MEEKER | Leif Joy, who is a prominent figure in the community, is known for wearing many different “hats” in terms of his job descriptions. Last Friday, Joy and his co-worker, Matt Franks, sat down to discuss the various roles of the Community Development Department.
The department handles numerous tasks, including GIS, survey planning, flood planning, administration, building permits, and plumbing permits. “We manage the Community Development Administration, so we do all vouchering, all paperwork; everything that goes along with running a department at a county level,” Joy said.
When asked about his proudest hat that he wears, Joy remarked, “I’m very proud of being part of a team that really likes to think outside the box, innovation, new ideas. We don’t get caught up in the status quo and I’m very proud of that as the Community Development Director.”
Franks added, “I think the community development does an exceptional job at communicating with the public.”
Joy also discussed his most challenging hat to wear. “Balancing between accomplishing what the public needs, wants, desires and the state rules and regulations. That’s been a very difficult and most challenging aspect of our job,” he said.
He continued, “A lot of what we do is not necessarily local rule. It is handed down from the state and the federal government, and that’s been difficult for us because we have to be the messenger between this office and the public.”
Franks echoed Joy’s statement, stating, “We are, in a sense, regulatory agents, and our job is to enforce the regulations that are handed to us. A lot of times, if not most times, they don’t fall on the local level. It falls at the state level, so trying to communicate that to the public is the most challenging part of our job.”
When asked about his favorite hat to wear, Joy said he didn’t have one. “I really don’t have a favorite, and that’s the honest truth. I love every aspect of what I do. Otherwise, I wouldn’t do it.”
Franks shared his favorite part of the job. “For me, it’s coming to work every day and getting to work with a great colleague like Leif. That, to me, is my favorite part of the job,” he said. “We share this common bond. We are not confused about what one another thinks, and to have that and to be able to call Leif a friend at the end of the day and a great colleague is my favorite part of my job.”
Joy has served the county for a long time, having been the elected county surveyor for sixteen years. “I started to build the GIS system back in 2006. Then I went out and did a private sector job, serving with my father. And then I came back to the county five or six years ago, so I’ve been in the community development role as the director for just a couple of years,” he said.
Joy began his career as a land surveyor, working for a large land surveying company where he learned coordinate geometry, also known as KOGO, in the AutoCAD environment. He started his career in Denver doing base mapping.
“While I was there, I also learned or got into the GIS portion of that where they would take our CAD drawings and put it into the GIS as the base, and then add tabular data. I learned how to do that from a very smart, intelligent guy, probably the biggest influence on my life, Steve Holmes,” Joy said.
When asked what brought him back to Meeker, Joy replied, “My wife and I wanted to come back home and raise our child here, raise our family. That was the biggest reason to come back. It’s a great place to live.”
Joy now works with GIS, which stands for geographic information system. “It’s a system of information that’s both spatial and tabular data, and that gets merged together in a format that you can point and click and visualize and see spatial data. See tabular data in a spatial environment. That’s what GIS is,” he explained.
Joy provided examples of everyday uses of GIS. “When you call into dispatch and say we have an emergency at x,y,z, that then gets mapped by Rhawnie McGruder and her great team, and emergency responders are immediately sent to that location. That’s GIS-based information,” he said.
“Large companies use it for market analysis, and given our current election situation, you see the maps on TV. That’s all GIS-based products,” he added.
When asked about their specific passions and how they work on being the best at each one, both Joy and Franks pointed to a whiteboard with a quote at the top that said, “Be better than expected each day.”
“Our goals, both individually and collectively, are to satisfy the needs or the requests made and take it to the next level and get better every day. That’s kind of our motto in the community development department,” Joy explained.
Joy wears many hats for our community, and he can add one more as he gives our youth some good advice. To our youth, Joy stated, “Get involved, don’t sit on the sidelines, get involved. The next innovations, the next technology, the next developments are going to come from the next generation and we are only helpers in that we can only point them and guide them. It will be up to them to make those breakthroughs.”
By JARED HENDERSON
