Editor’s Note: Time to vote! The election window closes at the end of December 2018. Please note the two candidate statements (for the NSPS office of VP), re-posted today on xyHt.com. The National Society of Professional Surveyors (NSPS) will be holding its annual election of officers in December of 2018. NSPS members will be notified by the NSPS prior to the election with details on how to vote and deadlines. xyHt annually extends an invitation for any and all candidates to submit candidate statements for publication. Here is the candidate statement from Timothy Burch, PLS, who has put his hat in the ring for the office of NSPS Vice President. VPs often progress to President-elect and then President of the NSPS. Learn about your NSPS candidates and be prepared for December’s vote.
Candidate Statement:
NSPS has been a great champion of the profession for a long time, but the time has come for the association to begin evolving into an organization built for the 21st Century. We are coming to a crossroads in our existence, as the rich tradition of surveying is intersecting with technology and a very different workforce. To survive as an active and vibrant professional society, we must meet these challenges head-on and begin to adapt our historic profession to align with rapidly-changing world we find ourselves today.
My four years as NSPS Secretary have allowed me to develop a unique perspective based upon my inside view of the positives and negatives of this association. As your next NSPS Vice President, I will continue to push our organization into new yet sometimes uncomfortable places; places that will provide this distinguished group of professionals a new and more educated view on how business and society cultures thrive in today’s tech-based world. While our association name is based on the professional surveyor, our focus as the national society should be the profession of surveying. The profession includes those technicians who work directly for a licensed professional surveyor. We need to embrace the survey technician as a valuable member of our team and it is my goal of making sure they know that they are welcome here as valuable assets.
NSPS is a member-driven society but those members start with our state affiliates. All our members should come to expect more out of their national organization, so now is the time to begin down that road of improvement. It is my goal as NSPS Vice President to create a better line of communication with our affiliates to further streamline our message to our members. With better and more thorough communication, our goals, initiatives and messages will become easier to identify for every member of NSPS.
Another goal as the NSPS Vice President is to establish a strategic plan for the association to help guide the next generation of survey leaders. Part of that strategy includes a NSPS Staff Succession Plan to provide a guide for dealing with turnover of key individuals, planned or otherwise. Our organization grew from 2,500 to 15,000+ in a few short years yet our organization and staff did not scale with it accordingly. The strategic plan will help us capitalize on our strengths and minimize our weaknesses, with an end goal of being more efficient yet providing better service and communication to our members.
While I have enjoyed my time as Secretary for this great organization, I’m ready to move on and tackle more challenges as your next NSPS Vice President.
Biography:
Timothy W. Burch, P.L.S. – Candidate for Vice President NSPS
Timothy Burch has been an instrumental person in keeping NSPS moving ahead since the separation with ACSM and the rapid growth of the 100% Membership Initiative. He has been the back bone of keeping the new larger NSPS on task and focusing on the future by not looking back but always focusing forward. His forward thinking has started the process of creating a succession plan for all the members of the NSPS staff, as such a plan does not currently exist.
As a second-generation surveyor, Tim has been a passionate advocate of new technology and his love of our land surveying profession has kept him very active and involved at the state, national, and international level. A few of those examples are: As Chair of the Government Affairs Committee of Illinois Professional Surveyors Association (IPLSA), he helped to guide revised language of the Illinois Land Surveyors Act of 1989 thorough the 2017 Illinois legislative session and into law. He also participated in the Illinois Boundary Law project book written by Jeff Lucas, organized and distributed by the Northeast Chapter of IPLSA. Tim is also an ever-present member of the NSPS Lobby Day in Washington DC and an active member of the Certified Surveyor Technician Board (CST). His dedication to his service as NSPS Secretary for the past 4 years has kept NSPS moving forward in the difficult times of transition. As a Brand Ambassador, Tim has been a leader in the co-operative effort with Elaine Ball in the “Get Kids into Surveying” project that provides students, teachers and parents with informational posters about geospatial profession. As a contributing editor for survey in GPS world Magazine, he has travel abroad to learn more about the profession and brought that knowledge back to the US surveying community.
Tim is a dedicated member of our organization and a proven efficient leader, so a vote for him is a solid vote for our future.