Design Professional of the Year

Halfen watches the big picture

By Janine Anderson

Fred Halfen Regional vice president with Ayres Associates Inc, Madison

In a way, Fred Halfen is putting Wiscon-sin on the map.

A regional vice president with Ayres Associates Inc, Halfen works in photo-grammetry, a process of creating maps and geographic information system data from aerial images. The images are
used in everything from road place-ment to U.S. Geological Survey contour maps.

And they are key elements when cities and villages take on development projects.

“The uses of them are probably as great as your imagination,” said Dean Schultz, executive vice president of Ayres Associates. “Municipalities will use them to map everything from their streets and where utilities are located to the precise locations of highways.”

Combining the maps with a GIS lets people chart property ownership, tax parcel information, property values and property improvements, to name a few benefits.

The maps also help determine what kind of crops are growing on farmers’ fields and the moisture content of soil.

While Ayres isn’t the only company using photogrammetry, Halfen found a way to broaden the applications of the technology, Schultz said.

“What distinguishes what Fred does from maybe what some other companies might do is how he tries to create value for the client in how he does things,” Schultz said. “It’s not so much what he does but how he does it.”

Halfen and his staff created a large consortium of municipalities and half the state’s counties to create an enormous mapping program with the goal of increasing the information available to everyone.

“If you line up lots of folks who are interested, you can send the plane up once and fly a large area rather than sending it up multiple times for small areas,” Schultz said. “He recognized the value that could bring to clients, not only in reducing costs but stimulating interaction between adjacent clients.

“There are multiple agencies and governmental bodies interested in the same mapping, but for different reasons.”

Ted Koch, the state’s cartographer, said Halfen’s work on the consortium was an important step in opening up a wealth of information to a large group of people.

“It was affordable; he helped find financial partners,” Koch said. “Two-thirds of the state in 2005 was covered with photos. It was important in that it gave a lot of local governments updated imagery.”

Adding data to photo-based maps has become the standard for mapping in the last 10 years. The photos must be scale-corrected, accurate and up-to-date.

“We’re using imagery for a whole lot of applications,” Koch said. “Wireless 911, homeland security. Imagery is almost an absolute requirement in municipal applications.

“Ayres and Fred deserve a lot of credit for the assistance they brought to their clients.”

And some in the industry already are giving Halfen credit. He was recognized this year with the American Council of Engineering Companies of Wisconsin’s President’s Award for his service on behalf of the organization. He also was elected president of the Wisconsin Land Information Association.

He earned the President’s Award from ACEC for his work with Madison to exempt design professionals from the city’s lobbying ordinance, voicing concerns about the impact of the ordinance on the profession and the city.

He also was recognized for his early work in notifying ACEC of the potential loss of federal funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s map modernization program. Appropriations were limited after Hurricane Katrina strapped FEMA’s resources.