So a parcel is up for sale, the old deed declares that there are 17 acres. A Section breakdown on ease-west lines, north line is a section line and south line is a parcel division.
The deed describes 17Ac, while the county GIS lists it at 13Ac. High dollar land so the 4Ac. makes a difference. No idea where the 13Ac. comes from but the retracement agrees with the deed. Come to find out at closing that the only reason the survey was done was to figure out which one was correct.
Another job out the door because of the GIS.;-)
GIS = Get It Surveyed.
can your client back charge the county/state? yeah i know- nice thought, but....
Many times the county subtracts out any permanent easements that restrict utilization. They are also prone to ignore areas under water.
here's where i've seen it cause problems on more than one occasion locally: architects using the appraisal district GIS numbers for impervious cover calcs. guy with a concave curving lot line just had us as-built his post-pool construction lot, came up well over the allowable impervious cover. however he solves it, it's gonna cost him big. of course he doesn't want to pay for the survey because we screwed up his land area.
yet another example of people hiring you for your expertise, but then not wanting your expert answer.
similar, but different: topo and design survey on an environmentally sensitive tract that somebody wants to put (of course) about 200 apartments on. half a dozen "caves"- which basically amount to aquifer recharge holes. crew goes out and details each of them, including crawling down in as far as possible to get a depth. city geologist calls me a couple weeks later telling me our data is bad, that she went out and found our elevations to be 10 feet too low. her garmin handheld, held waist-high over each cave, was showing a Z anywhere from 8 to 10 feet higher than ours. client ends up having to pay (because the city isn't going to) for a crew to go back out there two more times, meet with the geologist, show her our equipment and methodology for collecting data, and explain the inherent problem with her collected Z being 4 feet higher than her admitted BFE for the tract she's standing on.
> her garmin handheld, held waist-high over each cave, was showing a Z anywhere from 8 to 10 feet higher than ours
Perhaps she just had very long legs and forgot to correct 😉
I've noooo idea what was going on here, simple deed, north portion of a regular size 40 ac 1/41/4 surrounded by fed land.
There is even a recent resurvey (1960's) for two of the section lines, the deeds are straightforward, who knows. No easements, no roads, no right-of-ways, just 4 missing acres. LOL
Only they really aren't missing they showed up for me. Guess they were hiding in the trees.:-P
Of course, if I tried to figure out what was going on with all the GIS info I get I'd only be doing that nothing else!!!
I'm sure the stories are endless and here's one:
A Natural Resource Specialist (no I don't know what that is) with the government tells a land owner where his land is. Then proceeds to ask me how I surveyed it because he told the guy his fence was east of the common line and my survey shows it west, so being nice I copy him my corner records. He can't find my corners even though a brand new fence was built to them. seems he was a bit "OFF" looking for them because he was looking at the coordinates supplied to him by the GIS Department (yeah I don't know who the heck they are either) at the state. He got a map with blue lines showing government boundaries and it looks like this (the map he sent me)
And yes he was looking where the blue lines are, and no they aren't correct in any way-the quad is "OK".
Oh my Gosh! For the last 15 years I have thought it was Girls in Skirts. Dang it.
> So a parcel is up for sale, the old deed declares that there are 17 acres. A Section breakdown on ease-west lines, north line is a section line and south line is a parcel division.
>
> The deed describes 17Ac, while the county GIS lists it at 13Ac. High dollar land so the 4Ac. makes a difference. No idea where the 13Ac. comes from but the retracement agrees with the deed. Come to find out at closing that the only reason the survey was done was to figure out which one was correct.
>
> Another job out the door because of the GIS.;-)
This (and many other stories) are why when the idea of forming our own GIS started floating around, I jumped out in front and made sure that it happened under the direction of the Survey division. It's meant a lot of extra work, but when they get around to hiring GIS analysts I don't want them set up in their own area without any supervision.
Would have been nice, they put it out to bid and we gave them a rock bottom price to do it and figured if we did the set up it would have been as "good as possible" at the time because we had early on set-up a coordinate system and had the county "pretty much" controlled. Of course there were a bunch of areas unsurveyed by us, but at least we had parcels in all the areas with NAD27 values. But they went with someone else who bid to do the entire county in six weeks. Yicks!!
This was in the mid 80's and twenty years later they were still imputing info and it's been a mess. Get what you pay for, if they would have had us involved it would have saved them a fortune.