Our People

Spatial Focus, Inc., is proud of its leadership team. Collectively, we have over seventy years of experience in the field of geo data architecture, geographic information systems, addressing, planning, and data management.

Spatial Focus announces the retirement of our founding President, Don Jones, as of the end of 2011. Don's long tenure with Spatial Focus was instrumental in getting us started, and helping us to become the high-quality, service oriented business we are today. Working in our changing professing has always been challenging, and we are grateful to Don for his wisdom, business sense, and insistence on our independence and integrity through the years. We wish Don, his wife, Rosey, and their family the very best.

Martha McCart Wells, GISP, President, and Director of Consulting Services

Ms. McCart Wells is an experienced GIS Manager and a founder of Spatial Focus, Inc. She brings over 40 years of experience in local government planning and zoning, organizational issues, budgeting, project management, real estate development, transportation planning, and coastal zone management to serve clients of Spatial Focus, Inc.

Ms. McCart Wells has managed numerous projects with Spatial Focus, Inc., including the development and implementation of a Master Address Repository for Washington, DC, addressing implementation studies for Boulder County, CO, Cobb County, GA, Raleigh, NC, Fairfax County, VA, and Bellevue, WA, development of an enterprise GIS system with Florence County, SC, quality control for orthophotography, planimetric, topographic and cadastral maps for several counties, and development of a Strategic Plan and Master Address Repository with Cambridge, MA, and strategic plans for Addressing for Raleigh, NC, Cabarrus County, NC, and the Town of Weymouth, MA.

Ms. McCart Wells is co-chair of URISA's Address Standard Working Group, which developed a comprehensive street addressing data standard for the Federal Geographic Data Committee. She has authored numerous presentations and publications on addressing, GIS management and urban planning issues and has been a technical trainer and taught at University undergraduate and graduate levels (University of California, Davis, Sacramento State University and Georgia Tech) in planning/zoning field. She is a Past-President, past Treasurer and past Member of the Board of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA), and has written and taught workshops for URISA for several years. She has received the URISA Leadership Award (1999), and twice received the Barbara Hirsch Special Service Award for her work with URISA on the Address Standard, and on development of URISA's Leadership Academy.

She received her BA, Geography, from San Francisco State University, and an MS in Resource and Regional Planning, from the University of Massachusetts.

Sara Yurman, Secretary/Treasurer and Director of Information Services

Sara Yurman is an experienced GIS Manager and a founder of Spatial Focus, Inc. She has over fourteen years of experience in both organizational and technical aspects of geographic information, encompassing government at the local, regional, and state levels. Her activities have included team-building and change management, as well as implementations of raster and vector GIS, GPS data integration, system development, and database design.

Ms. Yurman has been Project Leader for the Fairfax County and SAGIS Address Implementation Plans, and was the primary technical consultant to the Republic of Malawi on the automation of the Land Title Registry. She has designed comprehensive GIS databases for Hall County, GA, Gaston County, NC, and developed a web-based quality control application that provides for detailed checking of cadastral, planimetric and orthophotographic maps. Ms. Yurman has been the Project Manager for the City of North Little Rock Electric Department in their development of GIS and conversion of system plans and documents from CAD to GIS. She has also been the Project Manager for the GIS Implementation and Addressing Plan for the City of Delray Beach, FL.

Before the founding of Spatial Focus, Inc., Ms. Yurman was a consultant for American Cadastre, Inc. (AmCad), a GIS consulting firm. She served AmCad's domestic market in both managerial and technical assignments. Ms. Yurman served as on-site interim GIS Project Manager for the Pulaski Area Geographic Information System (PAGIS), a partnership involving the City of Little Rock, Little Rock Municipal Water Works, Little Rock Wastewater Utility, and Pulaski County. Over a six month period, she completed a Strategic Plan that reorganized the eight-year-old partnership and forged new institutional relationships. After recruiting a permanent replacement, Ms. Yurman continued to work with PAGIS to complete and document a database design, produce governing documents for the new organizational structure, and assist with address completion and reconciliation.

Prior to joining American Cadastre, she worked with a variety of clients on technical and strategic issues, advising clients on profit potential of existing geographic data within their organization. Her client list included a transportation planning firm and an ESRI business partner. Previous work included serving as GIS Manager for the Department of Community Affairs, State of Georgia, encompassing responsibility for GIS coordination at the State level, and working with federal, state, regional and local governments. During her tenure she established a statewide lending service for global positioning systems (GPS) equipment for local government statewide, along with a GPS base station, which publishes hourly on a public bulletin board system.

Ms. Yurman worked in regional government as the GIS Manager for the South Georgia Regional Development Center, where she developed a GIS that served ten counties and over thirty-five units of local government. She developed the GIS system, provided training and technical support throughout the process, and provided strategic planning, budgeting, and management of the system. During this project, Ms. Yurman designed and supervised the development of a comprehensive addressing system for a county in Georgia that had not previously been addressed, in support of the E-911 dispatch system. Image processing and GPS efforts were also within her purview.

Ms. Yurman also worked for Gwinnett County, GA, as a planner, providing GIS services in the Planning Division, and preparing statistical and demographic reports for the public and other county departments. She is a trained and experienced user of ARC/INFO, Maptitude and other GIS and database programs.

Ms. Yurman received a BFA from California Institute of the Arts, and a Master's degree in geography from Georgia State University. Her language skills include English, basic Spanish, and written French.