JaRo...
Apparently that judge's car has never been towed.
Give the families of the chronically or terminally ill children of the Presbyterian Hospital priority of using the house at reduced rates or free. I bet the Hospital would get onboard.
I would bet that with enough public pressure locally, the developer would just walk away and let them have it.
I just hate to see a good beach house go to waste.
James
kudos are in order
I'm not sure that Carrigan Engineering is responsible. They appear to have created a site plan, which the builder misused and submitted as a survey to the City review. To me, the blame rests squarely on whoever staked the house. The buck stops there. Had they hired a surveyor, you can be sure a surveyor would have found the property lines and staked the house at the proper setbacks, and if he failed, this case would have been builder vs. surveyor, not landowner vs. builder.
I mean, at some point, someone had to have told the masons where to put the foundation, right? My guess is that someone went out with a handheld GPS and some coordinates picked off the tax map/GIS, but who knows ....
Published court findings
> That's a good read. They laid the logic out in step by step fashion covering all of the bases.
I thought so too. I just wish they would have included some of the maps that would have been part of the decisions.
This error is big enough that hopefully the whole story will come out.
It really needs to as a public service to all that come afterward.
My first question is who pointed their finger and said they could "build there".
Locally there was a Realtor that was infamous for telling his clients they could build on sites that were not on the property he was showing them.
I would also like to see everything from the architect site plan to the delivery invoices from the lumber yard.
When I can plug an address into Google Earth and go to an address two lots away from the one they built on, I would be questioning the opinion of everyone involved.
Taxlots overlaid on aerial photo
Here's a rough rubbersheeting of the assessor's map on google earth. The park is 162.
Taxlots overlaid on aerial photo
hmmm ... let's build a 2 million dollar house and we'll save a few hundred cause I think I know where to build it.
In reality, to me, it almost looks like someone knew where "a", line was ... I mean the guy built everything excpet a small smidgeon of drive on the park land ... unrealB-)
Land Swap?
Couldn't they exchange parcels of land? Heck, even if you did 2:1 it would be cheaper than moving the house.
Somethings fishy
Here in CT you need a survey to even bring a plan for new construction before P&Z. You can't get a CO without an asbuilt. Strange.
Land Swap?
not only cheaper, but the park(if possible), would better benefit with more beach frontage.
Land Swap?
Thats what I'm thinkin' more land area and beach frontage for the park.
Somethings fishy
The news stories linked above say that the local ordinance did require a survey, but that the builder had submitted a site plan prepared by an engineering firm (apparently, without a licensed surveyor being involved), which was accepted by the building department as a "survey prepared by a design professional", or some such nonsense. The surveyor who discovered the mistake is quoted, and is quick to point out that no surveyor was involved in the construction or initial site plan/boundary, even though everyone else is trying to pass this off as a surveying error. It seems like a builder error, to me.
Somethings fishy
So does that mean that the Engineering firm is in hot water on this? Their site plan told them where to build it. Sounds like they assumed the responsibility of preparing a site plan without a survey.
Somethings fishy
Good question! From the linked stories above, it sounds like the engineer prepared a "survey-like" drawing, which all the reviewers mistook for an actual survey, so perhaps surveying without a license?
But, without seeing the drawings, it's hard to say if the engineer did anything wrong. It could be that they showed the proper configuration of the lot and house, but whoever tried to lay out the foundation completely blew it. There is definitely a lot of finger pointing going on here, that's for sure.
Back when I used to do construction, the joke was that no matter who screwed up, the surveyor was always the one to be blamed first. Well, here you don't even have a surveyor involved, but the quotes being tossed around are that it was all an "innocent surveying mistake". Yeah.... not really.
Taxlots overlaid on aerial photo
> excpet a small smidgeon of drive on the park land ...
Retired- that's a real rough overlay, so the property lines could be quite a bit farther away. I just slapped the tax map onto the ground and stretched it around to match some roads and fence lines. It's just a cartoon.
Looking at the topography in Google Earth, the house sits at the bottom of a hill in scrubby brush north of the park- almost like they assumed the park took up the top of the hill and they figured they could build down below the rise. In the photo below the Google Earth oblique you can see the park hillside behind the house. They had to build that ugly home real tall to see over the park...
Somethings fishy
Could be. I wonder if the engineering firm submitted a plan with bearings and distances on it around what looked like a "survey".
Somethings fishy
Yeah, the media narrative is definitely not on our side here:
Surveying error dooms $2M Rhode Island mansion
&g http://news.yahoo.com/court-1-8m-house-built-park-must-removed-133734497.html
>
> "innocent surveying mistake"?
Some folks get a sack of lemons and blame the surveyors. Others just go into the house moving business. What a great contract to move that house it may be once all the dust from the inevitable bankruptcy and foreclosure settles.
Since the interim construction loan is presumably secured by a lien on the vacant lot, I'll bet some lender will be motivated to help pay for moving the house.
Could be a clean foreclosure
So, if virtually none of the improvements are on the lot, if you're the lender, do you go ahead and foreclose on the vacant lot and sell it to cut your losses, or do you try to get the house moved onto the lot where it is supposed to be? Just as a wild guess, I'd suppose that the land is worth about $800,000, and the construction loan is probably for about 20% less than $1,800,000. So, do you write off about $640k or do you try to cut your losses even more?
I realize it's somewhat rough
but look how they turned that driveway, pretty much in compliance with the boundary's deflection ... someone knew something.
Then one has to build a gawd-awfully ugly thing to boot ... that's reason enough to tear it down.
It also sounds like the governing agency may have allowed someone some unreasonable priviledges. The fact that something may have "looked", like a survey wouldn't detract from the need of a surveyor's signature ... maybe there'll be more lawsuits to come.
NOW ... this things been in the court for a few years and I hear NOTHING about surveyors acting for a single party to the lawsuit, or the court. Come on 2 million dollars on the line and who knows how very much to bring and defend the action ... and NO SURVEYS?
Really? Is the only survey, the same survey that caused the buyer(a nonparty to this lawsuit), to back out?
I would've imagined at least a few independent surveys on something like this, along with some important testimony by a number of surveyors ... maybe there was ... but the only surveys mentioned was the "non" survey and a survey that shouldn't be pertinent to this case(that surveyor's clients being non-participants).
My gawd! WHERE ARE THE SURVEYORS?