Kent,
If you had not been provided with the 1990 plat and had no evidence that any survey had been done since the original re-plat, and you found the 1963 monuments, would you continue searching for monuments? Would you continue searching in a 10 foot radius 'just in case' a quickiedick had been there?
If you had not found them they would still be there. Would it matter?
DDSM
> If you had not been provided with the 1990 plat and had no evidence that any survey had been done since the original re-plat, and you found the 1963 monuments, would you continue searching for monuments? Would you continue searching in a 10 foot radius 'just in case' a quickiedick had been there?
Actually, there is a chance I might have. The quickie-dickie marker No.58 less than two feet away from Rod 57, the original corner, would have probably been caught in a metal detector sweep, as in fact we did. We did find Pipe 71 fairly easily since it was sticking up an inch or so and flagged up. Rod 50 was sticking up a few inches and easy to find, so I'd imagine we'd have found it also. With the quickie-dickie points 50, 58, and the other markers that formed the basis of the same, i.e. Rod 56 and Pipe 71, I think that it's probably fairly likely that we would have also found the other erroneous markers in the course of sorting out the mess.
Naturally, any surveyor who tried to project other corners of other parcels from the 1990 surveyor's erroneous markers would soon discover that the results were obviously false. But in the meantime it would be a waste of effort with the meter running.
Yet another example of the advantages of a recording requirement. If the 1990 survey occurred in Calif., the surveyor would have been required by law to file a Corner Record showing what he found and set and that would have been filed at the County Surveyor's office, although they are usually not as easy to find as a Record of Survey that is filed at the County Recorder. Since the surveyor apparently thought he had not discovered any material discrepancy with record and just plopped his pins in where the record map said they should go, he could have gone the easy CR route rather than the expensive RS route.
I am working now on a case that's going to trial so I can't be too specific but some of the pertinent property corners were obliterated by construction activities and the neighbor to my client hired an engineer who relied on a landscape contractor who tied into a couple of monuments and he says he "draped" the record lot boundaries over the parcels based on those monuments and determined that certain building corners and such were in certain locations to the property lines. That sounds a lot like what the quickie dickie person did in Kent's case.
My "real-world" example is the subdivision of a section in which the surveyor used one of his own traverse points as the southeast corner of the section, about 70 feet from the BLM monument. He had used this traverse point to proportion the south 1/4 corner and a number of internal subdivisional corners defining the lines between public and private property
The only reason I realized this is that we happened to find a 2" hub with tack near the section corner with a brush line leading directly to the corner. It took a while to realize why the proportioned 1/4 corner was about 40 feet out of position. Plotting out my traverse showed the problem immediately as we had occupied his hub.
This affected about 8 or 9 monuments in the section.
> Yet another example of the advantages of a recording requirement. If the 1990 survey occurred in Calif., the surveyor would have been required by law to file a Corner Record showing what he found and set and that would have been filed at the County Surveyor's office, although they are usually not as easy to find as a Record of Survey that is filed at the County Recorder.
So, you think it would be a good thing that the 1990 survey gets permanently preserved for all time? I suppose it's just part of the overhead of a system that uses the device of plan recording to leave a record of resurveys, but I'd think even in California you'd want the ability to add either a big black "X" to the plan or a red rubber stamp reading "UNFIT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION" or something of the sort that would have the effect of cancelling the plan and putting all subsequent parties on notice that it was judged to be grossly flawed.
>The quickie-dickie marker No.58 less than two feet away from Rod 57, the original corner, would have probably been caught in a metal detector sweep, as in fact we did.
I didn't underline this point, but I've found from experience that if you are resurveying a parcel in an area such as a residential subdivision where the quickie-dickie surveying firms are likely to have been working in abundance and you find a marker that appears to be of an age completely inconsistent with the date of the original survey, part of the field investigation should almost always involve looking for any older monuments near the newer marker. Usually, this requires referencing the marker,removing it so that a metal detector can be used effectively, and then replacing it. On the whole, I've my experience has been that you'll win money betting that there is something still there that had been overlooked.
Kent
That's what your recorded survey would be for. That is unless only certain surveyors, including you, would be able to file their work. What if all those corners the q-d guy set were gone when he got there? What if he had used the proper existing points to re-establish the missing corners. Would that have been a bad thing to have in the records? That's what he thought he was doing. The fact that you dug deeper and found the originals is great, but what's wrong with having the record reflect the history of good and bad surveys. At least it's easier that way to know what happened and why, isn't it?
How would the keeper of the records, whether it's the CS or the Recorder or whatever local depository there might be, know "here comes the dean of Texas Surveyors" or "Here comes Old Man Dickie with another land mine to confuse the future generations"?
> Kent saved the other surveyor no money, the statute of repose in Texas had expired. Also, as much as Kent denies it, the other survey granted color of title to said property.
LOL! Sorry to have missed that one. No a mistaken survey grants absolutely no color of title as the term is used in Texas. Color of title means an apparently regular chain of conveyances from the sovereignty of the soil down to the present owner.
Kent
> That's what your recorded survey would be for. That is unless only certain surveyors, including you, would be able to file their work.
Okay, so we're talking about spending hundreds of dollars just to keep from removing $3.00 worth of ferrous junk that some surveyor thought had been placed in locations as much as five feet from where the original surveyor's monument still existed? How efficient is that, really?
I can definitely see the merit in having qualified surveyors like myself being paid to record plans that show details relevant to several properties or entire neighborhoods. It benefits the public and would tend to prevent the quickie-dickie surveys from going so far astray. I'd think that a very modest surcharge on the property taxes would be enough to fund the effort. Land surveying and the maintenance of boundaries really is a public benefit on a par with road maintenance or schools.
Kent
Boundaries are the most valuable part of the infrastructure but unfortunately we've never been able to sell even ourselves on that.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a City Surveyor. I said the City should put in well monuments. He said, "But those cost $3,000!" There is some kind of cheapskate gene ingrained in most Surveyors.
The engineers would never think of burying a manhole or water valve under 6" of pavement or leaving maintenance of those things up to a sort of ad-hoc effort whenever some property owner has an extra 75 bucks to blow on a survey.
Kent
> Boundaries are the most valuable part of the infrastructure but unfortunately we've never been able to sell even ourselves on that.
Yes, the whole thing really requires surveyors who recognize the importance of the effort to push for it. As for surveyors being oddly unable to acknowledge the obvious worth of what we do, I'm reminded of a now-dead local colleague who some newspaper reporter had interviewed about something or another. She devoted probably seven-eighths of the article to quotes from Ralph describing how important surveying was and what could go wrong, etc. It all sounded reasonably good, but then in the final eighth of the piece she made the mistake of asking Ralph how much a survey would cost and he quoted "the going rate" as $300, or something similarly ridiculous.
I asked Ralph why he had spent as much energy as he had closing the sale only to quote such a low price. He admitted that he couldn't do them for that figure but that was what the quickie-dickie surveyors (my term, not his) to whom he lost business charged. Pithy Anglo-Saxon word.
Kent
Well, now you're not even being serious. As I said, how is the agency responsible for filing the records supposed to know that the dean of Texas surveyors is filing his records or Mr. Dickie? Around here, there are recorded surveys that we're tempted to just shove back in the drawer when we see who signed them. The thing is that those surveys actually might reflect what happened at some point in time.
Kent
> Well, now you're not even being serious. As I said, how is the agency responsible for filing the records supposed to know that the dean of Texas surveyors is filing his records or Mr. Dickie?
Oh, I'm perfectly serious. The quickie-dickie surveys would be fairly easy to filter out just by certain plan requirements such as:
perpetuating original evidence,
using an independently reproducible bearing basis,
providing an accompanying narrative describing the rationale for the reconstruction of the boundaries involved,
showing a minimum of X parcels under different ownerships, et cetera.
Kent
Who or what entity is going to administer that? I see what you're saying about the issue of whether a survey really affects any parcels other than the ones immediately adjacent to the survey, but I'm sure you can imagine situations where a survey of one lot is accepted by another surveyor for another survey down the street and that subsequent survey is accepted and relied upon by the landowners, blah, blah...
Not allowing the results of a survey into the records because on the face of it, it doesn't affect other properties would be a hard call for a clerk at a Recorder's office to make, wouldn't it?
Kent
> Not allowing the results of a survey into the records because on the face of it, it doesn't affect other properties would be a hard call for a clerk at a Recorder's office to make, wouldn't it?
It would be simple enough to administer via a disciplinary rule of the BOR. I think that the County Clerk should be required to accept all survey plans presented for record as long as they bear the seal and signature of a professional surveyor authenticating them as either (a) the work of that surveyor or (b) an ancient plan upon which that surveyor relied in part in preparing a plan for record.
Most of the urban Texas counties, where more than 90% of Texans reside, have abolished the office of County Surveyor and I wouldn't want for even one second the city planners or GISers to be the gatekeepers.
Kent
Kent,
Who owns the lot to the north? That #75 seems to be on that lot, not the subject tract. If you pulled it, I believe you might have been trespassing, if your client didn't own it. Of course, we don't know how the adjoining owner felt about you pulling that rod.
Kent
> Who owns the lot to the north? That #75 seems to be on that lot, not the subject tract. If you pulled it, I believe you might have been trespassing, if your client didn't own it. Of course, we don't know how the adjoining owner felt about you pulling that rod.
I don't see a No.75 on the detail I posted above. If you mean Pipe 71 that fell a foot or two North of the chain link fence, as a mentioned above, I didn't remove it since it hadn't been set by the quickie-dickie surveyor and was possibly a mark from one of the late 1930's surveys of the tracts that had been merged to form the tract subdivided in 1963. Pipe 71 really wasn't a problem.
> I didn't underline this point, but I've found from experience that if you are resurveying a parcel in an area such as a residential subdivision where the quickie-dickie surveying firms are likely to have been working in abundance and you find a marker that appears to be of an age completely inconsistent with the date of the original survey, part of the field investigation should almost always involve looking for any older monuments near the newer marker. Usually, this requires referencing the marker,removing it so that a metal detector can be used effectively, and then replacing it. On the whole, I've my experience has been that you'll win money betting that there is something still there that had been overlooked.
Finally! Someonelse who is using common sense in the field. I have found countless old pinch top pipes buried one to two feet below the surface of junk iron rods. You wouldn't believe how much junk is really out there.
AS3
> I have found countless old pinch top pipes buried one to two feet below the surface of junk iron rods. You wouldn't believe how much junk is really out there.
I think I would believe it. If we had the rule that New York apparently does, that surveyors can't remove any marker ever set by a surveyor or an engineer, it would be almost impossible to resurvey many older parcels.
Real World Example No. 1_- hey Kent
here in MA we have this little requirement;
"(d) Computations, Conclusions and Publications of Results. The surveyor shall:
1.Compute and compare field information with record data.
2.In the event of substantial disagreement with the work of another surveyor, contact the other surveyor and investigate the disagreement."
Is there not a requirement for you to contact the other surveyor in TX?
Don
