A private individual recently contacted me about surveying their family trust lands of about 200 acres, all within the same section. He was keenly interested in getting the R/W along the section line staked for a new fence. The county has improved the road and obtained additional R/W and it's kinda jiggy-jaggy. He provided me with documentation of the new RW. We discussed fees and he felt the cost of an entire survey was prohibitive, so he decided just to get the RW staked and worry about the rest at a later date.
Well the county is just finishing up the road project and all the section monuments are gone, along with 99.9% of the references (nails in power poles and fence posts). I called a fellow surveyor in the area and he had actually done the engineering topo for the plans and prepared the RW docs. He emailed me his entire CAD file of 6 miles of topo with boundary info of 12 sections adjacent to the road.
Now I have info that could significantly reduce my price of a boundary of my client's 200 acres. What do you all here think of me starting with the boundary info I have procured from a fellow surveyor to reduce my fees?
PS - I will verify all the corners, but it sure saves time to have that info.
Ethics smethics. It's standard business. The client's bill is always (99 percent anyway) proportional to the effort I have to put forward to handle their job. Not so much hourly as it is relative to what I would be making on someone else's job. You now have on hand basically the same information you should have had on hand if you had been called prior to the section monuments being torn out. My charge to the client would be very close to what it would have been with the original monuments in place.
> A private individual recently contacted me about surveying their family trust lands of about 200 acres, all within the same section. He was keenly interested in getting the R/W along the section line staked for a new fence. The county has improved the road and obtained additional R/W and it's kinda jiggy-jaggy. He provided me with documentation of the new RW. We discussed fees and he felt the cost of an entire survey was prohibitive, so he decided just to get the RW staked and worry about the rest at a later date.
>
> Well the county is just finishing up the road project and all the section monuments are gone, along with 99.9% of the references (nails in power poles and fence posts). I called a fellow surveyor in the area and he had actually done the engineering topo for the plans and prepared the RW docs. He emailed me his entire CAD file of 6 miles of topo with boundary info of 12 sections adjacent to the road.
>
> Now I have info that could significantly reduce my price of a boundary of my client's 200 acres. What do you all here think of me starting with the boundary info I have procured from a fellow surveyor to reduce my fees?
>
> PS - I will verify all the corners, but it sure saves time to have that info.
Charge for your liability, NOT your sweat.
“Now I have info that could significantly reduce my price of a boundary of my client's 200 acres. What do you all here think of me starting with the boundary info I have procured from a fellow surveyor to reduce my fees?”
Absolutely not.
Simply because you were able to procure information appurtenant the survey is no reason to reduce your fees. You have to review the information the other surveyor provided anyway. Maybe you feel a moral obligation to this client if he is a friend or one of those pesky relatives everyone seems to have. In my eyes this is strictly a business decision with no ethical questions involved.
Govern yourself accordingly. 😉
I only see one ethical consideration. How much work do you have to do to certify you were in responsible charge? The money is about business. Charge what the product is worth...
Let's look at this another way. Say the client had decided your estimate was too high and decided not to proceed. Then you happen onto this new information that you can get at no additional cost to you. With that information in hand, your estimate would have been lower by some percentage. Would you then contact the client and tell him that, based on the availability of the new information, you can do the job for what he might think is a reasonable fee? You would make your normal profit instead of absolutely nothing.
Those of us in PLSSia face this dilemma regularly. If someone wants an estimate immediately, that number is going to be based on something close to a worst case scenario. If they will allow some time to do a bit of research, you may very well discover easily recovered modern monuments exist at the section corners you need instead of the worst case scenario that involves a backhoe and an hour or two at each corner. Usually, when you issue a worst case estimate, you make zero dollars.
What's the ethical issue? Can't you charge your client whatever you agree on charging him? If you decide to charge him less, whose business is that but yours and his? Where would ethics come in to play at all?
Another question. Why has the county torn out all of the section corners? Shouldn't they be liable to re-establish them? How is it that they (the corner monuments) survived all of these years and now are gone?
> Another question. Why has the county torn out all of the section corners?
You may have a future in stand up comedy, Tom, but don't quit your day job just yet.
>Shouldn't they be liable to re-establish them?
I am not aware of any legal obligation to do so, and if there is it is universally ignored.
The widely followed standard of practice for recovering section corners in OK is to find the Mag Nail (or PK nail, 1/2" iron pin) in the road intersection and hold it. Where did the Mag Nail come from? Who knows? Who cares? Moving on. No record, no problem. A lot of the time someone had some information or did some proportioning or whatever and just didn't get around to filing the CCR. But I strongly suspect that a lot of time somebody just puts a Mag nail in the road, drives around the block, and, low and behold! Found it!
>How is it that they (the corner monuments) survived all of these years and now are gone?
The high likelihood is that they were mag nails, maybe PK nails. Zero chance that they were original. Zero. Maybe they were brass set by ODOT around 1970, best case.
> Let's look at this another way. Say the client had decided your estimate was too high and decided not to proceed. Then you happen onto this new information that you can get at no additional cost to you. With that information in hand, your estimate would have been lower by some percentage. Would you then contact the client and tell him that, based on the availability of the new information, you can do the job for what he might think is a reasonable fee? You would make your normal profit instead of absolutely nothing.
>
> Those of us in PLSSia face this dilemma regularly. If someone wants an estimate immediately, that number is going to be based on something close to a worst case scenario. If they will allow some time to do a bit of research, you may very well discover easily recovered modern monuments exist at the section corners you need instead of the worst case scenario that involves a backhoe and an hour or two at each corner. Usually, when you issue a worst case estimate, you make zero dollars.
Surveyors that practice successful business habits exist, even in PLSSia. Allowing a client to determine your fee isn't a successful business habit.
We always use the "worst case scenario" to our advantage. The bigger picture helps our clients understand the value of our service.
I'm sure you think I'm being "ignorant", and I certainly understand why. But this kind of thing should be addressed more often. When a land surveyor has to re-establish a section corner, they should possibly set a witness corner outside the right-of-way limits that could be used in the future. I imagine the county road "department" has to follow some engineering standards to build or widen a road; why don't they also have standards for preserving the location of the section corners? Do you suppose that when they come through with a mill and repaving job, that they don't address and improve the manholes and the water valves? Shouldn't they be upgrading the section corner boxes at the same time?
I don't know if it can be done, but I think that the surveyor-community should be figuring out how to put pressure on road crews to preserve and not totally wipe out primary boundary control, don't you?
I agree that this is strictly business, not ethics. How you want to run your business is your choice.
If I was hungry enough, I would be tempted to lower the fee a little. But it doesn't sound like your customer will go for the whole survey without a substantial reduction. And if you look at it from his point of view, he will think you are willing to negotiate the fee. Soon all your customers will want to haggle.
You owe the other Surveyor a Carton of Beer, you owe the Client nothing.
Part of our job is doing a thorough search and finding all relevant and useful information. You have simply done this part of your job well, with a little help from another Surveyor.
The theme at our annual conference this year was WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS
Bill the client what the job is worth, not what it costs you to do it. Just because you are able to access information from a fellow surveyor, doesn't take anything away from it's value.
If you breakdown a difficult section for one client, then do another survey in the same section for another client, do you give the second guy a break, just because you've already done a lot of the work? Isn't that a disservice to the first guy?
Paden,
Unlike the US we LS in S OZ register all boundary plans in a central plan register.
So when asked to remark boundaries we access these plans. So on occasions it is either Whoopy or Bummer depending if a survey is recent and has recovery marks that allow easy re-tracement.
After 36 years of boundary surveying for self..."When surveying for friends/relatives the surveying is either extremely difficult or extremely easy thus always making the fee charged a quandary."
RADU
If you feel guilty, charge full price and send the other surveyor a few hundred dollars.
:good:
I was thinking the same thing when I read equivocator's post. You don't owe the client anything....if anyone, you owe the other surveyor. Send however much money you would have discounted to the other surveyor. If he doesn't like money either, try to find another way to repay him. 😀 (that carton of beer?)
:good:
Charge based on value and not cost? Radical, but good Doug.
Larry P
There is the ideal. There is what is written in statutes. There is what really happens.
In Kansas a huge percentage of the county roads and State and US highways follow section lines, quarter section lines or quarter-quarter section lines. Most of the time when you are searching for a section corner or quarter corner you are standing in the middle of a road or two. The vast majority of Government monuments were the stake and pits variety that disappeared when the first road was constructed. The rest were stones. (That's not counting all of the imaginary monuments that were never set in the first place no matter what was written in the Field Notes.) Sometimes in counties with good county engineers back in those early years, the stones were lowered so as to permit a smooth driving surface while retaining a stone that could possibly be dug up later as needed. In rare situations, the stakes survived by some means, such as being in a spot where the road surface was raised above natural grade. Probably 95 percent of what we use today are steel monuments set by some surveyor for some reason at some time in the past. Sometimes there is a paper trail, but, sometimes not.
By Statute, the County is responsible for the perpetuation of all section corner monuments. That fact is widely ignored by Counties who have not had a qualified surveyor/engineer involved in road and bridge functions for seventy years or more. Some Counties have been pushed to do this by aggressive surveyors who convince them of how important this is to all land owners, not just someone who happens to be their client at the time. The largest problem is the Counties themselves as they no longer employ someone who understands and appreciates the need for the corner monuments to either be left untouched or carefully re-established by a licensed surveyor. In Paden's case, this is being handled by a surveyor directly involved with the road reconstruction project.
Our surveying statutes dictate that we are to establish whatever references are needed for whatever corner may be in danger of being destroyed and then file a Notice of Endangerment record with the State and County. Following the construction project, a new Land Survey Reference Report is to be filed recording what new monument was set and provide references thereto. This works great when licensed surveyors are involved. The problem is when the County or some utility company pretends they do not know of this requirement and rips and tears and goes on their way.
Today I drove through a neighboring county where they are ripping up about 15 miles of old chip and seal-type pavement on a County road. I can guarantee you that no surveyor was consulted to find the monuments, file the Notice of Endangerment, reset a monument and then file a new LSRR documenting the new monument. I have talked with their Road and Bridge Director and a number of County Commissioners over the years about this type of foolishness. It's like trying to discuss philosophy with a brick wall.
> You owe the other Surveyor a Carton of Beer, you owe the Client nothing.
I think that Paden owes the other surveyor a similar favor in return, sometime in the future. What kind of alcoholic trades thousands of dollars of survey data for a carton of beer?
> I'm sure you think I'm being "ignorant"...
Certainly not, Tom.