PLSO Conference 2016 • January 20–22 O to the Emerald City we go! 9 Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon | www.plso.org PLSO CONFERENCE • JANUARY 20–22, 2016 „ Jered McGrath, PLS, PLSO Conference Chair Comfort, familiarity and good past experiences are just some of the things we all look for to guide our day to day routines. When we dri away from that comfort or familiarity we tend to proceed cautiously all the while looking in the rearview mirror of life for the hindsight to creep up. In many cases the hindsight only shows up to tell us that we made the right decision and without that decision we would have never been able to create positive new experiences. is year’s conference is stepping away from the comfort and familiarity of the Salem Conference Center to return to the Emerald City of Eugene. Here we will be graciously hosted by the Hilton Hotel and Resort and some members will recall that this isn’t the rst time the PLSO has held a conference there. I am reminded by those PLSO members with a lot more grey hairs than I, that we were at the Hilton many moons ago and that change is a good thing every once in a while. We on the conference committee feel the same way and would like to present to you, our members, another outstanding lineup of both new and familiar presentations. We have had the schedule online since early November and hope that you have had a chance to review the great topics that will be presented. We are bringing back John Stahl as one of our headliners and many will remember seeing John speak at our 2010 or 2012 conferences. Personally, I rst stumbled into a John Stahl Class in 2008 at the ACSM national conference in Spokane, and what I took with me from that single class still aects my approach to surveying today. Not only do I have a great stack of reference materials and court citations that I can refer to; but have a better understanding of owners’ rights, monuments, reliance on those monuments and methods to help landowners resolve their disputes. Have you ever switched out of your surveyors hat and put on the mediator hat to help your client mitigate a tricky boundary situation? If not maybe you should try and pencil in one of John’s classes this year. If you have followed along with recent rule changes from the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industry (BOLI) than you know that a “Construction Site Survey Party Chief” denition was added as a job classication that is subject to prevailing wage under the Power Equipment Operator, Group 2. Contracts subject to prevailing wage rates moving forward from January 1st will follow these new rules and classications. You may ask yourself, what is a Power Equipment Operator group and how does it aect my work? To get the best answer to that question you should plan on attending Susan Wooley’s presentation from BOLI. Her bio is on the conference website and she will be here to help us with questions we may have related to this change. ese foregoing examples represent just two of the great presenters we have for this year’s conference. ere are countless reasons why each of you may want to sit in one class over another and I hope that you all are planning on taking a small break from the chaos of work to reinvest in yourself and your career. We on the conference committee are continually trying to look into the crystal ball of class scheduling and pull together a lineup of classes that provide powerful content, relevant continuing education, jurisdictional updates and repeatability. We hope that once again each of you will be able to take away from this year’s conference some continuing education to improve your practice, streamline your workows, increase your network awareness, and provide you an opportunity to do what we all love to do at conferences…just shoot the $!#% and catch up with those likeminded individuals that you may only get to see once a year. On a closing operations note, we will have nal conference schedules printed at the front registration desk this year like we did last year. ey will contain the latest schedule of events that may incorporate some last minute changes due to speaker conicts that seem to always arise. It really helps us out tremendously from a printing standpoint if you can keep just one program throughout the conference and not grab a new one each day. If you do happen to forget yours at home please feel free to come get another. If you are planning on attending I encourage you to not only spend the night in Eugene but to stick around for the Auction Dinner and live entertainment we have coordinated with fellow PLSO member Chris Sherby and his band, who will provide some great music before and aer the dinner. Finally I hope that the year has been good to us all and our industry as a whole and I really hope to catch up with many of you at the conference. Like minded or not. Cheers. Register at: www.plso.org/2016Conference
PLSO Issue 6 2015 Nov Dec
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