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2005 Forest Service Engineer of the Year Winners

William Angelus—2005 Engineering Technology Applications Employee of the Year

Since June 2000, William Angelus has been the Infra program manager and coordinator in the Southern Region Regional Office, helping employees and managers locate and retrieve data. As regional coordinator, he helps 17 forest, station, and area Infra coordinators gather, maintain, and report on all corporate data pertaining to the Forest Service’s physical assets (buildings, roads, bridges, trails, dams, recreation sites) and fiscal assets (real property, permits, and billings).

As regional coordinator for Infra, Bill learned that most Forest Service employees and managers struggled with Infra’s reports and views. Recognizing that most Infra users did not work with the application often enough to know the report they needed to use to get the answers they sought, Bill developed a Southern Region Web page (http://fsweb.r8.fs.fed.us/nr/infra/) with Web queries or reports not offered elsewhere. Once users selected a Web query and supplied their attributes, the results appeared lightning quick—either in a Web browser or in Microsoft Excel.

The national Integrated Business Service Center (recreation sites) links from their Web site to the Southern Region’s Infra Web page for reports. Forest and road engineers across the country have raved about the Web queries’ utility, especially for maintenance inspection date tracking and accomplishment reports.

William initiated forest accountability of data collection, input, and verification of data quality by sharing the results of the Web site queries with the forests and regional leadership. He works with forest and regional program managers (engineering, lands, recreation, heritage, range, real property, and fiscal) to identify gaps and inconsistencies in Infra data. He tracks (measures) forests’ accomplishments in the collection of maintenance work tasks and completion percentages.

Examples of William’s accomplishments:

• In preparation of the August 2005 WCF pull, he developed a Web site query that checked for populated facility master plan required fields. Using his tool, forests identified buildings that didn't have these key fields populated. William worked with data stewards and, in less than 14 days, more than 4,500 blank fields were completed, allowing the Southern Region to achieve 100 percent completion.
  
  
• To prepare for the production of motor-vehicle use maps (MVUM) for the travel management rule, William created a query, Roads MVUM to identify blank required fields in each forest’s roads data. These fields must be populated in Infra before road routes can be linked to a forest’s GIS spatial coverage. By January 31, 2006, the Southern Region had populated 99 percent of the required fields (jurisdiction, system, route status, operational maintenance level, functional class, and surface type).

Highlights of William’s Forest Service career:

• 1993–Received a letter of commendation for his assistant team leader role on the public comment analysis team of the Northern Spotted Owl Final Environmental Impact Statement from Robert Jacobs, interagency team leader.
  
  
• 1996–Received a certificate of merit for outstanding professionalism as a key resource specialist on the Upper Carroll Timber Sale EIS team (Tongass National Forest).
  
  
• 1998–Served as public comment analyst and summary writer for the ICBEMP and eastside Cascades draft environmental impact statements.
  
  
• 1998–Served as a team leader on the content analysis enterprise team for the chief’s national roads policy interim rule.
  
  
• 1999–Received a letter of commendation from Ketchikan public utilities for his role as Forest Service liaison and project coordinator. Ketchikan public utilities was the proponent for a controversial powerline in Southeastern Alaska.

William serves on the policy and technical MVUM committees in the Southern Region regional office and will help the 15 forests in the region produce their motor-vehicle use maps. William received his bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture (summa cum laude) from the University of Florida with an emphasis on community and regional planning and onsite design and planning. After college, he worked as a town planner for a regional planning firm in Florida, a landscape design firm in Albuquerque, NM, a landscape architect in San Juan Capistrano, CA, and as a manager at a recreation vehicle and marine dealership. In 1992, William began his Forest Service career as a resource specialist on large timber EIS projects on the Ketchikan area of the Tongass National Forest.

William and his wife, Beryl, live in a 1930s-era schoolhouse in the north Georgia mountains. The schoolhouse has original floors, walls, and ceilings of well-aged heart pine. Renovating the schoolhouse occupies most of his spare time. He also is president of the homeowners’ association that represents all county homeowners before the Dawson County Commission in matters affecting environmental impacts from regional and community development.

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