I think whats happening in these cases is someone in office gets annoyed that someone else is being critical of them, or their work, or making them look bad. So

I think whats happening in these cases is someone in office gets annoyed that someone else is being critical of them, or their work, or making them look bad. So they lean on the levers they have to make these problems go away. I live in the city where this traffic light mess happened and to me it's an embarrassment that someone tried to use the law to strong arm this guy into shutting up. The certifications are (ostensibly) there to make sure the people who are doing the work are qualified to do it - a protection against scammers and fraudsters doing shoddy engineering work and endangering people. If instead the powers that be uses it as a tool to silence people, it becomes simply a corrupt access point to power.