Christopher Badtke, PLS, recently was elected to the post of president-elect of the Wisconsin Society of Land Surveyors (WSLS). His 2025 term will be followed by a term as president in 2026 and then past president in 2027.

Badtke has been director of the Northwest Chapter of WSLS since 2021 after having been an active member in WSLS since 2012. As chapter director, he has attended chapter meetings and state-level board of directors meetings throughout the year. He acts as the liaison between the board and the Northwest Chapter and assists with activities such as continuing education for the state’s professional surveyors. Jake Jensen, PLS, an Ayres surveyor in Green Bay, is director of the Northeast Chapter.

Badtke, based in Eau Claire, joined Ayres in 2012 and is a project manager who supervises three survey staff. He works closely with our internal divisions to provide survey coordination, estimating, project planning, and scheduling on a variety of projects. Badtke also serves as an office professional with a primary focus on preparing ALTA surveys, subdivision plats, transportation plats, utility corridor property base mapping, easement exhibits, and other CADD-developed deliverables.

“For me, getting involved in WSLS helps you to see how as a collective group we can advance and protect our profession and get the word out about surveying,” Badtke says, noting the need to attract more young people to the profession.

Badtke will assist the current president this year as well as learning more about establishing the agenda for the state board meetings. He will attend neighboring states’ annual surveyor conferences if the present president cannot. As president in 2026, Badtke will attend those out-of-state conferences and represent WSLS at other in-state conferences.

A big push for WSLS has been finding new ways to get young people interested in careers as professional surveyors. “The number of surveyors is still declining as the need for their services increases,” Badtke says. “Probably our primary focus is trying to bring younger surveyors along to replace our older surveyors.” Mentorship can also increase the number of surveyors by effectively passing knowledge from one generation to the next, helping younger surveyors advance in their careers, he says.

Getting in front of school counselors and positioning professional surveyors at high schools’ career events are among the ways Badtke sees WSLS making progress against the lack of exposure surveying has among today’s teens. Part of the allure of surveying is the many hats you get to wear. Badtke notes that map maker, puzzle solver, and historian are among those many hats – not to mention the some of the advanced technology like drones and lidar scanners they get to use. Badtke holds professional land surveyor licensure in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota. He earned a bachelor’s degree in water resources-fisheries and limnology from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and an associate’s degree in civil engineering technology from Madison Area Technical College.