Several weeks back I received a call from a surveyor complaining about my review practices. He was upset with a local firm's plat that I had reviewed. His complaint was that a key boundary line could be extended to a calculated center corner of a quarter section and he couldn't use the data provided to determine if this would be the same calculated corner he would have had when working on a couple surveys in the same section. I asked if he had recorded his surveys and corner reports for all to see. The answer was a negative.
What it boiled down to was that a "good" client had called him after seeing a lath and flagging and was sure it wasn't in the same spot as an earlier survey. The fellow was upset. This made the complaining surveyor unhappy because he really didn't want to physically go to the site to see if things matched or not. He wanted coordinates for that corner. This was all my fault because "Reviewer A", by golly, always held him to a higher standard. I confirmed what he had told me earlier about not recording his surveys and corner reports. Things tended to simmer down a bit.
He was told to contact the current surveyor and supply him with all of that data so that HE could make a comparison.
BTW, probably every inch of that entire section, except that occupied by county roads, had been subject to strip mining for coal over the past 100+ years. Any interior survey monuments would have been set sometime after the mining ended. The center of the section is definitely not monumented. An entire mathamagical section.
"This made the complaining surveyor unhappy because he really didn’t want to physically go to the site to see if things matched or not. He wanted coordinates for that corner."
I don't practice in a recording state so the only thing I know about an ROS and its review is what I read here. The quote above is confusing to me, how is it possible for somebody to even attempt to file a survey without going into the field to collect existing evidence to base an opinion on? Am I missing something, or is this just a piece of paper prepared by info collected by others?
He had worked previously in the same section. The current surveyor's project only had two adjoiners. Apparently one of those wanted the surveyor from years earlier to dispute the current work. He did not want to go to the field to prove or disprove anything. He wanted every piece of data handed to him on a silver platter while he had withheld all of his data such that the current surveyor could not find it.
Sounds to me like something that is a viable complaint to the Board.