PLSS Seminar at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire Overview

Parcel Mapping and the PLSS

              

The attended seminar I was available to attend was from 2:45 pm to 4:00 pm. on Tuesday afternoon on the 15^th of March. This seminar consisted of GIS professionals and experts discussing the ideas of how to balance the needs in statewide parcel mapping and positional accuracy as well as how to implement these in practice.

The groups came up with ideas for each answer and a spokesperson shared the group’s ideas with the rest of the room. Ideas for how to balance the needs statewide for parcel mapping that is more accurate and in cooperation with the public land survey system seemed to fall along the same lines. Essentially the solution is to first educate the public so that they understand the need for better and more accurate maps, the “public” would be the city council members and community activists. Once education is had a step towards procuring the funds for this massive mapping project. After funds are gathered it is necessary for a precise set of goals to be laid out to allow the several organizations involved in the project to all be on the same page and work in tandem to produce the new products in a timely manner instead of putting progress off.

The second question that was discussed in great detail was the multitude of strategies for PLSS implementation. Many of the spokespeople for each particular group identified the fact that county boundaries needed to be done first. This seemed to be a reasonable first step to most people and would allow for more specific measurements later but this is a required first step that would be relatively easy to delegate. Along the lines of the first discussion was that the officials who would be passing bills and funding would need to be literally sold on the project before more accurate mapping would be possible. They also discussed the dividing up of counties to different organizations statewide who, working with the same requirements, would be able to work on their own to produce surveys that would fit with the rest of the state.

At the end of the seminar a rather passionate discussion was had on how exactly to go about beginning this process. As one speaker, “Steve” stated, it is all great to talk about ideas and goals people in the room have but it is useless to do nothing about it. He was clearly frustrated with the speed of bureaucracy and wanted to be able to begin this project as soon as possible. It was neat to see how excited he was to begin the project.