Mapping a new route

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN JERRY ENGLER
Since her retirement in mid-July, Joan Watkins has transferred her love of cartography as a mapper for the Marion County Appraiser’s Office to her artistic love of a lifetime-cartooning.

Actually, she hopes to catch up on art-work in general as well as pursue her other hobby, poetry.

Watkins has used both talents to make cards with rhyming poetry and cartoon sketches for people important in her life.

She also likes charcoal drawing, and wants to pursue education in other media such as oil painting.

But in the meantime Watkins, whose retirement County Appraiser Dianna Carter said was “just like losing a member of your family,” has spent much of her time just relaxing.

Watkins said, “I’ve been working around the house (in Marion), and just spending some quality time with my husband, Melvin.”

Her husband was from Minneapolis and she was from Wichita, but they had been living in Arizona until they returned to their native Kansas in 1981. After more than three years in admissions at St. Luke’s Hospital, Watkins moved to the appraiser’s office where she spent more than 17 years.

She began work with former County Appraiser Max Hayen, who later became mayor of Marion, to develop the locally done appraiser cartography at a time when most counties contracted such work out.

Watkins found it a challenge to pioneer work in the office with computers by starting to use the “Arc-Info” software for the first time in 1988. For the last two years she used Autocad Map software that can put on a map everything from lot and block numbers to acreage and ownership.

Her co-worker, Lee Dalrymple, a geographic information system technician, has been redrawing all the maps of cities in Marion County with more detail that will help make them be of more use.

Watkins maintained and corrected maps for 11,860 parcels of real estate under different ownership to determine ownership and taxation. Along with this, she worked with owners, title companies, surveyors, appraisers and others to research deeds, and make legal interpretations. She could make determinations anywhere from road and pipeline right-of-ways to use-value of land.

Carter said that the kind of creativity and experience Watkins had in making all of these determinations will make her leaving the the office difficult although, because of the efforts made over the years, both women expect her successor to get a good start.

As for Watkins, it looks like the creativity that served her well in work will continue to do so in retirement.

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