December 31, 2006
2006 Officers: President Douglas R. Crane
Vice President Steve Waak
Secretary/Treasurer Dave Rieder
WSLS Board Director Lee Villeneuve
2006 Financial Report:
Balance as of January 1, 2006 $ 1714.26
17 Paid Members for 2006
Balance as of December 31, 2006 $ 817.33
CD $ 562.27
Seminar Fund $ 1322.00
The Northwest Chapter of the Wisconsin Society of Land Surveyors has been very active in the last year. We held 6 membership meetings throughout the year. We continue to meet in Rice Lake due to it's central location within the chapter. Our meetings are held at Lehman's Supper Club at 5:30 pm for dinner with the meeting starting about 7:00 pm. We normally meet on the Second Thursday of February, April, June, August, October and the Second Wednesday in December. We would like to see more of the Land Surveyors in our area become active Chapter members. Our web site covers upcoming meeting agendas and other pertinent information. We have a link from the WSLS web site.
A regular feature at our membership meetings is a report of the society board meeting from our Board Director. We have elected Douglas Crane to serve as our Board Director for 2007, along with Bill Anderson for President, Steve Waak for Vice President and Dave Rieder for Secretary/Treasurer. Current legislative matters are also discussed. We routinely discuss all types of matters involving the status of the various county programs affecting our work including PLSS Corner Recovery Work, Geodetic Control and Land Information issues. This year we met with Jim Logan and Steve Green to discuss platting issues. Discussions at Chapter meetings included: DOT Height Modernization Program, NAZCA takeover of county web sites and fees for public information, minimum standards for surveys, WSLS Strategic planning, ALTA Standards, status of TRANS 233, WSLS Stategic Planning, Executive Director transition, Lakebed and other water issues along with many other pertinent topics.
We had guests at some meetings including: WSLS President Joe Gruber; Les and Lisa Van Horn showed us the Erickson compass that was donated to the foundation from a family in our area; and Chris Rotegard of Leica gave a presentation on real-time cell phone GPS corrections from the Minnesota DOT system.
The members of the Chapter voted to donate the profits from the 2005 Summer Meeting to the WSLS Foundation. Doug Crane made a donation of $1000.00 to the WSLS Foundation at the Annual Membership Meeting at the 2006 WSLS Institute.
We have continued to monitor a serious title problem involving millions of acres. This involves the ownership of non-meandered lakebeds. We believe that this is grossly incorrect due to the fact that the lakebeds of non-meandered lakes passed into private ownership in the original land patents. No compensation has ever been given to these owners which would be required under the 5th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution if the government takes the land. We would encourage all members to support some joint action with other interested groups such as the title industry to correct these errors in the DNR position. We sincerely appreciate the efforts of Tony Gromacki of the Milwaukee Chapter who has taken over as Chairman of the WSLS committee to address these matters in the WSLS Water Issues Committee.
Ken Olson, a founding member of the Northwest Chapter passed away this past year. Ken was very active in the Chapter, served as Douglas County Surveyor and served on the licensing board. We are looking at some possibilities to honor his contribution to surveying at the Douglas County Government Center.
We are looking forward to another great year in the Northwest!