Our UESI (Utility Engineering & Surveying Institute) Illinois Chapter is newly formed. We just celebrated our 1 year anniversary of being chartered so we are continuing to expand our network. Let us share with everyone what we are doing now and where we intend to take this institute.
We have been hosting monthly meetings during the day via Teams. This seems to be working well for everyone as we are all quite busy and getting people together for a one-hour meeting during the work week is a challenge. We believe it would be nice for us to have one in-person meeting during the 2024 year for team building, but that is our goal not a requirement.
As it regards membership in ASCE, this would be ideal. If you have an interested person who is not currently an ASCE member, we can bring them on board as a committee member and/or chair and not on our board. If they like the group, we will hope that they will join ASCE and step up into a bigger leadership role. As board members of UESI, we have a vote on the Illinois Section of ASCE so anyone representing UESI to the local section would need to be an ASCE member.
Our primary goal for UESI as an institute, like the other ASCE institutes, is to bring technical information to the Illinois Section of ASCE and the engineering community at large. One of the channels we are working on is to arrange for presentations of on-going or recently completed projects in the region that are related to significant utility work, changes in surveying technology, challenges in permitting, ROW, etc.
We are welcoming professionals in all stages of their careers. The Current Chair is Joel Koenig, jkoenig@cmtengr.com & Past Chair is Steve Rienks, s.rienks@AmericanSurvey.com . Both are in the “twilight” of their careers and are working to mentor new board members who are in the early parts of their careers, so they are working on welcoming younger staff of all backgrounds to the institute.