I had to let this one sink in a bit and weigh all the sides of this issue.
I think a property owner can rent a back hoe and try and find his own sewer line to facilitate a repair and that he can pull a tape and try and locate his own corners. But that is on him for any damages to others or to himself.
It's not right that the city, using non-licensed people, attempt this service. That places, what I would think, a high liability on them. But a city has a lot of protection and a tort claim can be a PITA to win at times. It's still not good practice.
We set corners and property owners should be able to rely on them from that point forward but that would mean they understand the role of the corners and protect them and then also 'walk the bounds' from time to time to insure they are protected and rehabilitated when necessary. That rarely happens as we all know to well. Land changes hands and often no survey is done for decades and the corners have never been seen by the current owner.
Our city has a survey crew and often we would find glaring errors in what some of our code inspectors were citing people for. In one worse case they had ticketed a man three times for tall grass and when we investigated, the property they were ticketing was actually owned by the city itself.
We often have streets not centered on the survey line and the inspectors would rag tape from them using what they felt were the right dimensions to ticket people for violations in the rear of the property. I'd say in about 75% of the cases they were wrong.
We did many classes for our neighborhood services staff, the water department and others to try and educate them on what we did and why certain things were not always a given in the field. It helped but I imagine they still write tickets without Micheal's knowledge and at times make mistakes. And these staff were not even hunting for corners but just using the footages on subdivision maps. I shudder to think if they carried schonstedts or metal detectors from Radio Shack.
I don't know about your area but in ours the back of the property of a subdivision is where ALL the junk is left after building a home, fence or other improvements. It's also where tons of utilities lay that have spare rebarb left from construction and even rods that looks like pins that are used for ground rods.
The city seems to feel that it is being friendly to their citizens but actually they are doing them a disservice. They may be unsettling boundary lines which would be easily retraced by a licensed surveyor.
Owners locating "THEIR" monuments. Okay. Third party unlicensed others locating them. NOT OKAY.
I have been asked many times during the past 14 years while employed by the County to locate someone's property corner for them while at a particular job site. Even though I am confident that I could make a very good determination with my 25+ years of experience, it is our policy to not do this because it takes away work from the private surveyors.
In one sense I think it probably gives someone a sense of "power" when they locate a person's property corner. When landowners call and ask for research, we don't tell them that they can't locate their own corners by using a metal detector, but we also tell them the problems associated with this and advise that in order to have full peace of mind they should open the yellow pages and hire a licensed land surveyor.
