Nominations were open April 12-26.  Elections take place May 3 and close May 17.  All members in good standing may be nominated.  New Board Members will take office on May 31, 2021.

Election Results

Open Board of Directors Positions

There were three Board Officer positions and two committee chair positions open for nominations: Secretary, Treasurer, Technical Committee Chair and Scholarship & Grants Committee Chair. These are all two year positions. The Vice/President/Past position is a three year position.

Elected Positions

Nominees

Vice President 

Mike Powell is the GIS Manager for Yellowstone County. Mike has worked for Yellowstone County for 20 years, starting out as a GIS Technician. When he became a GIS Analyst, he oversaw the parcels and all layers that were associated with parcels. 6 years ago, he became the Address Coordinator adding the responsibilities of addressing, 911, E911, NG911 and road naming. Within the last seven months he has become the GIS Manager of the county. Before coming to Montana Mike lived in WI and worked for 5 years in the private sector doing GIS work with AutoCAD and MicroStation. Mike has been a MAGIP Member throughout his time in Montana. Mike has made great connections, friends around the state and now looks forward to getting more involved with MAGIP.

Secretary

Aaron Vaughn is the Great Falls City GIS Coordinator. He started as an unpaid intern at the City of Great Falls, then on to become the Addressing/Land Management Specialist, and later to GIS Coordinator. He got his start in GIS not long ago after moving back to his home state to escape the city sprawl in Utah.

He has been a member of MAGIP for 5 years and active in the GIS community attending meet-ups, conferences, and making friends and acquaintances in GIS across the state. He has embarked on building out an Enterprise GIS within Great Falls and created dozens of hosted services to help the city Planning and Public Works departments accomplish their goals. Also he has worked to start the transition towards Great Falls and Cascade County come closer to NG911 compliance and started projects to make data, spatial or otherwise, easily accessed by residents. 

Outside of work he loves to create unfinished home improvement projects, playing the electric bass, and volunteering as a robotics coach in Fort Benton, his current hometown.

Heather Widland was elected MAGIP secretary in 2019 after attending my first Big Sky GeoCon in Butte. I would like to continue working with this great group. As secretary, I kept detailed minutes and was quick to post them to the website. I hope to continue to serve. I am also looking forward to connecting with more Montana GISers as we emerge from this pandemic and can have in-person meetings again. I moved to Montana from southwest Colorado in 2018 and I still work remotely for a small county there.

Treasurer

Nate Wold has worked for the Montana State Library as a GIS Technician since January 2020 where he lends a hand maintaining Montana Spatial Data Infrastructure data layers. Before starting with the MSL, he worked seasonal positions with the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management. His experience includes using GIS to strengthen citizen science projects and using GIS technologies for field data collection and Greater Sage Grouse habitat threat mapping and improvement. His education includes a M.S in Geography from the University of Montana and B.S. in Geology from Kansas State University.

Technical Committee Chair

Jason Danielson is the GIS Database Analyst and Address Coordinator for Lewis and Clark County/City of Helena GIS Services. His duties include the assignment and/or re-assignment of roads and addresses within Lewis and Clark County, the creation and maintenance of our enterprise geospatial data, providing GIS software/project support for existing clients within our enterprise, and the creation, maintenance, and management of our interactive mapping sites. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in geography from the University of North Dakota (2000).

Jason served on the MAGIP Board of Directors as a Member-at-Large from 2010-2012 and has been a member of various committees/subcommittees since 2008. Jason also co-chaired the inaugural Big Sky GeoCon in Helena in 2018. Jason looks forward to continued collaboration among our membership and GIS community!

Kenny Ketner is the Information Products Lead at the Montana State Library and has been a MAGIP member for four years. He is currently the incumbent Technical Committee Chair. 2020 and 2021 have been difficult years for everyone, MAGIP included. Helping to coordinate the 2020 Big Sky GeoCon workshops only to have to cancel the whole thing was rough. The all-virtual 2021 Big Sky GeoCon workshops were mostly an echo of the work done in 2020 with some updates. The future of Big Sky GeoCon workshops is bright, however, with hybrid conferences promising to enhance the experience for presenters and attendees alike. Kenny also set up the MAGIP Discord Server, which helped the success of the Fall 2020 Minicon. If re-elected, Kenny will expand the membership of the technical committee and seek additional ways to engage the membership outside of conferences.

Scholarship & Grants Committee Chair

Dr. Robert Ahl has degrees in Biology, Environmental Science, Forestry, and is affiliate faculty in the University of Montana Department of Geography. He works as Geospatial Systems Specialist for the USDA Forest in Missoula, MT, for a National Land Status team.

At a MAGIP conference in Billings, MT Robert was approached by members of the MAGIP Board of Directors and asked if he would be interested in serving on the Education Committee. He gladly accepted, and has had the honor of serving on what is now called the Scholarship and Grants Committee since 2014. This has been an extremely rewarding experience, and over the years Robert has helped the committee increase the annual scholarships and grants budgets and helped fund over two dozen undergraduate and graduate student scholarships alike, as well as provide grants to Tribal, private, and public schools. With your approval, Robert will build on past successes and eagerly serve another term as committee chair.

Craig Threlkeld has been living in Montana for 9 years and working in GIS for 5. I lead DJ&A's diversity scholarship effort and have enjoyed the experience immensely. I think leading MAGIPs Scholarship and grants committee would give me another opportunity to help the GIS community grow, and I think I would enjoy the experience. At DJ&A in addition to our scholarship work, I perform a variety of GIS tasks my favorite of which are python programming for automation and quality checks, and UAS data processing. In my free time I enjoy backpacking, rafting, and ultimate frisbee.

Additional Election information can be found on our Election Overview page

Contact MAGIP for more information