Putting the cart before the horse. First, you need to decide where the boundary is. We are not mediators, we are professional boundary specialists. Then, a good surveyor will work with the affected parties to solve any problems revealed by the survey.
If the monument is the corner then it is the mythical true corner. Otherwise it is just some random piece of scrap metal, I would still tie it on the map just so the next Surveyor knows which one is the corner and which one is a piece of random scrap metal.
The entire flow of case law runs from theoretical Deed location to established location whether that be by original monuments, acquiesced monuments, agreed monuments or some reset monument. The courts recognize the value of finality of location.
I came across what I call the Santa Barbara cases. These are three cases in 19th century Santa Barbara. The first two bless the original stakes or some acceptable evidence of their former location, no surprise there. In the third case we find out there were two circa 1870 resurveys, Norway's Survey did a new more accurate survey and the Barker (or Booker) resurveys did the best it could to retrace the original survey. The plaintiff had fenced to the Norway stakes for over twenty years, the trial court accepted that and the appellate court said they couldn't overturn the trial court on the facts. They really don't like to upset the apple cart.
An original monument is never scrap metal. It is true, it may no longer be the "true coner", but it was the original corner, and should be ascertained, before deciding if the corner has moved by unwritten means. You can't hope to defend a boundary without understanding and explaining what it is.
Yep, I was taught “the king gets his first” except in few instances ( improvements built to monuments that don’t match full record width....). Also in calif subdivisions, we did not set front pl mons. We set sidelines produced to curb with no distance r/w. Centerline mons and record width controls r/w. Different strokes for different folks in different parts of the US. Jp
If the object is proven to be the original monument then it is not scrap metal, you got that part right.
The law in California is that the street is located as it was opened and used (sometimes fenced). The width in the street document carries no more weight than it does in any other Deed unless there are sufficient circumstances to give it control.
I don't quite follow you, but as I said, if there are no ROW monuments the record width may control, but even in California the original monuments control if they exist, so I don't see any difference there.?ÿ
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Well Steve, I may be mistaken about the statue. I appears that this is simply a practice from Santa Barbara down to Los Angeles. They do lot's of weird stuff beside this....... 😉 If you do a Parcel Map or Final Map in the County of Santa Barbara, the County Surveyor won't let you record that map until you remove the angle points created by monuments that don't fit the exact width. I agree that the long standing practice since Roman times, and English Common Law is to hold the monuments, but because of the way things are done here is CA you may find yourself "calling-off" monuments because they don't fit perfectly with the center line monuments. I've also seen this practice hundreds of times with Caltrans maps...............it done all the time. CA has a "standard of practice" law, and part of that is complying with local practices. That's something Curtis Brown discuses also. I know when I surveyed in Los Angeles that any monuments along the right of way were basically ignored. It may not be right, or what they should be doing, but the CITY maintained excellent center-line monumentation. I've retrace 1893 subdivisions in Los Angeles and the center-line monuments matched the tract map EXACTLY!
UP in Santa Barbara, it's a much different situation, and sometimes you have center-line control (or block control) and sometimes it's a hodgepodge of right of way monuments. Rarely, if ever, do the streets have the same width as on the map.
I did have a conversation with one past County Surveyor here who simply told me not to cross the street or show the other side, thus I'd be able to hold the monuments on my side.................seems silly but we do what we have to, to move forward sometimes. I think this is another reason why some old-timers simply put measured and record the same if it's within a tenth or so, reasoning "why muddle the record?" I'm more concerned about the practice in CO, since I'm studying for that.
I have submitted maps where i "created" an angle point in the right-of-way but I had to argue it. Only because an older Parcel Map had it in there, was I able to do that. I find different Counties handle this stuff differently. In one County, I asked what the tolerance whould be for a 20 acres parcel for the requirement of a Record of Survey to be triggered for my measurements. I was told that if I turn in a Corner Record for a 20 acre parcel that showed more than a tenth of a foot different than the record, I would have to do a Record of Survey. As you can imagine, this puts surveyors in my area in a real pickle when it comes to practicing practical land surveying! The record of Surveys in this COunty cost more than $600 and you can add that "low income housing" $75 fee to that now. Things are a little more complicated in real life than what we read in the codes.
Just trying to figure out how things are done in another state so I don't really want this to turn into a CA thing. In CO you have to set a monument when you establish a corner, so I'm trying to figure out how to deal with that. It sounds like the consensus is to simply accept the monument. However, I've seen a lot of pictures from CO surveyor friends of mine of pincushion corners................ Not good!
In CA, we can do a "paper pincushion" but that doesn't seem like an option in CO. They don't like that in ID either. In NV they have written into the Survey Standards that you HAVE TO ACCEPT the monument if it'sis a certain distance from the record corner. There is a chart, and it all depends on if you're in High Urban, Low Urban, High Rural or Low Rural (I might be mis-quoting the official terms).
The point is, that I want to comply with the way things are done, in the jurisdiction I'm wording in, not apply the procedures I've used locally.
If you believe a monuments has been moved, or disturbed, I wonder what the process is (in Colorado)?
