President's Message

Members,

2025 is turning out to be a huge year of change for me and I am truly thankful for the blessings, prayers, and well-wishes I have received from my friends, peers, and my family for some health issues I have faced in the last three months. Thankfully, those issues are now almost behind me, and I am looking forward to continuing participating in this great profession for many more years to come. I am so looking forward to our conference at the end of July and seeing all of those friends and fellow professionals that make this profession great to be part of. Looking back over the last 10 months, I have these reflections:

I had been asked on a couple of occasions in the past several years to run for President of FSMS and I kept putting it off because I didn’t feel I could give it the time, energy and commitment that I felt this very important position deserved. When I finally decided to retire in the last couple of years, this was number 1 on my “Bucket List” of something I was now wanting to do and ready for and could devote all my time and energy on giving back to the Profession that has been my life for 53 years now.

In August 2024, it happened, and I couldn’t have been prouder to stand up in front of the membership and take the oath of office and commit myself and my time to our Society and Profession. It all started relatively calmly and eventually got heated with more deregulation issues and potential threats to our profession. We met with our Lobbyist and committees in meetings, phone calls, emails, and online discussions and worked through them as a team. Because it’s not the individual that takes this position as president that is the deciding factor on whether our Society succeeds or not, you are just the coach. It’s a group effort from those individuals who volunteer to represent you the members, the State officers, the State directors, the Chapter presidents and their officers, the FSMS staff working behind the scenes to keep things running smoothly, and the multitude of individual members who participate.

A successful professional society is a team that loves what they do and looks out for what’s in the best interest of the profession. They are not paid for their efforts in monetary funds but volunteer to organize, provide background experience and knowledge, give up their time and energy to give back to something that made them successful, and look out for the things that may be detrimental to the profession. They also look to the future through the education of the next generation, and to the past for the foundation of what built the profession into what it is today. FSMS is your society, we are only as good as the members who are part of it and participate in it. I became a member in 1981 and do not regret a single day being part of it. It truly gives back more than it takes and the lifelong friendships it fosters and promotes is something you can’t get anywhere else.

Each surveyor out there has a story(s) that resonates inside them and permeates the world around them as they go about their work. These hidden stories are what make them special and drive them onward in their quest for knowledge of how to meld the past with the present in every survey they perform. How do we take historical data and blend it with modern Lidar and robotics and make them into a coherent and accurate representation of a property that was patented back when Florida was a territory or when it became a State.

A surveyor is really a unique profession that has past, present, and future aspects in everything they do. It’s really up to all of us to k eep it relevant, and being part of a Society is a step in the right direction.

I’ll leave you with one last thought on this unique profession.

With the new state plane coordinate projections coming out in 2026, where we have taken the spherical geography of the earth and projected it to grid, does that mean that we are supporting the Flat Earth Society movement?

Ponder on it.

Respectfully submitted,

Richard D. Pryce, RLS/PSM   

Previous 2025 Messages

January 2025
February 2025
March 2025
April 2025
May 2025