After 44 years of service at WisDOT, Gene Hafermann retired on Tuesday, February 4th.
Gene’s civil engineering career started in a summer camp in 1968. The following summer, he began at WisDOT while in school at UW-Madison and later that year graduated with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Civil Engineering Structures. Gene went on to get his Master of Science Degree in Geodetic Surveying in June 1971.
Gene worked as a civil engineer at WisDOT for three years in a design-construction pool in District One before going to the Technical Services Section in June 1974. The majority of Gene’s career at WisDOT was helping to automate surveys and working on coordinate system issues in the Surveying and Mapping Section. His assistance in the development of the Wisconsin County Coordinate System (WCCS) and the Wisconsin Coordinate Reference System (WISCRS) was valuable, but more importantly, his work to get the WCCS and WISCRS parameters available to equipment manufacturers so surveyors could collect real-time data in county coordinates was instrumental.
Gene collaborated with coordinate transformation software vendors to include county coordinates into their software packages and assisted in the development of WISCON and WI-SDMS translators. He also worked with many WisDOT survey consultants to provide them with the correct tools (WCCS parameters, feature code, and attribute libraries) when working on WisDOT projects.
Memberships that Gene belonged to included many surveying and engineering automation groups such as: SDMS Task Force, AASHTO, Highway Engineers Exchange Program (HEEP), and Wisconsin Automation User Group (WAUG). Gene was also a member of the Wisconsin Land Information Association (WLIA) and many others.
In “retirement”, Gene is going to continue to work on SDMS software develpment but more importantly he’s going to work on that long neglected golf game, enjoy having more time to pick berries, hunting, and spending time with his family.
Congratulations Gene and best wishes!