A Harris, post: 346965, member: 81 wrote: I have surveyed two HOA controlled lake subdivisions.
One has completely repealed their restrictions and have kept the basic terms that control the upkeep and maintenance of utilities and lake areas. The nearest town is 10mi away and the sounds of nature are all you can hear. Wildlife is everywhere and hardly notices you passing.
Other is in a similar rural setting and the degree of madness is in tune with whoever is in command of the chair. The current prez is a tyrant. Bountiful amounts of wildlife jump to safety and stands in the shadows shuddering in fear.
I will never understand why some people can not get over the sound of their own voice or why they want to bring the overwhelming effect of the bureaucratic oversight to the divinity of their retirement home and doesn't shut up long enough to know the sound of silence....
These folks are usually scared of the dark too. I rarely turn on my outside lights because the condos across the street provide sufficient light. Thank you overpriced condos with an overpriced HOA fee.
I did a survey once for a gentleman that had a long (800' or so) driveway that wiggled up a hill to his detached garage.
Although the estates were beautiful with mature hardwoods and manicured fescue, the property line between this property and the next had never been fenced and was kind of "up in the air". His neighbor was wanting to plant some sort of border and I found pin-flag remains of where someone was attempting a line of sorts, but it was askew at its best.
The plot thickened when I found out the "neighbor" was the long term and omnipotent Lord High Mocus of the HOA. I didn't discover this until he came charging at me waving his hands telling me I had leave or the police would intervene. His main complaint was 'trespassing'. A very, very short conversation revealed what he called trespassing was ANYWHERE in the subdivision. Being a recorded plat with public dedicated streets I called his pair of nines and told him as long as I was on my client's property or within the public R/W he could piss up a rope all he wanted.
Within a half hour the local patrol car was there and the officer was kind of on my side. This old goat had a phone book size folder of the HOA requirements which required "service vehicles" to use the lake drive at the rear of the properties and I was parked on the street in front of the houses. The old guy was distraught that the policeman wouldn't enforce an HOA by-law. He kept thumping his 'bible' and telling the officer "this IS legal!" :pinch:
My client's property line actually "gored" well into what the old goat thought was his lot. I was asked by my client (who wasn't present at the time) to "stake" the line every so often with lath. I did. It looked obnoxious and it didn't last long enough for me to get back to the office; I restaked it several times with my client present. Over a three month period this old neighbor called me at least once a week to threaten law suits and questioned my surveying ability. My client was a nice guy and knew his neighbor was a jerk. I found out later the neighbor had called several other surveying firms to "contest" my findings but was apparently scared off by the prices.
The cherry on the top was about six months later when my client emailed me the hilarious new restriction the HOA had passed at their last meeting; "No surveying stakes can be placed within 50' of adjacent properties."
...some people and self-absorbed crap.....
This one, discussed in numerous post on this board, was over the top fubar: https://surveyorconnect.com/threads/house-built-on-wrong-property.265440/
One of those over priced condos called ma and said they would not spend over $300 to get 1ac surveyed out of 5ac.
hahaha good luck with that sir
One summer, while I was still in college, I got a job working for Pacific Gas and Electric on one of their field crews. I learned a lot about actual, practical survey techniques. Anyway, the party chiefs had lots of little pranks and jokes they liked to say to the unsuspecting person that might ask what was going on. For example:
"Are you going to widen the road?" (asked by a homeowner in a fully developed subdivision). To which the party chief said, "Oh yeah, the sidewalk is going to be moved back to about where your front door step is. You should probably contact the city about that."
"What are you surveying for?" (asked by a farm owner out on a rural country road). Answer "Oh, they're going to be building a hazardous waste materials storage facility right here. Is that your land next to it?"
"Is that a camera?" or "Are you taking pictures/video?" (asked by pretty much everyone). "Yeah, if you want to be in a picture, go stand by that person with the rod and the orange vest over there"...
But apart from those silly quips that were mostly to entertain us (and annoy the public), the best story for me was probably that summer when we were staking out the east line of an old railroad parcel that went over a hill (the railroad used to go through a tunnel, now sealed up). We had a brush crew cutting along the line we were laying out up and over the hill. Around 11 AM, a fancy car rolls up and out hops a guy asking to talk to whoever was in charge. I pointed him at the party chief. This guy then proceeds to insist that we stop what we're doing because we aren't supposed to be there doing what we were doing.
The party chief said that he was pretty sure that we knew what we were doing and that we were supposed to be there and maybe this guy had made a mistake. But this guy (turns out he's the "president of the local HOA") said that he should have been notified, and since he wasn't, we had to stop immediately. The party chief (without stopping the brush crew and their chainsaws) said that we were on the railroad property, with their permission, surveying the boundary line, and marking it for inspection.
The guy looked at our equipment and trucks and then said, "Well, they can't be cutting that brush like that. It has to be clipped down at the base and then the root bundle dug out. That brush is hard to keep under control and so it has to be removed properly!"
So apparently, his only way to object to us being there was stating that we were causing a nuisance for the adjoining homeowners.
Our party chief explained, again, that we were only on the railroad property and not on any land owned by the residents or the HOA and that our procedures were standard for what we were doing.
Then, this guy said to the party chief, "Well, I'm a lawyer and if you're going to survey, you'd better survey right. What you're doing is completely wrong!"
Much to his credit, the party chief didn't so much as bat an eye. He told the guy that since it was close to lunchtime anyway, he'd have the crews break, he would call the main office of our company and have the project manager come out to the site and meet with him so that things could get "straightened out".
We ate lunch, the project manager drove up (about a 30 minute drive) from the main office, and they had a little meeting. After lunch, we resumed our operations and kept on cutting right up the hill. On Thursday mid-morning, we closed into a boundary corner just over the crest of the hill with less than a tenth of error. We wrapped it up just before lunch, and we never saw that HOA guy after that first day.
I will say that if I had been the party chief and been told to "survey right" by a lawyer, I likely would have had a much more vocal response.
Not mine, but one I found today.
Teacher hit with å£50,000 legal bill and could now lose her home after court battle with neighbours over a fence that strayed just 15 INCHES into their land
