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Non-Surveyors and Boundaries by Acquiescence
ridge replied 8 years, 4 months ago 11 Members · 21 Replies
Duane Frymire, post: 350174, member: 110 wrote: The pertinent question that is being raised across the country is not whether it is or isn’t under current statute and case law, but rather whether it should be. I would say no it shouldn’t ripen into acquiescence. And if trees were cut over the line it should be intentional trespass and damages assessed accordingly.
On the one hand you have cheap, haphazard lines that can easily be run by landowners themselves with modern technology. Couple that with strong acquiescence laws. Under this theory there is no need for licensed surveyors, which some would argue is a good thing. I think the time frame needs to be shortened for this to work well; maybe one year is appropriate. This would help to reduce/eliminate disputes on the ground. But it would make records evaluation even more difficult than currently, unless a hearing is required to register the line once established; which to be affective would require an expert survey (measurement not legal) of the marks so that a reliable new written record could describe the line sufficiently.
On the other hand you have the current system wherein old lines are difficult to retrace and costly, and marking a line that affects someone other than yourself is against the law. A licensed surveyor is required. This system works pretty good if surveyors are educated in evidence and procedure of boundary location, rather than the traditional education of only measurement science and technique. And if there are requirements that people actually retain a surveyor opinion before improving the property. Acquiescence law is still needed occasionally for those cases where lines were run many years before modern technology and evidence is gone or misinterpreted. But the time frame can be much longer. A case for this system needs evidence that it matters to have the surveyors opinion. That the majority of the time surveyors agree on a retracement survey, and on the contrary the majority of the time landowners on their own disagree and fall into dispute without the surveyor. The public and other professions are focusing on the instances where surveyors are in disagreement, but I wonder what percentage of the time that actually happens. Most of the disputes I see, read, or am involved in are due to a lack of surveying and homemade surveying at some time in the past. This brings about difficult evidentiary issues that educated professionals can disagree on. At the same time it must be acknowledged that there is no basic, structured legal education regarding land boundary retracement required to earn a license to provide that service to the public. Unfortunately, surveyors are against this, engineers are against it, attorneys are against it, college programs are against it, NCEES is against it. And the result are too many surveyor created disputes about basic issues that they should be in agreement on. Which results in a movement toward system one above. And the endgame is that engineers will once again be the ones doing property surveying as well as all other surveying (which already falls under their license).
Duane,
I can certainly see where you are coming from. In Utah I think we definitely need our current acquiescence law just to protect what has long been established from the modern version of the math. I also can see that going forward things probably should be tightened up. We do now require surveying to do subdivision and other things because of the land use laws that have been around a few decades now. So at the present time most new parcels created have a survey and a record of that survey in the public records. Also Utah is a filing state since the late 80’s so information is more available since then. There is however that huge gap between about 1850 and 1990 where survey information is hard to find. In rural areas its much worse. Utah only has 8 of 29 counties that have a regular county surveyors office. The rest are versions of various ways to avoid the cost of a county surveyor’s offidce. So even though the statutes say all this stuff is supposed to be done it ain’t (no money for that).
I think eventually the dam will break and something will need to be done to bring the land records and location of boundaries inline with the current at your fingers online computer data. Hey, the technology is there BUT it costs money to collect good data and maybe even more money to align the data with boundary law. The public wants the free stuff but doesn’t want to pay for the accurate data (what else is new?). I’m afraid that when the dam breaks the low cost math will be put in place over the higher cost of sorting out each boundary according to the law. They’ll just do some legislation or modify the constitution to avoid the cost, declare some emergency to avoid the current law.
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