Paul Van Zuyle expands GIS practice at Penfield & Smith
Santa Barbara, CA – Penfield & Smith, a leading regional engineering, planning, surveying and construction management firm headquartered in Santa Barbara with regional offices in Santa Maria, Camarillo and Lancaster, has added a GIS services group headed by Paul Van Zuyle.

Until joining Penfield & Smith, Paul headed his own consulting firm, Westlake GIS, and worked on enterprise GIS projects for the City of Los Angeles, County of Ventura, City of Ojai and other private clients. He was also previously the GIS coordinator for the City of Thousand Oaks where he built an enterprise GIS system that was the first in the Tri-County region to offer GIS data access to the public as well as City employees.

At Penfield & Smith, Paul will strengthen the company’s ability to offer integrated solutions to engineering, asset management and planning problems that include GIS. Paul’s particular expertise in enterprise Geodatabase design, GIS needs assessment, and implementation of ESRI technology will further establish Penfield & Smith’s ability to offer innovative solutions to business problems.

Paul is also an educator and trainer in GIS technology, and is an ESRI-authorized instructor, now offering classes and custom training through Penfield & Smith. Many GIS students in the region also know him from the classes he has taught at Santa Barbara and Ventura Community Colleges over the past several years.

Paul is a past president of the Channel Islands Regional GIS collaborative (CIRGIS), where he helped establish that organization as a non-profit public-benefit corporation. With his assistance CIRGIS has received over $200,000 in Federal cooperative agreement programs that have lowered the cost of digital aerial imagery acquisition for local agencies, and facilitated the distribution of that data to the region and the nation through The National Map.

Penfield & Smith is an ENR Top 500 Design Firm and has been recognized by California Construction Magazine as one of the top 25 Design Firms in the state. The firm has been providing complete surveying, mapping, planning, engineering, and construction administration services to the Central and South Coast areas of California for over 60 years.