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Tim retired from the BLM Oregon State Office in September of 2005 after 34 years as a land surveyor with the federal government. He graduated from the Oregon Technical Institute with a bachelor’s degree in surveying in 1971 and joined the BLM in their Portland office. Subsequent assignments were in Eugene, Anchorage, Denver, and back to Portland in 1984. In 1990, he joined the Forest Service in Portland as the regional land surveyor for Oregon and Washington. He returned to the BLM in 2002 to finish his federal career as the Cadastral Survey Field Section Chief.
Tim is a licensed land surveyor in several western states and is an active member in NSPS, PLSO, and LSAW. He has served as the Area 10 Director for NSPS, a committee chair of the PLSO conference committee, and interim Editor of the award winning The Oregon Surveyor magazine.
Tim was selected as the Land Surveyors Association of Washington Surveyor of the Year in 1996, 1998, and 2016 and the Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon Surveyor of the Year in 2009. He was also recently awarded Lifetime Membership in PLSO.
About Tim Kent, PLS
Timothy A. Kent has been involved in the Surveying profession for over 55 years. Starting at Sheldon High School in Eugene where the math instructors provided transits and steel tapes to solve triangle-based problems to his associate degree in Civil and Structural Engineering at Lane Community College to a student in the surveying program at the Oregon Institute of Technology in 1969.
He retired from being the surveying program manager at Clark College in Vancouver, WA in 2024.Tims career has covered many aspects of our profession. To say this is the end of his illustrious career would be an understatement of his continuous dedication to the profession. For over 16 years in this position, Tim worked to form a partnership between Clark College and the Oregon Institute of Technology.
Tim was an assistant professor of Geomatics at Oregon Tech from 2005 to 2008. That position was a result of a partnership between OIT and BLM specifically designed to bolster the instructional capabilities within the program and to recruit new students into the profession. As a professor, Tim used his new contacts and “spare time” to start up the TWIST (teaching with spatial technology) program at OIT, form partnerships with community colleges, and to recruit students and members to OIT, PLSO, LSAW, and NSPS.