Lead From The Front—What Does It Mean? (Monday 8:00 am)

Most surveying firm owners have convinced themselves they've earned the right to stay behind a desk. They manage schedules, review plats, and call it leadership. But leadership and management are not the same thing. Management executes systems. Leadership sets direction, inspires people, and requires something management does not: sacrifice. This talk challenges the comfortable assumption that seniority means you no longer need to be in the field, on the difficult jobs, doing work you could delegate to someone else. If you are not willing to bleed alongside your crew, you are not leading—you are administering.

Leading from the front is not just a philosophy. It is a competitive advantage. When the principal shows up on a 109-degree day to run GPS, or grabs a machete to help cut line, employees notice. They develop loyalty that cannot be purchased with pay raises alone. Clients notice too. They see a firm where the person signing the plat actually knows what happened on the ground. This visibility builds trust, reputation, and repeat business. In an industry where most firms compete on price, leading from the front creates differentiation that directly impacts retention, referrals, and profitability.

This session offers both a philosophical framework and a practical toolkit. Attendees will examine the distinction between leadership and management—and honestly assess which one they have been practicing. Through real-life examples from two decades of field work, the talk delivers a concrete framework for leading from the front that attendees can apply immediately. The goal is not to make anyone feel guilty about their air-conditioned office. The goal is to ask a harder question: if your name is on the license, are you actually leading the people who depend on you?

Responsible Charge—What Does It Mean in An Era of Shrinking Surveyor Presence and Construction Automation? (Monday 10:00 am)

Surveyors have been systematically removed from construction sites, and the profession bears significant responsibility for that outcome. For decades, we treated construction staking as commodity work—competing on price, cranking out hubs and laths, rarely demonstrating the irreplaceable professional judgment that justifies a license. Contractors noticed. Equipment vendors noticed. When GPS machine control and robotic total stations made stakeless construction viable, the industry asked a reasonable question: why pay for a licensed surveyor when a grade checker with a rover can do the job? This talk delivers an uncomfortable truth from a surveyor who works primarily on the boundary and title side and watched colleagues commoditize themselves out of relevance on the construction side. If we are honest, we created the opening that technology exploited.

But responsible charge has not disappeared—it has shifted. Licensing laws still require direct control and personal supervision of surveying work. The question is where that responsibility now lives when a surveyor never sets foot on site and a contractor builds directly from a 3D model. The answer is not to fight the technology. The answer is to recognize what cannot be commoditized or handed to someone without a license. Control network establishment and maintenance is the irreducible core. A contractor's grade checker is not qualified to design primary control, propagate error through a network, or tie a project to the geodetic framework that makes stakeless construction actually work. Constructability review—the QA/QC that surveyors used to perform naturally while calculating stake-out data—does not happen automatically in the stakeless model. Someone still needs to know those plans better than anyone else. That someone should be a licensed surveyor.

Responsible charge in the stakeless era demands that surveyors move upstream into design review and become more selective downstream, verifying only the critical points where errors create catastrophic consequences. This talk offers both a framework for rethinking responsible charge and a concrete list of services surveyors should be selling to design teams: control network design and maintenance, constructability review before construction begins, critical-point verification during construction, and as-built certification at project completion. These services pull the licensed professional—and the professional liability insurance—back into a process that currently has a dangerous gap. The surveyors who adapt will find more profitable work with less competition. The surveyors who keep competing on staking volume will discover that responsible charge means nothing when you have no meaningful role in the project.

Contract Basics For Land Surveyors (Monday 1:15 pm)

Most surveyors learn contract law the hard way—through a dispute with a client, a scope creep nightmare, or a collections problem that could have been avoided with three sentences in writing. This session covers the fundamentals every surveyor needs to understand: the six elements that make a contract legally enforceable, and the specific clauses that protect your practice and set clear expectations with clients. We will walk through scope of work definitions that prevent misunderstandings, compensation terms that get you paid on time, limitation of liability provisions that cap your exposure, indemnification language that allocates risk appropriately, and termination clauses that let you exit bad situations cleanly. The goal is both defensive and professional—contracts protect you from liability and scope creep, but they also serve as a communication tool that builds client trust by eliminating ambiguity before work begins. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for evaluating their current contract language and specific recommendations for clauses to add, revise, or remove. No legal background required—just a willingness to stop relying on handshake deals.

ALTA Surveys: Understanding the Purpose and Avoiding Dangerous Mistakes (Monday 3:00 pm)

ALTA Surveys are the most important surveying deliverables in the commercial real estate industry. They are also the most commonly misunderstood deliverable and improperly executed survey types. In this talk, Landon explains the one true purpose of an ALTA survey and shows how understanding this purpose should shape how ALTA surveys are executed. He also talks about six (6) of the most common mistakes made on ATLA surveys.

Landon is a land surveyor who lives and works in Central California and Western Nevada. He is a licensed land surveyor in both states, a certified federal surveyor, and an FAA Part 107 Certified Remote Pilot. He produces a podcast on small business for land surveyors called "Putting Your Business - On The Map". Landon enjoys hiking, backpacking, landscape photography, and code slinging in Python. He has over two decades of experience in land surveying and GIS.

Tales of a County Surveyor (Monday 1:15 pm)

Personal observations and reflections on the roles the County Surveyor, past and present, along with a look at some case studies that will offer food for thought as to how we go about establishing boundaries in unusual situations.

Rick graduated from Penn State University in 1977 with an Associate Engineering degree in Surveying Technology. He was first licensed as a PLS in Colorado in 1983. He moved to eastern Idaho in 1994 and obtained his Idaho license that year. He spent the next 17 years as a sole proprietor of a small surveying firm working on projects from Island Park to Bear Lake and parts of Wyoming and Montana. During that time, he also served 6 years as an adjunct professor at BYU-Idaho teaching the Fundamentals of Surveying course in the Construction Management program.

Seeking adventure in 2010, he moved to the US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean and found work on a US Dept of Defense project on the island of St. Croix. Returning to the States in 2013, he moved to Lake Tahoe on the California-Nevada border and filled positions with diferent multi-discipline firms, including his current tenure with Lumos & Associates since 2018. During this time, he has assumed and maintains the role as the County Surveyor in both Alpine County and Mono County, California.  Rick relocated to Boise in 2024, and he currently holds active survey licenses in 7 western states.

Ethics In a Changing Profession (Monday 3:00 pm)

This session will be a discussion on three big changes in Idaho surveying and how they impact our ethical standards.

A few years ago, Idaho underwent a dramatic change in regulating occupations and professions. We spent a lot of time focused on these changes and what they meant for us. Things have settled into a new routine and it's time to take stock of where we are.  Fifteen years ago we began requiring a bachelor's degree for new licensees. What are some of the impacts of that change? Has it brought positive change to our ethics and conduct?

We talk a lot about the aging surveyors and our need to recruit new blood. We've made great strides due to ISU, ISPLS, industry, and the professional surveying community. The stark reality is, even with improved recruitment we are losing much of the old guard. What will that mean for the profession?

Tom Judge is a Professional Land Surveyor in Boise, Idaho. He began his surveying career in the Army in 1979 gaining experience overseas and around the country.  Tom continued surveying as a civilian after his discharge in 1984, working in Texas, Missouri, Illinois, and eventually Idaho. Here Tom found abundant opportunities for professional and personal growth, obtaining licenses in Idaho, Utah, Washington, Oregon and Nevada. He also attended mediator training, obtained his Certified Federal Surveyor (CFedS) in 2017, and Certified Water Rights Examiner in 2023. His best training and experience came from serving three years as Deputy Director for the Idaho Board of Professional Engineers and Professional Land Surveyors. This position allowed him to influence the development of laws and rules, and was the most rewarding period of his career.

Toms interest in policy led him to serve as President and past President Director of the Idaho State Bowhunters from 2003 to 2007, Vice President of ISPLS in 2015 and 2016, and ISPLS lobbyist for the 2022 session. Tom is now working toward his next chapter mentoring some of the next generation surveyors.

AI Powered Land Surveyor: How AI is Changing the Surveying Toolbox (Tuesday 8:00 am)

Rob Mitchell, Kuker-Ranken, Leica Geosystems Representative and Consultant.   Senior Project and Client Manager specializing in large complicated delivery platforms; providing team leadership and management; and leading development of discipline standards and protocols. Responsible for identifying, evaluating, and securing leads in alignment with strategic and marketing plan objectives; meeting all profit and growth goals; and ensuring per-project profitability.

Who Says the Surveyor Can't Determine Intent? (Tuesday 8:00 am)

Some surveyors say “Intent is King!” while others say that we have no authority to go beyond the words of the deed when determining boundary locations. There are very experienced and well-regarded surveyors at both ends of this spectrum. The courts have been and continue to tell us what our duty as boundary surveyors is with regard to intent. In this presentation, we look at what the courts have told us to do, and the results that can happen when we ignore that guidance. We also define what it means to “determine intent”, and in doing so, find that many of us are not so far apart in our opinions as we might think.

I. What is Meant by “Intent”?

II. What Importance Does the Law/Courts Place on Intent?

III. Whose Intent Matters?

IV. Origins of Surveyors’ Attitudes & Beliefs Regarding Intent

V. What the Law Says About Surveyor’s Role Regarding Intent

VI. The “What” & “Where” of Boundaries

VII. Ambiguities

VIII. The Law Informs Us

IX. A Brief Glimpse at the “Rules of Surveying”

X. The Rules of Construction

XI. Judge & Jury

You Say You found a Gap? Are You Sure? (Tuesday 10:00 am)

The topic of “gaps” between conveyed parcels is one that occasionally comes up at chapter meetings, over drinks at “the conference after the conference” get togethers, and at the office between surveyors discussing a current project.  It is a topic that comes up fairly often on the surveyors’ internet forums.

While there are circumstances by which actual gaps, or lands left unconveyed seemingly without intention to do so, do occur, most gaps found by surveyors are actually cases where the surveyor has misidentified a boundary location problem as a title problem.

Mr. Page addresses how to tell the difference and how to solve a boundary issue rather than create a title problem. 

Evan Page began his career surveying in Michigan in 1981 and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Surveying from Oregon Institute of Technology in 1995. His experience covers a broad spectrum of practice in the public and private sectors. He owns Selkirk-Cabinet Land Surveying in Sandpoint, ID.  Mr. Page is active in the Idaho Society of Professional Land Surveyors, where he serves on the Legislative and Professional Practices Committees.

Maureen O’Shea, CFM works part-time as a Floodplain Specialist for Idaho Department of Water Resources (IDWR). Maureen retired in January 2023 from the Idaho State NFIP Coordinator position she held since November 2015. Maureen has practiced floodplain management in the planning profession since 2005. She has been a Certified Floodplain Manager (CFM) since 2007. Maureen has a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from the University of Nevada Las Vegas.