Just saying that pulling monuments and starting range wars is probably not in the job description.
teffinger, post: 344448, member: 2642 wrote: We have a situation here in Colorado:
Large Subdivisions were surveyed and all of the lots were monumented with capped pins in the early 1970s.
All of the lots were sold shortly after the surveys were complete.
About 30% of the lots have been developed.
The subdivisions have gone through booms and busts since then and lots have changed hands.
Many of the lots have been resurveyed over the years.
One Surveyor decided to resurvey interior lots by placing new pins where they should have been placed according to the plats instead of using existing pins as control.
He placed pins as close as 1' and as far as 10' from the original existing capped pins.
There is evidence that he never looked for the existing pins but set his pins based solely on his mathematical model.
He did many surveys over the years. Some of his pins have been in the ground since 1995.
Land owners are finding the new and old pins and are accepting the ones that make their lots the biggest.
He has been contacted but has refused to cooperate in a resolution.
Even if the errant pins are shown on plats, many landowners don't see the plats and pick the pins they like.
Young and out-of-area Surveyors are confused by the issue and unknowingly accept the errant pins for their work.
The lots are small and the errant pins have caused buildings to be placed inside of setbacks and in easements.
As land values increase, the problem threatens to get worse.
The State Board has refused to rule on "pincushion" type issues.As County Surveyor, I would like to fix the issue because of all that and it is becoming a boundary problem between landowners.
What are good courses of action in a case like this?
Can I encourage Surveyors to remove the bad pins as they discover the problem?
Can we remove pins set by another Surveyor if we know they were set improperly?
Should I go to my County Commissioners with the issue?
Should I contact my State Board for direction?
Should I just let it go and see what happens?I appreciate your opinions.
Thanks,
Tom
Classic, happens too often. I've taken to pointing out that it is not a pincushion problem. Pincushion would indicate there are simply two differing and valid professional opinions at work, and that happens and always will. But what you are describing is one individual who is not practicing within minimal professional standards that are well recognized all across the country. He or she is performing an original survey instead of a retracement survey in a situation where virtually all court jurisdictions in the U.S. require retracement, all survey textbooks spell out it must be a retracement, all college programs teach it must be a retracement, all statutes if applicable call for a retracement, and the vast majority of licensed surveyors know it must be a retracement. Unless a surveyor can prove to a high level (beyond a reasonable doubt if the manual has been adopted by your state) that the subdivision was not ever surveyed, then they must perform a retracement. It is presumed that parcels were surveyed on creation and people took title with a view of the premises. It is the most basic and lowest level of knowledge a surveyor needs in order to offer services to the public. If two surveyors disagree on location based on differing interpretations of the evidence available in the retracement process, or one surveyor finds a bit more than the other, then so be it. But here you merely have professional negligence in your fact pattern. I would leave the erroneous pins as evidence of such. But you will need court intervention probably, although the board may be able to do something if you present it correctly.
For Bill; 4-10 feet difference in measurements is normal in rougher terrain and/or rural subdivisions up until the advent and widespread use of the edm. Some did better work, but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule in my experience.
The difference between this and other pincushions is that the original points still exist. That should be slam-dunk easy and entirely non-controversial for your state board to deal with. Is there enough spine within your state organization to have it, as an organization demand that the state board get off its duff and live up to its responsibility of protecting the public?
Until the board declares the surveyor negligent or incompetent for the practice that raises his own math and measurements above original monumentation, anyone than all affected landowners mutually agreeing to remove the errant monuments is on very shaky ground. Once he has been disciplined for that practice, then there is a very solid basis to go to the landowners on a case by case basis and explain why those monuments are wrong and should be removed.
The problem I have in the absence of the Board or a court having declared his practice to be negligent or demonstrative of incompetence is that advocating that his pipes be pulled upon finding them opens the door to surveyors taking license to begin pulling anyone's monuments when they disagree with them, without further reasoning or permission from those affected than "I'm right, so he's obviously wrong and out it comes!" It sets a very dangerous precedent and also exposes anyone who pulls the monuments to possible board discipline.
However, in the instances where significant improvements have been made in reliance on the incorrect monuments, the landowners are going to have to seek some legal advice to determine if they may have accrued some property rights, a basis for an adverse claim, or have recourse for damages back to the surveyor. If he's been doing this for 20 years, it wouldn't be too long before there wouldn't be any blood left to squeeze out of that turnip.
Duane makes a good point. The only issue is that much of the damage has already been done.
There are two basic principles at play here:
1. Priority of call which, in almost all cases, means that the monuments control over the measurements.
2. Acquiescence where the errant pins have already been relied upon for constructing improvements. Pulling or completely ignoring those would almost certainly result in more harm than good at this point, but the person who set them should have yielded to the monuments. (He probably never found most of them or found them and thought they were too far off of the recorded measurements to be the correct monument.)
Lots of good answers hear. I think Nate has the correct one, get everyone in the subdivision to agree that the old ones are the correct ones, find all the old ones, mark them, and reset the missing ones. The problem is one or more people won't like that solution and won't agree. The other problem is, who pays for all this? Your probably talking several thousand dollars.
vern, post: 344596, member: 3436 wrote: As I understand it, the County Surveyor has a duty to resolve boundary disputes....
Vern, are you sure about this? It would surprise me in this day and age.
Technically his duty is to represent the county in boundary disputes. Still, there is no duty to create disputes.
Bring this matter to your Board's attention immediately!! If he won't talk to you about it they should remove him from practice.
OK yes - for matters specifically involving the county. Back in the day, I can imagine they got involved with all kinds of private issues.
In this case, I would think that it would be outside the capacity of the "County Surveyor" to expend public tax dollars correcting sloppy survey work in a private subdivision, regardless of the significance of the dispute. However, County Commissioners can surprise you with what they can come up with sometimes.
Jim in AZ, post: 344616, member: 249 wrote: I don't know how a County Surveyor would have the authority to resolve private property boundaries. Perhaps Teffinger can enlighten us... Its strictly forbidden here!
Jim,
Here in Oklahoma the "Authority" the GLO used to perform the original survey ceased once their survey was complete and the lands were patented to the public. Through a loose number of statutes prior to and after statehood, the County was given the authority to maintain an office of County Surveyor to "complete and maintain" the cadastral control that was recently turned over to private interests. For years the office remained the authority and final say when it came to boundary establishment or problems.
I don't know about other States, up until the middle twentieth century the courts upheld (and conscripted) the County Surveyor's Office to settle boundary disputes and problems. After WWII around here the County Surveyor's reign had been appealed and questioned enough in the courts of public opinion their authority had been reduced to generally being assigned by the courts to settle squabbles where two other surveyors disagreed.
Sadly the office degenerated to political sway and a pile of undeterminable records and drawings. Most County Surveyors did such poor work their office was nothing but contradictions. Due to poor funding the Office was officially dissolved by the legislature in '76 or '78. I think the legislature actually left it up to the county to decide whether to maintain the office or not. I believe all 77 have decided to drop it.
But at one time THE County Surveyor's Office in the State of Oklahoma was quite the force and authority.
I remember a survey I did in fairly small subdivision while I was still in school and taking a Survey Law class. I was working with the owner/PLS and we found a rebar and cap about five feet from an old axle painted yellow. My employer had me shoot the rebar then without hesitation he pulled it out and chucked it in the woods. I was appalled and seriously considered quitting as I knew that Curt Brown wouldn't approve. Fast forward a few years and now I feel privileged to have worked for a man whose first consideration went to keeping the piece and not how the Board would react. My employer told me that he couldn't in good conscience accept money for a boundary survey and leave the owners with an erroneous boundary marker that had a great potential for causing problems. Mr. Brown was intelligent but Justice Cooley was wise.
I hear lots of fantastical solutions being offered but the only solution that can easily and cheaply be implemented is the location then removal/burial of the bad pins.
To paraphrase Johnny Cash: I pulled them one pin at a time, and it didn't cost me a dime.
Too late for that now. Some of these pins have already been accepted, probably for many years. You'll do more harm than good by taking them all out indiscriminately at this point.
Unfortunately it seems the best solution is to revise the original subdivision now, but nobody is going to pay for that. It's going to be hard for different surveyors to work in that area and for all of them to get it right. This is going to be a perpetual problem.
"...but the only solution that can easily and cheaply be implemented is the location then removal/burial of the bad pins. "
I fully understand what you are saying, but that action would probably cost you your license here...
I worked for a company in the early 1990's where a major subdivision was platted, but sat idle for years. I forgot the reason, but no houses were built. All the monuments were set including the back lines that were offset from property lines in the adjacent subdivision. Then new developers came along and the new engineer changed all the lot configurations. New monuments were set - sometimes only tenths way from the old ones. The back lines had up to six different pins which included the two going the other direction. Talk about confusion. Surveyors who were prone to accept monuments within a certain tolerance such as 0.30' now were accepting the old monuments. Should the old monuments have been pulled? I would say "yes" because they no longer represented anything. I just like to avoid confusion when there seems a valid reason for doing so.
While it may seem that the State Board might be the logical ones to run to, keep in mind that they are not a civil court and cannot affect the boundary locations between the landowners. The only authority they have may extend to a disciplinary action against the surveyor for failure to conform to some standard of practice or professional misconduct (not to be confused with "negligence").
Any State Board action will do nothing to resolve the problem on the ground. That problem must be dealt with on a boundary-by-boundary process taking all of the evidence of reliance by the landowners in each case with each individual boundary.
There's a big difference between boundary law and administrative policies.
Why leave a situation where strife, confusion, ambiguities, and lawsuits can thrive?
Just because a "surveyor" sets a hunk of iron, it doesn't make it some magical, untouchable, reverent, mythical, legally binding, boundary monument. We simply don't have that power over the landowners and their land.
Sometimes the best thing a surveyor can do is to remove errant "goat stakes". If for nothing else to protect the landowners from ill-informed, ignorant "surveyors".
I agree that we waited too long to deal with the problem. We tried to attack it in 2007 when land prices and activity out there were high but it went by the wayside as the recession took hold. Now we have 8 more years on those pins. I also agree that the County Surveyor can't "fix" something like this unilaterally. I do think that the County Surveyor should be the catalyst to get things like this resolved. I think my plan will be to notify the Homeowners Association, the County Commissioners and the State Board that there is a problem in some subdivisions. Hopefully they will agree to cooperate in getting the issue resolved in some way. The resolution may not be as easy as "pulling pins" but may be accomplished over time on an individual basis as lots are sold and surveyed. If the homeowners, surveyors and builders know about the problem, they can all be careful to watch for it as the lots are developed.
Thanks to all for your great comments.
Tom
In this case, the original monuments are still somewhat important as they denote the boundaries within which the new plan had to fit. They are original monuments. This is similar to the PLSS in that the original plan for the section was one thing but now there is a complex set of metes and bounds tracts and subdivisions and streets and alleys and all that stuff.
I have worked in a few of these circumstances. It most definitely is critical to know which monuments relate to which plan.
One bizarre case of multiple monuments referring to different plans that I've encountered is a case of two subdivisions that resulted in a very long, narrow triangle of land between them. Once this was discovered, the owner of the remnant began selling off little wedges to the owner on one side or the other. As the lot lines of the two subdivisions did not match up, this would produce situations where the wedge would lap behind an adjoiner in one case and someone else would lap behind the first guy in another. Of course one end of the wedge was always a bit smaller/larger than the other, except for the end piece which was a triangle.
I cannot imagine how busy the county surveyors office would be if they were involved in resolving private boundary disputes these days. It would be a nightmare.
I don't think the original post indicated that any of these monuments were "errant goat stakes."
