Chair

AdV Chair - Free Hanseatic City of Bremen

On January 1, 2026, Ulrich Gellhaus, director of the Bremen Agency for GeoInformation, took over the chair of the Working Committee of the Surveying Authorities of the Laender of the Federal Republic of Germany (AdV). Ulrich Gellhaus is director of the Bremen Agency for GeoInformation, which is assigned to the Senator for Construction, Mobility and Urban Development Bremen. The focus of the Agency is in the areas of surveying, geotopography, real estate cadastre, urban and engineering surveying as well as official valuation. In addition, the office takes on various tasks in the documentation of federal properties. After studying geodesy at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Ulrich Gellhaus completed his technical traineeship in North Rhine-Westphalia. His professional career took him from the surveying field service for a publicly appointed surveyor in North Rhine-Westphalia to the Hamburg Nord surveying and cadastral office to the then cadastral and surveying business in Bremen. After several years of managing the Bremerhaven surveying and cadastral office, he moved back to Bremen in 2011 to take responsibility for what is now the Bremen Agency GeoInformation. He now looks back on 30 years of management experience in official and municipal surveying and valuation. Ulrich Gellhaus has represented the Bremen Agency for GeoInformation since 2011 and has also been the consultant for Bremen's official surveying in the AdV since 2016. He has also been the representative of the Land of Bremen on the Geobasis Steering Committee since 2011, which he chaired from 2020 to 2022. In this role, he worked, among other things, as project manager for the future of the central offices for the nationwide provision of geospatial reference data as an essential joint task of the surveying authorities. In addition, Ulrich Gellhaus is deputy chairman of the Geoinformation, Surveying and Land Planning Commission in the German Association of Cities and was chairman of the DVW regional association Lower Saxony-Bremen e. V. for many years.

In view of dwindling budget resources and the shortage of skilled workers, Gellhaus, as chair of the AdV, places a particular focus on reducing costs and creating synergies between the AdV's own state tasks and the joint tasks. “The key is to have a goal and start together,” says Gellhaus, who highlights the image of the Bremen Town Musicians as a symbol of shared commitment. “Community is more than the sum of its members.” As the new chair of the AdV, he is also committed to even more intensive cooperation with the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy.

Ulrich Gellhaus will lead the AdV in 2026 and 2027.

 AdV Vice-Chair - North Rhine-Westphalia

On July 1, 2026, Stephan Heitmann, deputy head of department 304 - official surveying in the Ministry of the Interior of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, took over the deputy chair of the Working Committee of the Surveying Authorities of the Laender of the Federal Republic of Germany (AdV).