August 2022
Membership Dues Renewal
2022-2023 Fiscal Year
We’ve had a GREAT response this year. If you haven’t renewed yet, this is your reminder!
Jonathan Dufrene, LSPS President
PRESIDENTIAL PRIVILEGE
Dear LSPS members,
Hopefully, everyone has been staying as cool as they can this summer. It can be tough out there in the heat constantly wiping sweat from your eyes, craving that beautiful fall or spring weather when those of us in the office wish we were back out in the field; but it can be even tougher trying to find someone new to work in the field these days. The incredible technology that has advanced our industry over the last few decades has substituted our 3-4 person crews of days past, for our 1-2 person crews of today. This has been great for business, but not so great for moving a Rodman up to Instrument Tech. That’s hard to do when that position isn’t really around as much.
In an effort to support our industry, LSPS has partnered with the Louisiana FFA Foundation. Originally known as the Future Farmers of America, the FFA Foundation has expanded their program over the years. “Louisiana FFA is a dynamic youth organization that provides students opportunities for leadership development, personal growth, and career success through agricultural education.” There are more than 200 FFA chapters in middle and high schools across the state and almost 3,000 high school seniors graduate from their programs every year, many with credentials in Forestry and AgriTechnology. The FFA holds various events throughout the year, some with surveying-related portions within the competition (compass, pacing, elevations, map reading.) They’re actually looking for surveying volunteers for two upcoming forestry events in September in Franklinton and Hammond. Please contact wwallace@agcenter.lsu.edu for more details.
Our partnership with Louisiana FFA is a simple and effective way to provide community outreach and promote our industry to its future leaders. This is a great first step while we’re still exploring new ways to attract a younger generation. Please feel free to contact me or your district chair with any questions, comments, or ideas as to how LSPS can better serve our profession and community.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Dufrene
THANK YOU TO OUR MEMBERS FOR DONATING TO THE
2022-2023 “EVERY MEMBER CAMPAIGN!”
Benefactor Level
Dufrene Surveying & Engineering, Inc
ASCE-UESI Surveying Competition Comes to Louisiana
By: John Dennis, Brad Holleman, Walt Ballard
Surveying Meeting
If you had plans to attend the annual Ruston Peach Festival this past June, you may have been surprised when you arrived in town ready to partake in the many ‘peach-themed’ events. Instead of seeing just peaches, you might have spotted one, two, or maybe even thirteen survey crews performing some of the tasks that many of you do on a daily basis. Or you may have noticed the 21 concrete canoes getting prepared to set sail on the peaceful waters of Hoogland Lake.
Now….you may be asking yourself, “who in their right mind would send thirteen survey crews to one location” or “where in the heck is Hoogland Lake? While we’d like to say that the answer to these questions could be found by consulting with the Giant Peach Oracle near Hoogland Lake, you’d be better off deferring to the local ASCE Student Chapter at Louisiana Tech. That’s because these students were responsible for organizing and hosting the first ‘in-person’ UESI International Surveying Competition along with the first Sustainable Solutions Competition as well as the 35th annual Concrete Canoe Competition.
Surveying Practice
The goal of the Surveying competition, as described by UESI, was to “include a recognition of the importance of basic surveying principles to all civil engineering projects.” The 13 teams were given a series of tasks and were assessed both on their accuracy and their time in completing each task. The tasks included an ‘office event’ in the form of a mapping/presentation project and four ‘field events’ including a pacing assessment, a differential level loop, a building stakeout, and finally, calculating the depth of a proposed sewer pipe. To help with assessing these tasks, several members of LSPS (Messrs. Walter Ballard, Brad Holleman, and Dr. John Surveying Meeting Dennis) joined Dr. J.P. Mohsen (University of Louisville) to serve as judges for this competition. Not only did these gentlemen serve as judges, but Brad, along with the help of Chris Cothren from NEI, had the distinction of setting up the four field events. It should be mentioned that the equipment that all of the students used was provided by the College of Engineering & Science at Louisiana Tech and Louisiana’s own Navigation Electronics, Inc. (NEI) in Lafayette.
The mapping/presentation task was completed in two phases. Prior to arriving in Ruston, the student teams were provided a point-file where they prepared a topographic map with predetermined specifications that included displaying 1-foot contours and any other details that the students considered to be relevant along with an appropriate title-block, as stipulated in the competition rules.
The teams were then assessed on their final map at the competition by giving a presentation on their methodology and the appearance of their final map. It should be noted that while three of the judges (Ballard, Dennis, and Mohsen) were judging the mapping presentations in the cool air-conditioned surroundings of Surveying Practice University Hall, Messrs. Holleman and Cothren, along with Dr. Carol Morman, Mr. Allan Ng, Chris Chiu and Mrs. Diane Swecker (UESI Competition Organizers) spent the day working in the pleasant Louisiana weather offering brief tutorials with the equipment and preparing the four field exercises, which were to be completed the following day.
The first day of the competition was concluded with an authentic crawfish boil served with potato salad, cake, music, and a “how to peel and eat crawfish manual”. While the food was excellent, many lessons on peeling crawfish were given by several of the judges to help educate the surveying students on ‘basic crawfish peeling’ principles.
The following day, the competition resumed with the four field exercises. Because of the number of teams competing, the judges had the teams rotate through the four different tasks at different periods throughout the day. The pacing task required the teams to pace the perimeter of the triangle in a clockwise fashion, returning to the point at which they began. Each team then submitted a final recorded ground distance for each side of the triangle. Upon conclusion of their pacing and they were assessed on the accuracy of their pacing.
Surveying Practice
For the leveling task, the teams were required to determine the elevation of a TBM from a known Surveying Practice benchmark. The teams were assessed both on their timing and their accuracy on their reported elevations. For the building stakeout, teams were required to stake out a proposed building with appropriate offsets using appropriate stakeout techniques. Here, the students began by computing the necessary coordinates for each building corner and then worked on setting up their respective total station where they then staked out the corners.
The final task had the student teams determine the amount of cut or fill at predetermined stations as well as determine the elevation of the invert at the opposite end of a hypothetical proposed sewer line. This task required the students to interpret and evaluate the appropriate stakes and perform the necessary calculations to determine the cut and/or fill for the hypothetical sewer line. In all, it was these five surveying tasks that pitted the 13 universities against each other in two days of competition.
After four days of preparation, planning, judging, and working, the competitions concluded with a banquet on Sunday evening. Because of the nature of the events, three separate awards were given which included a plaque and a monetary prize.
The final standings from all three awards were:
Topographic Mapping
1st Colorado School of Mines
2nd Christian Brothers University
3rd Utah State University
Field Surveying
Tie: 1st California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and the Colorado School of Mines
2nd George Mason University
3rd Auburn University and Ohio University
Overall
1st Colorado School of Mines
2nd California State Polytechnic University,
Pomona
3rd George Mason University
Along with announcing the Surveying Competition winners at the banquet, the audience was also informed that plans were being made for the third annual ASCE UESI Surveying Society-wide Finals Competition to be held at the University of Wisconsin–Platteville in Platteville, Wisconsin.
Prior to this year’s surveying competition, the first society-wide UESI Surveying competition was held in 2021 in a virtual format as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, UESI was in its sixth year of being recognized1 as one of the nine full-service institutes within ASCE. The significance of this is that when UESI was established, it became “the first national organization designed to meet the needs of all individuals working within the utility, pipeline and surveying industry.”2 As Dr. Carol Morman (PS, PE) noted, before the creation of UESI, there were no regularly held society-wide competitions that allowed for universities to compete in head-to head land surveying events. Dr. Morman also said that, prior to the formation of UESI, there were ASCE regional competitions that varied from region to region. However, these various surveying competitions were not included in every ASCE regional conference. She did point out that in June 2002, the year of ASCE’s 150th anniversary, there was a single national student conference held in Madison, Wisconsin and hosted by the University of Wisconsin - Madison. At that event, there was a surveying competition, along with the ever-popular concrete canoe and steel bridge competitions.
According to Dr. Morman, the 2002 conference demonstrated to the surveying community that the creation of a surveying competition could be done and more importantly, that there was interest in a national competition. As a result of these events, Dr. Morman, along with assistance from Dr. Omar Mora and Mr. Allan Ng, took advantage of the events from regional competitions and developed a national level competition as part of UESI’s efforts to help support and promote land surveying and geomatics within ASCE. The arrival of 13 universities to the lands of North Louisiana this past June further supported the awareness that interest in the land surveying profession does exist within the university system.
With members of LSPS, along with the numerous students, faculty, and staff of Louisiana Tech and Nicholls State University helping to nurture, teach and celebrate the land surveying profession through this collegiate competition, it seems that all would agree that this year’s event “was a peach of a time”!
NICHOLLS GEOMATICS PROGRAM UPDATE
Dr. Esra Tekdal-Yilmaz
Greetings from the Geomatics program faculty at Nicholls State University. As we are getting ready for the start of our Fall 2022 semester, I would like to share our faculty accomplishments and student chapter involvement in the program.
Nicholls State Geomatics faculty successfully represented the program at the 2022 Surveying and Geodetic Educators Society (SaGES) virtual conference held on 2-4 August 2022. Dr. Dennis and Dr. Yilmaz successfully presented their work titled “Lessons Learned: Developing Experiential Learning Activities for a Land Surveying Classroom” and “Analysis of Coordinate Transformation Methods for Deformation Monitoring” at the SaGES conference respectively. During the conference, Dr. Balaji Ramachandran was unanimously elected to move from President-Elect to President for the 2022 -2025 term. In addition, Dr. Yilmaz was elected as one of the four SaGES board of directors.
In June, Dr. Dennis was asked to serve as a judge for the first in-person International Surveying Competition sponsored by UESI (Utility Engineering and Surveying Institute) and held on the campus of Louisiana Tech in Ruston. He taught a workshop in June, on GNSS fundamentals at the annual Louisiana FFA (Future Farmers of America) State convention in Alexandria.
Dr. Balaji presented his poster titled “Utilization of UASs to Predict Sugarcane Yields in Louisiana Prior to Harvest” at the fifteenth international conference on precision agriculture held on 26-29 June 2022, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He also gave a presentation titled “Nicholls State University Small Unmanned Aerial System (sUAS) Research Projects 2005 to Present” at the Gulf South Region 2022 Annual Meeting (Virtual) on June 29, 2022. The webinar had over 160 participants attend from different parts of the Globe.
A delegation from Doosan Mobility Innovation part of Doosan Corporation visited Dr. Balaji’s Geospatial Technology Lab on June 22, 2022. Doosan is a leader in hydrogen fuel cells. They are working on a mechanism to collaborate with Dr. Balaji on their longer endurance hydrogen fuel cell drones with flying times varying from 2.5 to 4 hours. This collaboration will further enhance our existing UAS research capabilities of our Geomatics program.
The Geomatics student chapter had its election at the end of the Spring semester. The incoming officers are: Breanna Arthur and Brandon Silva-Co Presidents, James Jones-Vice President, William Hunter-Secretary, Bethany Ekiss-Treasurer, and Jake Chauvin-Fundraiser Chair. They have already set several student outreaches and service learning events for the 2022 fall semester.
SOUTH LOUISIANA COMMUNITY COLLEGE UPDATE
By: Michael O’Pry
We are about to start classes and we have right at 20 new students starting. We have many students coming through for LAPELS hours, and we appreciate the industry trusting us with their employees’ education.
Hope you have had a wonderful summer!
LEGISLATIVE UPDATE
By: Harper Duncan & Associates, LLC
With the 2022 Legislative Session behind us, our focus turns to legislative committees, task forces, and elections. Congress is main the focus for many during the coming November ballots. While we are watching what is happening in our nation’s capital, we are closely monitoring certain state and local elections. There are a few legislators running for new positions and if they win, will call for special elections before the 2023 Legislative Session. Most notably Speaker Pro Temp Tanner Magee is running for 1st Circuit Court of Appeals. Representatives Royce Duplessis and Mandie Landry are running for State Senate in New Orleans. If Rep. Duplessis wins it will create an opening on the House Commerce Committee, a key committee for LSPS. We will keep LSPS members informed of the upcoming elections and any changes to State Legislative Committees over the coming months.
Current list of House Commerce Committee Members
https://house.louisiana.gov/H_Cmtes/Commerce
For more information on the Louisiana November Elections visit https://voterportal.sos.la.gov.
IMPORTANT DATES:
October 25, 2022 – Early Voting
November 8, 2022 – Election
April 10, 2023 – Legislative Session
LOUISIANA TECH UNIVERSITY UPDATE
The LA Tech Survey Advisory Board met in June to plan efforts for the upcoming school year. As we have seen a significant increase in interest in the Construction Engineering Technology (CET) Survey Option, new activities and events are planned. Reggie Jeter, Program Chair and Professional in Residence, plans to have LAPELS Survey Committee members Jimmy Chustz and Will Fontenot speak to the students in the fall. We also hope to have numerous LSPS Board members attend this event. Presentations from several regional surveying and engineering companies are also planned.
The Advisory Board will continue its efforts to promote the program to incoming CET majors with presentations planned for the fall and spring Introduction to Surveying and Introduction to Construction classes. Many students have been receptive to the information discussed including:
Students enrolled in the Survey Option receive a full CET curriculum as well as 30 hours of surveying, mapping, and real property courses, which make up the educational requirements for survey licensure as required by LAPELS. This essentially doubles the employment opportunities for students after graduation.
Licensed surveyors’ salaries compare very favorably with, if not equal to, those of licensed engineers.
Professional status: surveyors are licensed by the same board as engineers and work closely with attorneys, engineers, architects, and developers.
Surveying work is comprised of a mix of indoor and outdoor activities using interesting technologies, with regard to historical documents and consideration of real estate and boundary law.
We look forward to an exciting and productive year at LA Tech!
LSPS DISTRICT INFORMATION
District 1
John Teegarden
jteegarden@ascellc.com
District 2
Andrew Szush
andrew.szush@tbsmith.com
District 3
Shawn MacMenamin
smacmenamin22@gmail.com
District 4
Jason Tuggle
Jason_tuggle@hotmail.com
District 5
Jon Braswell
jbraswell@sehuey.com
District 6
Jean Reulet
jean.reulet@tbsmith.com
District 8
Lee Broom
lbroom@ballard-clc.com
District 9
Dennis Gowin
dgowin@ddgpc.com
If you are not an LSPS member, we would like to invite you to attend a District meeting in your area. Contact the LSPS office at lsps@lsps.net, or the chairman in your area noted above for details about upcoming meetings.
JOIN LSPS:
The Louisiana Society of Professional Surveyors is organized to enhance the Surveying Profession. Our goal is to carry out our mission by maintaining high technical and cultural standards in our field, working with educational institutions for the maintenance of high standards of education in Land Surveying, requiring a high standard of ethical practice by our members, and encouraging the personal and professional development of young Land Surveyors.
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