New Illinois Crime: Unlicensed Condominium Association Management

Kevin Drum was able to assure me yesterday that prohibitions on self-employed dental hygenists have been in decline recently, which is excellent news. Meanwhile, Carl emails this tale of a brand new entry-limited guild in Illinois, community association managers:

A community association manager performs certain identifiable tasks such as collecting assessments, controlling and disbursing funds of the association, holding meetings and preparing budget. A manager does not include the support staff and administrative personnel of a management organization. Volunteers who perform services for self-managed communities will also be exempt from the licensing requirement.

The primary qualifications of a manager are that an individual must be at least 21 years old, completed 20 hours of community association management courses and passed one of two specified examinations. As a concession to experienced managers, persons who have performed community association management for a period of five out of the last 10 years are exempt from the educational and testing requirement.

Here in the libertarian dystopia of Washington, DC we don't have these kind of rules and my condo association was, indeed, managed for a while by someone who was bad at her job. As a consequence, she got fired and replaced by a new person who's great at her job. It seems to me to be working fine as a system. And remarkably, it also seems to be working fine to the Illinois legislature since they exempted all the incumbent association managers from the new rule! These kind of grandfather clauses are oftentimes the giveaway in a new licensing scheme. If the problem is that community association managers are under-regulated then the people currently managing community associations are exactly the people you need to regulate more strictly. But if veterans are just looking to erect arbitrary barriers to entry, then obviously they'll exempt themselves.