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Time for Board to enforce California Law 8762?
aliquot replied 2 years, 2 months ago 23 Members · 86 Replies
- Posted by: @jim-frame
I write my contracts so that payment is due when the ROS is submitted to the county for checking. If the country drags its feet, it’s not a big concern for me.
How does that work? Your client does not get any benefit until the ROS is actually filed/recorded and added costs for for supplemental plancheck fees would be on your dime. I suspect you and I both work in venues where ROS plancheck reviews take only a coupla weeks and you can force file immediately if you disagree. But, the poor sots who work in venues where an ROS plancheck may take 10-18 months, that serves neither the client or surveyor ??? especially concerning when payment is due.
@k-huerth You could file against the County Surveyor or any person at the County which you believe may be the decision maker on this topic. (i.e., whomever the County Surveyor reports to, County Administrator, etc.) and who might had made the recommendation to the Board of Supervisors. Either way, the Board will seek response/resolution from the person(s) responsible for setting/recommending the fee structure.
As a reviewer, I do my best to help things move forward in short order. Today’s example: The measurement listed on the plat for a specific line says 1122.33 feet. The description says that distance is 1122.42 feet. I call the personal cell number of the signing surveyor and bring this to his attention. He pulls up his data and says the drawing number is correct and the description number is wrong. He authorizes me to change his number on the plat being filed and I do so. No fuss, no muss. BUT, he kicks things into high gear and notifies the client/lender/title company/appraiser to hold up a second because he is sending them a revised survey with a corrected description. Embarrassing as heck, but essential. Bad things happen to all of us. Fix things immediately and don’t hide the errors.
Heard of a Register of Deeds kicking back a plat that I had already reviewed and approved, today. She wanted two words inserted in the preamble to the description. The signing surveyor agreed to the request. So, I will see it again and approve it again.
- Posted by: @mike-marks
How does that work? Your client does not get any benefit until the ROS is actually filed/recorded and added costs for for supplemental plancheck fees would be on your dime.
I can’t recall the last time a client actually wanted a Record of Survey filed — they either want monuments in the ground that they can use for building whatever they have in mind, or they want an ALTA and/or topo that shows a boundary for financing and/or design purposes. In almost all cases, the ROS is something that I require in order to comply with the statutes.
Since almost all of my work is done on a fixed-fee basis, I try to build in enough to cover reviewing/revision costs, and bill the entire lump-sum amount upon submitting the ROS for checking. Sometimes I’m over budget, sometimes I’m under budget, but it averages out.
Perhaps the California Code could be change to only required a ROS be filed with the County Surveyor when a permanent boundary mon is set. This is the way Oregon does it. Also, most of the County Surveyors here (that I am aware of) charge a fixed fee for checking with the Counties in the Metro Portland region charging the most.
It is a very rare survey for me where no boundary markers are set. It has happened, but not much better than counting hen’s teeth.
Checking in from the San Bernardino County Surveyor’s Office. Someone brought this thread to my attention, and I just had a couple of comments and updates in reply. As Ric mentioned, staffing has been our primary issue. We have eight licensed LS positions in our office (across map-check, field crew, and R/W sections), four of which are currently vacant. Two of those positions have been vacant for over two years at this point, under a continuous hiring process. As a public agency, we do not have much control over contracted salary rates and/or benefits – we have to work with what we have.
In addition to staffing issues, we have also seen a dramatic increase in map submittals over the past two calendar years. 2021 saw the highest number of Records of Survey submitted to our office, at 374, since 2006 (which had 435 submittals.) This contrasts with 2017 through 2019, which had just over 200 submittals each year. On a statewide level, hiring issues and this increase in workload are definitely interrelated problems for our profession.
For our office, Records of Survey are currently on a 12-13 month backlog, and corner records are on a longer backlog at 18-20 months. We are doing what we can to at least keep up with incoming maps. We have staff working overtime hours to help with the backlog (with checking fees still being charged at standard rates).
We are also working on changing our fee for Record of Survey map-check back to a fixed fee, to be established at the same amount as our initial deposit for actual cost fees per our current fee schedule. This will be subject to approval by our Board of Supervisors, but has been well supported by members of the local professional community. If approved, this change in fees would take effect in July of 2022. One of the primary reasons for us to switch back to a fixed fee is to simplify our accounting procedures, in order to facilitate contracting out map check services if needed. We anticipate putting out an RFP for map-check services in the late spring or early summer if our hiring prospects do not improve in the near future for our map-check staffing.
Last point is that we ask surveyors to contact our office if they have some form of urgent need to expedite review of a map (legal issues, escrow, urgent neighbor disputes, etc) and we will work with them to do so as best we can. Barring these types of circumstances though, we ask them to leave their map in the que if at all possible, so that we are able to help those with pressing situations while still working on clearing the existing backlog.
If anyone needs to get in touch with our office, our contact phone numbers and email addresses are available on our website (linked in my sig) – please do not hesitate to contact us.
TomA personal note, the tiny town of Stark, Kansas has two additions named for the local Herrin family. Some of their descendants still live in the area.
Coincidentally, I just yesterday I received in the mail a recruiting announcement from your office. Too far to commute, but it did at least cause me to do a google search.
This thread should be obligatory reading for anyone working in a non-recording state who thinks mandatory recording is the way to go. Mandatory recording will never decrease the cost of purchasing a survey and will always increase the potential for administrative creep. Even in the low growth states where mandatory recording appears to be working, bureaucrats will eventually realize they hold the cards.
Don’t mandate the recording of anything other than subdivisions, keep recording fees dirt cheap but encourage all your client’s to record their surveys.
If I were in CA I would encourage my state organizations to repeal the law.
Recording is not the problem. The problem occurs when the law allows the bureaucrats to do more than check legibility of the drawing.
.- Posted by: @murphy
This thread should be obligatory reading for anyone working in a non-recording state who thinks mandatory recording is the way to go. Mandatory recording will never decrease the cost of purchasing a survey and will always increase the potential for administrative creep. Even in the low growth states where mandatory recording appears to be working, bureaucrats will eventually realize they hold the cards.
Don’t mandate the recording of anything other than subdivisions, keep recording fees dirt cheap but encourage all your client’s to record their surveys.
If I were in CA I would encourage my state organizations to repeal the law.
It actually works quite well in most parts of California. In our county, the turnaround time is under 1 week and the review fee is $291. All of our maps are online via a GIS and a map index.
What is wonderful is having a way to have a repository of surveys without them being officially recorded. We add new surveys on a regular basis to our files in the two counties where I am the reviewer of ALL surveys that are to be recorded and the two others where I share that job with another surveyor. That way the repository is not subject to all the other BS that goes with officially recording it. The surveyors who need access to that information for later work have a much greater total resource to search. This is especially helpful for surveys of city lots and blocks that have no real need to be officially recorded.
Not this again. Arguing against the concept of recording because a few of the many jurisdictions that require it have done it badly is faulty logic. Most mandatory recording jurisdictions done even have such a thing as a “check fee” and recording costs something like $20. That is a very small price to pay versus the value it brings the public, our clients, and the proffesion.
@holy-cow we have filed (not recorded) Surveys at the County Recorders since the 19th century.
The trouble with private records is they can disappear when their steward leaves the scene. Even pseudo public records such as the Public Works Department files can face destruction when some records retention milestone is arrived at. We are missing most of the survey records produced prior to about 1950; they were in other offices and got dumpstered when the Department reorganized.
The County Recorder never throws anything away.
So it may seem annoying to have to comply with rules but it isn??t that much of a burden in light of the fact the record may be around for 100+ years.
My point is that records are being placed in this other repository willingly by surveyors so that surveys that are not required to be recorded officially and maintained until Hell freezes over still have a place to be stored which aids everyone.
Our other repository is indexed in great fashion such that it is incredibly easy to search quickly and efficiently. The official recording is indexed in only one way and that is tying it to the property involved only. That is highly restrictive. It gets worse in some counties compared to others. Literally, slinging 40 pound books for hours on end is no fun. Meanwhile in OUR files, our indexing is vastly superior.
Say you are working in the NW4 of Section 9. It is fairly routine to search Sections 3,4,5,8,9,10,15,16 and 17 for surveys that may be of help on at least one of the government corners needed to solve the breakdown of Section 9. We have about 40 years of section corner reports and some of those are wrong. There are a huge number of corners that have no filed/recorded survey since the GLO work. The historic center for filing surveys was in OUR files, not the Recorder’s Office or the Clerk’s Office. Virtually all boundary survey work prior to about 1950 passed directly through the County Engineer/Surveyor Office. Those will not be found in the OFFICIAL office where certain surveys are to be recorded. The Recorders office, which in our case is the Register of Deeds Office, is the search of last resort as so few have been recorded compared to the tons of information available in the next room down the hall.
- Posted by: @holy-cow
What is wonderful is having a way to have a repository of surveys without them being officially recorded. We add new surveys on a regular basis to our files in the two counties where I am the reviewer of ALL surveys that are to be recorded and the two others where I share that job with another surveyor. That way the repository is not subject to all the other BS that goes with officially recording it. The surveyors who need access to that information for later work have a much greater total resource to search. This is especially helpful for surveys of city lots and blocks that have no real need to be officially recorded.
What is “all the other BS that goes with officially recording it”? I walk it across the street to the Recorder’s Office and tell them to record the maps. Easy peasy.
- Posted by: @holy-cow
My point is that records are being placed in this other repository willingly by surveyors so that surveys that are not required to be recorded officially and maintained until Hell freezes over still have a place to be stored which aids everyone.
Our other repository is indexed in great fashion such that it is incredibly easy to search quickly and efficiently. The official recording is indexed in only one way and that is tying it to the property involved only. That is highly restrictive. It gets worse in some counties compared to others. Literally, slinging 40 pound books for hours on end is no fun. Meanwhile in OUR files, our indexing is vastly superior.
Say you are working in the NW4 of Section 9. It is fairly routine to search Sections 3,4,5,8,9,10,15,16 and 17 for surveys that may be of help on at least one of the government corners needed to solve the breakdown of Section 9. We have about 40 years of section corner reports and some of those are wrong. There are a huge number of corners that have no filed/recorded survey since the GLO work. The historic center for filing surveys was in OUR files, not the Recorder’s Office or the Clerk’s Office. Virtually all boundary survey work prior to about 1950 passed directly through the County Engineer/Surveyor Office. Those will not be found in the OFFICIAL office where certain surveys are to be recorded. The Recorders office, which in our case is the Register of Deeds Office, is the search of last resort as so few have been recorded compared to the tons of information available in the next room down the hall.
Our recorded maps are in an awesome GIS. Click on the property and get all of our recorded maps back to the 1850’s.
Part of the BS is the only large plats they will accept are for full-blown major subdivisions. Everything else is shrunk to fit a legal sheet and is completely unreadable. One Register of Deeds was literally cutting the original into legal size segments, putting page numbers on them and recording them for an exorbitant fee. Another has several flat storage units with maybe 150 or more simply tossed on top of each other in a single drawer. Digging through them to find the ones you need is a killer, especially as the bottom drawer is at floor level. You have to handle them over and over, doing damage for the long term. The ROD is an elected office so no one has the authority to tell them how to do or not do their job. As long as it is considered fit for recording and they put it somewhere inside the vault, all is good with the world. Except for those of us who need it.
The standard indexing is that a survey is listed along with the deeds, mortgages, easements, death certificates, oil an gas type documents and on and on. But, say you are working in a block with 32 lots and each lot has it’s own pages of indexing that goes back through three big books of indexes. So to find that a survey was recorded for any of the 32 lots, you will need to skim the first column in their index books looking for the word SURVEY (handwritten BTW in cursive). To check all lots and all indexes may require thumbing through a few hundred pages while scanning that first column. Then, if you find you need help from surveys in adjoining blocks, well, Lord help you. Plus, recording the surveys only started about 70 years ago. Most of the time you find the need to go back much farther. That’s where our files are vital. In addition to the to the surveys we also have about 15 other sources of information that may be of aid to your survey project. We have State highway plan sets going back to the late 1920’s when the State system came into being. We have bridge plans out the wazoo. We have railroad strip maps for all the existing and former railroad lines passing through the county, including the station maps. We have two sets of card files that are section corner records assembled by the County Engineer/Survey over the decades long before any Statewide statute demanding such things. We have the Field Notes from the 1865 government surveys We have the road records for county roads.
105 counties and it seems no two handle things exactly the same. I was helping another surveyor from 200 miles away a couple of weeks ago who was searching for the creation of a road in 1872. He needed Commissioners Journal “C”. I finally found it for him as it had been relocated from where it had been as far back as I can remember. Getting to it involves a key that is kept by the County Clerk who escorts you to where you think it is going to be and then stands by impatiently wanting to get back to her office but can’t until you are done. Had another surveyor call me early this week in need of help in a nearby county. He needed highway right of way information to a State Highway adjoining the tract he “had” to survey the following day. The official computer generated request to the DOT had not been received after four weeks since it went in. He told me they had found a survey I had performed directly across the highway about 15 years ago and had shown the ins and outs of the right of way on that side. Could I help him out. About 30 minutes later I had recovered my notes that are in storage over two miles from my office. Those included my handwritten notes from looking at the highway plans that are on file in that county. Then told him where he needed to look to get his answers. I know he did a slap to the forehead. In recent years he had developed the habit of making the request of the DOT and not looking in the files two feet from where he had been doing research.
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