Monthly Archives: October 2018

10+ Questions: Eileen Allen

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Eileen Allen is a familiar and respected face across the New York State GIS landscape.  First a foremost an instructor at SUNY Plattsburgh, she has instructed and mentored hundreds of students who are now part of the statewide geospatial fabric.  And in her spare time she has participated and contributed to numerous statewide GIS advisory committees over the past 20 years.  Always upbeat and a pleasure to work with, she is most certainly a first ballot lock for the GIS wing at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.  

eSpatiallyNewYork:  How long have you been at SUNY Plattsburgh?

Allen:  I was an undergraduate student at Plattsburgh State from 1973-1977.  In August 1984, I was hired to help finish a remote sensing research grant mapping historical beaver locations in the Adirondacks.  I’ve been here ever since.

eSpatiallyNewYork:  Where are you originally from and tell us about your journey that led to Plattsburgh.

Allen:  Both my husband and I grew up in Plattsburgh.  Fortunately there were state and federal programs to help me get a college education.  After college at SUNY Plattsburgh, I went to McGill and worked on a Master’s in physical geography.  Everything seemed to go wrong with my advisor and the research.  It was hard but necessary to leave there.   Fortunately, I could use my McGill credits and finish a Master’s program in Natural Resources at SUNY Plattsburgh while I worked on research projects.  I thought about getting my PhD but I just didn’t end up going in that direction.   Besides, I liked the research projects I was working on too much!

eSpatiallyNewYork:  You’ve been associated with the GIS program at Plattsburgh since its origin.  How did it get started?  Who was involved?

Allen:  My involvement with teaching GIS developed out of research projects and the need to train student workers. Dr. Richard Lamb was instrumental in developing the GIS courses and a minor in addition to his planning courses and practice.  He started the GIS course in the late-1990s and by the early-2000s we would take turns teaching the Introduction to GIS class.  I took over all the GIS classes when he retired and the Remote Sensing courses when Dr. Donald Bogucki retired.

But there is more, because so many chance occurrences determine our path.  Also, it has been noted that many more women are in GIS than in other natural sciences.  When taking college classes, I was often one of a very few or the only female.  Many people think that because GIS is so collaborative, women often gravitate towards it.  This is certainly true for me.

As an undergraduate, I was interested in many things but was unsure what I would major in and tried out several paths.  I needed a Social Science course and Physical Geography was on the list, so I took it.  Drs. Donald Bogucki (Geography) and Gerhard Gruendling (Biology) were working on a pilot project mapping wetlands and demonstrated this in their classes.  The grant was to investigate the use of remote sensing to estimate the impact of regulating the Richelieu River (the outflow of Lake Champlain, NY-VT) because of flooding concerns in Quebec.  Dr. Bogucki showed some color infrared imagery of wetlands in Physical Geography class and I was totally flabbergasted!  I absolutely had to be involved with the project!  It took several days for me to get the courage up to ask if I could be part of the research.  It so happened that they needed someone to use a transit to establish ground control.  I had been working with my father, a land surveyor, for many years and was enlisted by Dr. Bogucki to help set out targets and map them.

In the early 1970’s, it was very unusual for an ecologist and a geomorphologist to work together.  That was part of the attraction, though, where many of my interests could be combined. By chance, at about the same time, the Environmental Science Program was started at SUNY Plattsburgh and I had found my academic home.  I continued to be part of the project mapping Lake Champlain wetlands using custom flown 70-mm imagery until my graduation.
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Shared Services: Opportunities for Local Government GIS

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More than a couple years ago, Linda Rockwood, who at the time was running Mohawk Valley GIS, mentioned to the NYS GIS community that she was at a local meet and greet with regional elected officials and mentioned the “GIS” word to one of NYS’s congressional representatives in attendance.  To her amazement – and dismay –  she found out the representative had a very limited awareness or understanding of GIS.

Linda’s encounter certainly wasn’t the first of its kind and I’m sure there have been numerous similar incidents in our respective corners of the state since then.  GISers gingerly starting a conversation on the broad benefits and applications of geospatial technology to government and elected officials – only to see the focus wander quickly. Maybe two or three minutes into the discussion when comparisons to Google Maps normally kick-in and/or there is eye contact with the next constituent and thinking moves to that conversation.

Unfortunately, the message – and the collective mission – seems to continue to get lost and there is recent anecdotal evidence to suggest there is still a long way to go in context of recognizing and embracing geospatial technology in NYS local governments (county, city, town, and village) as part of an increasingly important government program area:  Shared Services.

New York State Shared Services Program

Those working throughout the local government ranks should be on some level familiar with the shared services buzzword.  It’s the talk among government officials and for legitimately good reasons.  Look no further than Governor Cuomo’s commitment of $225 million in the FY 2019 Executive Budget to continue the County-Wide Shared Services Initiatives (CWSSI). The $225 serves as matching funds for a one-time match for actual and demonstrable first-year savings achieved by the Shared Services Panels through new actions implemented during calendar year 2018.  School districts, boards of cooperative services (BOCES), fire districts, fire protection districts, and special improvement districts have the option to participate as well.    The current shared services initiative augments the existing NYS Department of State Local Government Efficiency (LGe) Program – which by the way formerly known as the Shared Municipal Services Incentives program –  “provides technical assistance and competitive grants to local governments for the development of projects that will achieve savings and improve municipal efficiency through shared services, cooperative agreements, mergers, consolidations and dissolutions.”

New York State Shared Services Initiative web page

There are many recognized barriers to implementing shared services across NYS governments though as the concept evolves, governments continue to try and find ways to consolidate services in specific areas such as municipal justices, zoning and code enforcement, construction/building/maintenance inspections, and in the establishment of health care consortiums to name only a few.   That said, it’s worthy to note the limited number of GIS-centric shared services proposals submitted by both the New York State Association of Counties (NYSAC) and  New York Council of Mayors (NYCOM). Specifically:
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