Help an LSIT understand

As in with a lot of surveying questions… it depends. If anything is to be certified, it needs a full boundary survey, taking into consideration if the monuments were original or re-established, if they were properly re-established, junior/senior lines if that applies to the lot that was not part of a simultaneous conveyance. Typically at our office, if we show any boundary lines on a map and put ANY bearings or distances, it’s going to be certified and show the monuments found/set. If you’re producing a map with topo and want the boundary referenced on there, I’d make some sort of disclaimer note that is similar to what the GIS assessor maps have and make sure that it’s stated they are approximate… and not put any bearing or distances on it, if they want the record, provide them with the original plat or legal along with your deliverable.

I guess some of this comes down to what you or your current LS want to be liable for in whatever situation could arise out of these maps. Fences or landscaping or anything that could be related to that line in the future.

tie into monuments shown on the map, find the best fit for distance then translate and rotate the map geometry onto our points holding our SPC bearings.

Personally, I find translate/rotate to "the best distance" to be a substandard method of boundary resolution. The monuments either hold or they do not - if they hold, draw the boundary line between them, don't try to shoehorn a distance between them.

As far as showing "record" lines on a topographic survey, if you're already halfway to a boundary survey like it appears you are....why not just recover the rest of the monuments and complete it? Around here, there's no need to file a record of survey unless you find a discrepancy or set/rehab monuments.

It's pretty common for us to resolve the boundary as part of a topo survey, but not file an ROS. Rest assured if the client wants the boundary shown relative to the improvements, there's a good chance they will use those lines for a design of some sort. You definitely don't want to hang a boundary off two points only to discover that the rest of it did not conform to the record metes & bounds description, and now the client has dropped a building too close to one or more of those lines.

I'm not going to say we never use record descriptions or GIS linework, but we use it very sparingly, and it's almost always combined with something like public LiDAR data or contours for our in-house engineers to do some feasibility studies or preliminary calcs, and they know that those lines are bogus.

I wouldn't say it's "reinvent[ing] the wheel". It's a retracement survey. I'm not reinventing the previous surveyor's solution, I'm recovering evidence to place the record description on the ground, using that previous survey as part of the record.

Using record boundary lines on a topo has its place if client expectations are managed. I do it regularly, but I must have a clear understanding of what the clients plans are, where the project workflow is going, and also a high degree of confidence in the record I'm using. Then, if the calculated boundary conforms to the occupation I feel pretty good about things. There is some risk involved. There should be an opportunity for more rigorous boundary work if the project moves beyond the early planning phase - which happens about 1/3 of the time in my experience.

I've entered $20million projects at the construction phase that have never had a full boundary resolution - until I do it as the contractor mobilizes.

I, and the property owner, should be able to rely on the work of other surveyors- up to a point. Imagine the common circumstance where a developer has an ALTA, with Table A item 1, at property acquisition. Three months later they have there funding and consultant team set up. Should they expect to pay the surveyor to do another comprehensive boundary survey?

We run into this all the time. And 90% of the time the client says something along the lines of 'what do you mean I need a boundary survey? I already had one done!' From there the client goes into Cost Saver Mode and tries to get you to do a full boundary done at breakneck speeds for pennies on the dollar because the project needs to move NOW and this was an unforeseen cost that was supposedly already accounted for.

In my opinion just... don't. Especially if you're providing CAD deliverables to clients. All it takes is 1 person to get their hands on a CAD file, see the record boundary, think it's the gold standard because it was provided by a surveyor, and proceed to design or make decisions they really shouldn't be making with such (potentially subpar) information. EDIT: you NEVER know what the end-user will do with what you deliver. Only deliver what you're willing to bet your license/job on. Your mileage may vary.

First let me say that I am in the process of retiring. Now let me say that if I was to do it all over again, I would always do (and charge for) enough field work to be comfortable as to where the boundary lines are located whether I set monuments or not. I have seen too many projects that went south because someone did not go far enough with their boundary determination.

Architects, Designers and Engineers will always push things to the limit and blame you when things go wrong.

First, I subscribe to most of the previous replies.

Second, consider finding a copy of "Boundaries and Adjacent Properties" by Skelton. It solidified much of what I needed to crystalize what it meant to survey.

Another one that may prove helpful is "The Pincushion Effect" by Lucas.

Good luck on your professional development.

JAC

@surveylife

As they say, it does depend.

But as a general rule I would say two points are insufficient.

You have no check.

Three good monuments minimum.

In your workflow, rotate and slide on two, then check against the third

Imagine the common circumstance where a developer has an ALTA, with Table A item 1, at property acquisition. Three months later they have there funding and consultant team set up. Should they expect to pay the surveyor to do another comprehensive boundary survey?

Eh, I don't have much sympathy for developers who want to cut corners and/or try to avoid costs. If they neglected to get the topographic survey done and come to me, wanting me to slap the ALTA boundary over a TIN surface and improvements, I'm going to tell them they or their consulting engineers are perfectly capable of xref'ing it in themselves. It literally takes 5-10 seconds in CAD, so the only possible reason they could have for wanting me to add the linework to my topo is to get me to take on the liability.

They can go back to the ALTA surveyor if they need topo and boundary sync'd up and don't want to pay for me to verify the boundary. It ain't my fault they didn't think this through from the beginning, and I'm not about to rubberstamp someone else's survey.

The designers won't question a survey, they don't care, they'll start designing on the bottom of the ocean if you give them an existing conditions map.

And if I'm the construction surveyor, I'm going to have to get oriented to their design one way or the other. Either I'm verifying supplied control points and utilizing the supplied CAD linework (with documented agreement that I am staking to the linework and not performing boundary analysis), or I'm verifying boundary monuments all over again and setting my own control network while aligning to their vertical datum with a TBM or MH rim or something.

A lot of this is just clients not wanting to pay for what they should have to pay for.

A full topo survey with “record boundary lines” included is a very ambiguous phrase. Sounds like a possible shortcut to avoid paying for a boundary survey. As others have stated, everyone who receives that drawing will assume the boundary lines are correct, legally binding, etc.

And the LS and their company will be liable for any possible damages caused by those boundary lines being wrong. As a professional LS, it is up to you to perform a professional service which means a boundary survey which complies with state code requirements. The judge will not let you off with anything less.

I will typically use a dashed line type clearly labeled as 'unsurveyed boundary line of record' for any depiction of a boundary line that I haven't retraced, and add a note that it is for orientation purposes only. If the boundary in question is critical to a project, I'm going to insist that we tie enough monumentation in the area that they can be comfortable any setback or other requirements are going to met. I would think that the LS in charge is going to be communicating with the client and cognizant of the potential consequences of providing topo for some development that doesn't have hard ties to at a minimum, the controlling monumentation that would directly impact their project. The two usually go hand in hand.

I've gotten to the point I won't show the lines if I didn't survey them. I also refuse to retrace a record of survey without doing the deed research. As has been said, those 'record' lines end up as the basis for design. I won't be the one to cave to a cheap developer or harm an unsophisticated landowner...

If I'm doing the boundary setting missing monuments is part of it.

The only exception to that is a new boundary and there is a hold on monuments till dirt work is completed.

Why not finish, crew is on-site, physically setting the monuments shouldn't be a big cost once the boundary is figured out.

I see less malice and more ignorance with the request from developers to use expensive data previously obtained. I'm a bit of a daredevil and will pull in the record boundary and dash it with the label, “Not Surveyed”, which is acceptable in NC. Prior to this, I’ll bring attention to it in my contract with some mention of typical tasks, such as building setbacks, that I cannot generate without investigating the boundary myself. NC makes it easy for me because I can just blame administrative code (those darned bureaucrats).

Consider how odd it must be for someone with only a superficial understanding of surveying (ie everyone but surveyors) to be told that there’s no way their new surveyor will use their old surveyor’s data, even if it’s only two weeks old. These scenarios are a good opportunity to take a second and explain that when it come to boundary determination, the weight assigned to boundary evidence is paramount and not often in 100% agreement with peers. If we don’t explain this to clients, I’m guessing most would be left thinking poorly of our profession. For folks who like making money, it's not a bad segue into a conversation about the cost benefits of hiring a single surveying firm to perform all tasks in a given project.

Suppose that you are called on to restore several lost monuments of this plat. What are you going to do other than best fit the plat dimensions to what you can find? Keep in mind that the county surveyor sent a crew out to confirm the location of all set monuments before allowing the plat to record.