Planning and Permitting

Online Tools to Support Efficient Planning

Joseph F. Musil and Ira Beckerman

Tuesday, May 21
Baltimore Rom
2:00 PM

About the Session

Environmental professionals need quick access to conservation information to support project planning and environmental review, including low-cost, state of the art GIS tools that provide efficiency and certainty for both industry and conservation. This session will describe existing state-of-the-art online tools for practitioners in Pennsylvania. Online Tools that will be described are:

Pennsylvania Conservation Explorer, an award-winning web-based mapping tool that allows users to easily query existing spatial data (such as Protected Lands, T&E species habitat, wetlands and high-value surface water resources), add their own data to the interactive map, or display map services from PA Spatial Data Access and other public resources.
Pennsylvania’s Cultural Resources Geographic Information System (CRGIS), a map-based inventory of the historic and archaeological sites and surveys stored in the files of the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office (PA SHPO).
The Project for Pennsylvania Transportation and Heritage (Project PATH), which provides an overview of the Section 106 status for each project, relevant documents associated with the project, a method for soliciting for consulting parties, a method for providing notices to interested and consulting parties, an administrative record for postings and notifications completed for a project, and means to search for specific projects by location or name.

About the Presenters

Joseph Musil

Joe has diversified work experience in both the private and public sectors, including private consulting and ombudsman services for industrial and manufacturing facilities, engineering consultants, government agencies, and local authorities/municipalities. His responsibilities have included management of multi-million-dollar construction projects, environmental and OSHA site audits, and review of multi-million dollar government procurement centers' activities. He places emphasis on environmental program management, developing standardized contracting procedures and documents, long-range planning, and improving Total Quality Management within client operations. He has applied his expertise as an employee of Urban Engineers, Inc. of Philadelphia PA for the past 25 years as a NEPA Specialist and Regulatory Compliance Engineer.

Ira Beckerman

Ira Beckerman has been the Cultural Resources Section Chief for the Bureau of Design at PennDOT since 1998. Trained as an archaeologist (Ph.D. Anthropology, Penn State, 1986), he has worked as a field archaeologist in Mexico, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. His 32 years of transportation experience is split between PennDOT and (previously) the Maryland State Highway Administration. Dr. Beckerman's research interests include archaeological predictive modeling, pre-contact Eastern North America, and GIS. He is a member of the Society for American Archaeology, Register of Professional Archaeologists, and a friend of Transportation Research Board's Archaeology and Historic Preservation Committee, and has served on panels for TRB and American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials (AASHTO). Dr. Beckerman was a 2001 recipient of the PennDOT Star of Excellence. Dr. Beckerman was the Department lead in the development of Project PATH.