Surveyor Spotlight: Donald T. Poole, PLS

By Emily Devane, MALSCE Membership Associate

In honor of the 11^th Annual Legal Perspectives on Land Surveying Seminar happening this Friday, January 31, the focus of MALSCE News’ first Surveyor Spotlight is the member who first came up with the idea of this successful seminar over a decade ago, Donald T. Poole, PLS. The president of Outermost Land Survey Inc. in Brewster, Don has been a member of MALSCE since 1983 and was awarded Surveyor of the Year in 2013. Despite being the grandson of a civil engineer and land surveyor, it was his 9th grade shop teacher Stu Findlay that first introduced Don to land surveying. He remembers being captivated during a class where Mr. Finlay took students out to the back of the high school with a transit, chain, level, and level rod and taught them how to make a map. After high school, Don went to Cape Cod Community College before eventually transferring to University of Alabama where he majored in civil engineering. Don and his wife, Dawn Sternlieb moved to Nashville after graduating. It was in Nashville that Don began working as a surveying technician and began learning from his first mentor, James L. Murphy.

Since moving back to Cape Cod in 1983, Don has been an active land surveyor and member of his local community. One of his most interesting projects has been the Herring River Restoration Project in Wellfleet. This long-term project has covered many aspects of the land surveying profession including; right of way surveying for topographic data, road right of way layouts (including research to define a layout from 1720), and intensive elevations for flood plane projections. Don believes that it is a citizen’s responsibility to give back to the society that they live in. He has been an active member of town committees in both Orleans and Brewster including the Finance and Capital Planning Committees and is the current president of the Brewster Chamber of Commerce.

Don has been a member of MALSCE for 37 years and has found that time to be incredibly rewarding. He has enjoyed working with the dedicated individuals that make up MALSCE’s membership and is optimistic about the future of surveying in Massachusetts. Don’s notable leadership positions include being president of the Cape Cod chapter for longer than he can remember before passing that position along to John McElwee, PLS, serving on the MALSCE Board of Directors as the president of the Cape Cod chapter, being the Massachusetts state coordinator for the NSPS Trig-Star competition, and coordinating several MALSCE hosted Surveyor Rendezvous in Boston Common. It was while serving on MALSCE’s Professional Development Committee that the idea for his most enduring contribution to MALSCE came to him on a beach in Hyannis. Cape Cod was hosting that year’s MALSCE Convention and Don had asked lawyers Denise Chicoine and Ed Englander to do an afternoon seminar. When the timing for the convention did not work, the three of them came up with the idea of a lawyers’ panel where surveyors could learn about related legal issues and recent court cases. When asked why Legal Perspectives remains so popular a decade later, Don points to the unsurpassed quality of the information supplied at the seminar every year. The seminar allows land surveyors and lawyers to communicate and learn from each other’s perspectives. Click here to learn more about the topics covered at this year’s Annual Legal Perspectives on Land Surveying Seminar.