At URISA's 39th Annual Conference in Long Beach, California, in October 2001, the URISA board presented the Horwood Distinguished Service Award--which is awarded for significant contributions to URISA and the industry--to Ed Crane.

Ed Crane has worked as a senior GIS consultant for Esri since 1998, when he was hired to open a Kansas City office for the company. For more than nine years prior to his joining Esri, Ed led the GIS Division of M.J. Harden Associates and led their efforts at supplying digital mapping and GIS databases to the firm's aerial mapping clients.

Wyandotte County's Base Mapping Program in Kansas City benefited from Ed's expertise from 1973 to 1989. The County's digital mapping systems for parcels, roads, and administrative information were recognized as pioneering efforts in local government automation by URISA, IAAO, and NACo in the 1980s, when the program was awarded URISA's Exemplary Systems in Government (ESIG) Award and a Distinguished Assessment Jurisdiction honor. LANDS (Land Data System) was implemented in 1979 as a countywide assessment and tax roll administration/accounting system that is still functioning well after 20 years. Ed was chairman of an interdepartmental coordinating committee that designed and instituted automation of LANDS and other automation technologies to support such tasks as reappraisal, election systems, and enterprise GIS for the County.

Ed has been extremely active in the industry's professional associations. Besides being an active URISA member since 1977, he was also a board member and past president (1992-93). He has been a program committee member for several URISA annual conferences.

He is a charter founding member (1980) and the initial chairman of the MidAmerica GIS Consortium (MAGIC) and is currently the conference program chairman for the 2002 MidAmerica GIS Symposium. Ed is also a founding charter member of the Kansas Association of Mappers (1985) and has held numerous conference and committee roles.

For more information, contact Wendy Francis (e-mail: wfrancis@urisa.org, tel.: 847-824-6300) or visit www.urisa.org.