We are in the final planning stages of our 2001 Spring Joint Mapping Conference, which this year will be held May 23-25 at the Hilton Hotel on the Bayfront in St. Petersburg. Reminder postcards were sent out a couple months ago to mark your calendars and registration forms and program will be coming in the mail soon. We will continue to post information on our web site so be sure to check here for last minute changes and information. We've also included a registration form and preliminary conference program in this newsletter as well as on our website.

This year's theme is "Converging Technologies - A Pathway to the Future." We hope to be trying different things like "converging" our individual tracks in our presentations so there will not be individual rooms for each organization. This way you will be able to see presentations from other organizations, which is what some members said they usually missed because they were in our "FACM track" sessions. Hopefully this will work out well. As you can see from our preliminary program, we have some very interesting topics. We also have Tom Teets of SFWMD who has agreed to be our Keynote Speaker. He will be speaking on the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.

We also have a very important panel discussion Friday morning, May 25, on the NCEES Model Law and GIS Licensure. This one may affect you in any G.I.S. based profession since it deals with G.I.S. professionals being certified or licensed. We thought that having representatives of FSMS, ASPRS, URISA and FACM in on the discussion maybe ALL sides could be viewed and discussed. Please plan to attend and participate in the discussion. If you want to read up on what has been being discussed so far go to www.asprs.org/news.html and click on "NCEES Material" and look specifically at the GIS/LIS Addendum to the Report of the Task Force on the NCEES Model Law for Surveying (number 00-10). Then scroll down to the original 1997 Report of the Task Force on the NCEES Model Law for Surveying (number 98-10) which the addendum is referring to. Definitely some heavy reading but VERY pertinent to our professions.

Look forward to seeing everyone at the conference!

Ellen M. Edwards
President

Last year the Executive Board decided to change some of the wording of available annual awards that were listed in our annual FACM Cadastre. One change was to include the "year" the nomination was for by stating it is from January 1 to December 31 of each calendar year.

Also, the Cadastralist of the Year award is no longer for a "single project or event in the last year" but is now for a "single project or event completed within the last year." This is to clarify that many of our "projects" in mapping take years to complete. Another was to set a definitive date to end acceptance of nominations, which was set as June 1 of each year so that the Executive Board can vote on the award winners at their July meeting.

Lastly, the award winners receive a complimentary registration to the FACM conference of their choice the next year. Since the Outstanding Achievement Award can be given to a group the decision was also made to limit the complimentary registration to only one for the group, not one for each person in the group. Their office will determine who uses it.

As of today we only have ONE nomination for an award so get out those pencils and fill in a nomination form for that special co-worker or employee today. The deadline is June 1, 2001 and will not be extended. You can download the Awards Nomination form here. Mail completed forms to Ellen Edwards, c/o Polk County Property Appraiser, 255 N. Wilson Ave., Bartow, Florida 33830 or fax to (863)534-4754.

All county property appraisers received a memo from the Property Tax Administration Program Director this past August outlining a request that all future sales tape submittals should include a copy of their supporting map data in digital form. Obviously this request only applies to the counties that have their maps in a digital format (computer generated). The request is based on Chapter 12D-8.013 (5) (a) F.A.C. For the sake of clarification, the final sales tapes are submitted in January of each year.

The Mapping & GIS Section will perform audits of county mapping programs beginning with fiscal year 2001-2002. Staff will evaluate those counties undergoing in-depth studies. Evaluations were last performed in 1995-1996 and one of the resultant outcomes was the creation of the Department's Digital Map Conversion Grant Program.

The St. Johns River Water Management District has received about half of the DOQQs that cover the District. The District covers all or part of 19 counties in northeast and central Florida, from Vero Beach through Orlando, Ocala and Gainesville concluding at the Florida-Georgia border west of Baker County. These images are based on the same control used in the 1990 DOQQ process and once again color infrared at 1M resolution. If you are interested in acquiring this imagery contact Kim Morris, SJRWMD, Geographic Information Division, at (904) 329-4500 or Kim_Morris@District.sjrwmd.state.fl.us

If you have access to a digital camera, preferably a 2 or 3 mega pixel, then experiment with using it as a viable alternative to a scanner. I have been using a digital camera as a replacement to a scanner and have found that the results are great. The images can be saved in several formats, which will result in size reduction of the file, without severe loss in resolution. We may try to implement this method as a means to display the "Map of the Month" on the FACM Website.