static or dynamic

I think you just made a darn good case for:

1. A better review of applications and supporting references.

2. Exams that better test an applicants capabilities to become a PLS.

3. Continuing education requirements.

4. Active Professional Practice Committees.

5. Encouraging the Board to act more quickly in response to complaints.

_________________________________________________________________________________

I ask why were these people even allowed to take the exam? These examples show a great lack of understanding of what surveying is about. Pitiful!!!!

There's a very good reason that there are such low scores on the CA PLS exams!

The Board is doing a disservice to our profession by allowing a cutoff score below 70 per cent. I believe that they have been close to 50 per cent the last few years just to get enough people to pass. What are their priorities? How is that protecting the public?

Excellent post.

As a reviewer of surveys, I've seen very good and very, very bad. I'm not talking about nitpicking over font size or similar foolishness. Serious stuff like the two differing opinions above for a 1/16th corner that vary by 50 feet. The 32 angle points is no big deal. No three consecutive monuments are ever in perfect alignment, it's just a matter of how far is too far in your opinion versus someone else's opinion.

I'm just curious. We all know there is a lot of varying surveying so what you report doesn't surprise me at all. I've looked at enough filed surveys myself.

But what I'm curious about is the county surveyors acceptance. What's that got to do with it? Is the county surveyor the final arbiter of where boundaries are located? If so where in statute is that authority?

Yeah I know there are places that have put the county surveyor in charge to review it all, and maybe it helps maybe it doesn't, but nobody other then the property owners and the courts (where there is a dispute between landowners) has been given authority over where boundary lines are located and I'd think that included county surveyors.

So although I don't think I always like what I find in the county surveyors filed survey records aren't these records just that, filed surveys that don't control boundaries. Can the county surveyor's blessing move a boundary? It's just evidence.

So maybe it's best how it's done where I work. They just take the filing fee and file the survey, no review. You can research them and many have really good information and others are not worth the media they are printed on. So what else is new?

Things would clear up a lot faster if landowners were encouraged to sue for damages done by poor surveys. That almost never happens where I live so things are only improving very slowly. I doubt it will ever get to a point where a landowner can hire anyone out of the book and be sure to get good work. It's just a crap shoot for a landowner that doesn't have long experience dealing with surveyors.

If we need a review that is going to cost about as much as the survey why not just have the public agency survey all the boundaries and save all the extra fuss. If the county surveyor is going to make all the final calls maybe you could just submit your field notes and research and let them do the plat.

If land surveying is a profession that needs constant review and approval of its work product then maybe it's not a profession at all. It's kind of a sad state of affairs that those entrusted with the work can't be trusted with the work. Maybe we should start over, cancel the current land surveying profession and develop a new profession that can actually be trusted to do the work. I suppose it's nice to dream once in awhile!

Mr. Cut is in California. If, as I assume, these are Records of Survey we,re talking about, the County Surveyor can comment on the face of the map if he really, really disagrees, and the surveyor can respond, also on the map, but the map must be recorded.

Don

Clear,

What a great post! I'm adding it to my "things that make you go hmmmmmm" folder.

Have a Happy New Year! :beer:

> > ...If land surveying is a profession that needs constant review and approval of its work product then maybe it's not a profession at all. It's kind of a sad state of affairs that those entrusted with the work can't be trusted with the work. Maybe we should start over, cancel the current land surveying profession and develop a new profession that can actually be trusted to do the work. I suppose it's nice to dream once in awhile!

LR, far as I'm concerned, your whole post is worth quoting. But, this part of it REALLY needed to be said by someone. We don't have this redundancy in Ga., thank goodness, but we don't have recording laws, either. The point you've made so well reminded me of the time an RLS employed by a city to review plats for planning and zoning purposes had to, just on his own out of the blue, inform a client of mine whose plat was being reviewed that the client "might want to point out to me" that a distance I had called for on the plat was 9' shorter than what the tax map was showing !! Of course, since this puke was a government "official" the client felt obliged to question me about this before recording the plat even though all the P&Z requirements had been approved. The client understood when I explained what the true purpose of the tax map was! The point being that the situation should never have happened. It brought doubt upon my work, unnecessarily, and ...., well, I won't say anything else about that cluster you know what.....

But, back to the point, do doctors and lawyers, supposedly the gold standard of who are considered "professionals", have 'county doctors' and 'county lawyers' to review their work before it can be confidently accepted by the public they work for?????? 😛 I'm with you on this one, LR. What IS the point of licensing, spending years just to sit for the exam and all the liability one takes on every time you stamp a plat if you can still end up in a peeing contest with some tax supported bureaucrat over some opinion or other you've rendered?

Anyway, LR, thanks for saying what you did a whole lot better than I could. :good:

To clarify at the very beginning: Things may be completely different where you are.

In my case: The licensing of land surveyors did not happen here until more than 100 years after Statehood. Hence, the county surveyor/engineer was THE AUTHORITY on such matters. The Statutes were set up such that he could appoint deputy surveyors to work under his direction. The county surveyor/engineer had the survey records because he was the creator of them. Not everyone appointed to hold that position was ultimately qualified, however. Many did very fine work while some did inferior work. Nevertheless, their work was THE WORK.

Of course, there were some exceptions. Most railroads and many towns located along them were laid out by railroad employed surveyors. There was far too much work for one person per county to handle, even with several deputies. Many of the early city plats weren't provided to the county files until after most tracts had been conveyed to others by the town company. Again, one person per county could not do everything.

Eventually, licensed land surveyors began to appear and attempts were made to build profitable businesses providing this service. Some worked well with the county surveyor/engineer while others chose to operate slipshod around him and attempt to whip out surveys without referencing prior work on file with the county. Some counties saw the need to attempt to bring some sort of standardization to the local practices. Eventually, the survey profession began to realize how poorly they were viewed by the public by trying to operate too independently.

That said, I have seen a wide variety of problem areas that should have been eliminated prior to submittal for recording or filing. Examples include:

1. Sent it to the wrong county.
2. Had the wrong section, township, range or other extremely important identifier throughout the description and on the plat.
3. Incorrect bearings (N xx W should have been N xx E).
4. No signature or seal.
5. Major survey error, such as identifying the wrong monument as being suchandsuch a corner when it was not.
6. Incorrectly dividing out lots as being half distance when the record clearly indicated that was not the case.
7. One or more calls left out of a description.
8. Showing radically incorrect distances on a plat that occurred because the draftsman had copied some number to a dozen or so places with the intent of then editting each one to the correct number, but missing one or more.
9. Misidentifying adjoining parcels, such as, the lots across the alley from the lot or two actually surveyed increase in number from east to west but are shown as decreasing in that direction. It's not critical to the survey, but, it makes the surveyor look like a careless fool when others not this error.
10. Street or alley widths are incorrect out of pure carelessness.
11. Lot widths are incorrect out of pure carelessness.
12. The area listed for a tract is clearly incorrect for a reason similar to number 8 above.
13. The description and the plat do not agree in one or more places.
14. The plat and the north arrow do not agree.
15. Garbled text that does not make sense due to an absence of one or more words, or repeating a phrase or sentence fragment, or stating something that should not be a part of the subject paragraph (the tract is located in Flood Zone Standard Barometric Pressure) or ... or... or... or...

I can see where you are coming from, everyone makes a little mistake once in awhile. BUT why worry about it if the county reviewer will catch it for ya!

If things keep occurring and are too abundant maybe a citation for negligence is more in order than a review. These folks would be tuned up a lot sooner if they were sued by their clients and made to pay damages than helped to make something very unacceptable barely acceptable by public review, it just let's them off the hook.

There is a flip side also where they make you submit some plans for review and then they inform you what they really want which is not anything like what you submitted (and spent many hours developing). This probably happens more with engineering/subdivision plans than boundary surveys. So after a few times you just go ahead and send em some cheap junk to start with just so you can get an appointment to find out what it is they want. I always attempt to get the appointment first but some of them just won't give you one. I've had some agencies refuse to review even a preliminary plan unless it is signed and sealed which I refused to do (seal an incomplete work). I think once I even dropped a client because of it, had a bad meeting where I gave the client all our work up to that point and zeroed out about $5000 worth of invoices. I came out way ahead in the long run by not having to deal with this particular town (and client) and all their BS.

So there I was, minding my own business when in comes the County Surveyor. Says he has gotten behind on his reviews and wanted me to help in out in reviewing some surveys that have been submitted to him.

OK, I says, glad to help. Shouldn't take more than an hour or 2 or 3 per survey, should be kind of fun.

First survey I open is a survey of a whole section (PLSS) that some fellow owns. Had been in his family's hands since the original patent. The surveyor ties in everything. On the west boundary he finds the section and quarter corners. He also finds some 32 private corners along that line that had been set in the adjoining section by different surveys as part of the partioning that occured in that section over the years.

Apparently never seeing a corner monument he didn't like, the current surveyor accepted every single monument that had appeared over the years. The section line now has 32 angle points with apparently little regard to their being junior to the section line. Nor with little regard to the effort (or lack thereof) that the junior surveys took in retracing the senior line.

A number of these "junior" corners create considerable deviations from the original section line location.

Where does it say that a section line is a straight line?

>
> Where does it say that a section line is a straight line?

Like I said, aint surveying fun?

clear as mud.

Lrday,

Bravo, I say again Bravo.

It's clear to me, clearcut, that the Co. surveyor gave you the surveys he didn't want to deal with. He probably went to work one day, looked at these three surveys, said to himself "WTF", and went home for a few beers. After his third beer, he probably thunks to himself "I'm going to call some private schlup to review these, heck, it's only county dollars". There ya go.

Where does it say that a section line is a straight line?

Do you believe the lines of the PLSS should be "redefined" every time a following surveyor attempts to retrace them?

If the answer is yes, how far from the original line will you let the "redefined" line wander before you put on the brakes?

0.1 ft.
1 ft.
10 ft.
100 ft.
more?

Hijack

Your Holy Bovineness,

Don’t mean to hijack your post, but the comment contained therein “Of course, there were some exceptions. Most railroads and many towns located along them were laid out by railroad employed surveyors.” made me think of a great read concerning that comment.

“Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 by Stephen E. Ambrose”

A quote from Amazon:

"Nothing Like It in the World gives the account of an unprecedented feat of engineering, vision, and courage. It is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad -- the investors who risked their businesses and money; the enlightened politicians who understood its importance; the engineers and surveyors who risked, and sometimes lost, their lives; and the Irish and Chinese immigrants, the defeated Confederate soldiers, and the other laborers who did the backbreaking and dangerous work on the tracks."

I loved the book. It's got pictures too!

Happy New Year to Y’all!:-)
:beer: :beer: :beer: :beer: :party: :beer: :-S :-X :coffee:

Hijack - Nothing Like It

There are hundreds of copies going cheap on ebay and Amazon.

There is no number. All boundary work is controlled by the Law and a large part of the Law is defined by Appellate Decisions and I haven't seen an Appellate Decision yet which boiled the answer down to a mathematical formula.

A common thing I see is the BLM Cadastral Surveyor set a 1/16th corner on line between two original corners. I haven't found one yet that was set perfectly on line at at the exact chainage called for (usually a split). They have the Survey authority so as far as I'm concerned and as a practical matter their 1/16th corner monument is the 1/16th corner. If there was a big discrepancy or blunder then I would ask them review their work and if a reset of the monument is called for they will do it and revise their Survey.

In Forest work we often come across "line" monuments that aren't perfectly on line but they have multiple generations of surveyor and forester flagging on them so as a practical matter we use them as the physical realization of the line.

1) Monuments move, it happens. A USGS Geologist gave me a tour of a certain area one time and it was humbling all of the places he showed me that were moving one way or the other. Land Surveyors tend to assume everything is stable and unmoving but Geologists assume that it's moving. Everywhere is moving relative to somewhere else.

2) 1/16th lines are among the least well understood lines in the Land Surveying profession, I'm just saying. For example, 19th Century County Surveyors set a lot of 1/16th corners only measuring east to west. I would think long and hard before disturbing a 1/16th line which has been in the same place for a long time in favor of a mathematical solution.

Interesting how you took this post in the direction you did Ruel, especially considering the lack of direct recent knowledge of the licensing exam and more detail from clearcut.

I welcome an in-depth discussion of the licensing exam process with you anytime, and given your misconceptions, how the cut score is established and hope that you take advantage of any opportunity to help the Board out with exam development for the state exams. We can always use more land surveyors to help with the process.

I don't know if you have heard me say it or not, but others have. The exam is not and never has meant to be the end all, ultimate judge of one's ability to practice a profession. It is but only one of the criteria towards achieving licensure and in my opinion, the professional references are the absolute most important step in the process. The exam is simply a measurement tool, nothing less, nothing more. And as you, I and every other land surveyor knows there is some amount of error in every single measurement. Are any of your measurements during the course of a survey the most important aspect of that survey? Or would you consider your evaluation, analysis, study, and subsequent professional determination the most important aspect?

Reading clearcut's post, I can certainly sympathize with him (and the County Surveyor) for having to review those maps. I see these all the time when reviewing complaint cases and I am left to wonder the same thing as now reading clearcut's post. Where are the mentors that certified to the competence of these land surveyors? Education doesn't stop just because you pass an exam and meet other minimum requirements. That is a responsibility for both the licensee that prepared the map(s) and their mentors. How is the communication between the County Surveyor and these land suveyors?

Yes, it is true that in California, the County Surveyor by law cannot tell the submitting land surveyor how to perform the survey and by what methods. But both parties have the professional obligation to communicate concerns and comments with each other, even if that means including notes on the filed map (as Don explains below). And beyond that, as a County Surveyor, that licensee has the additional obligation of protecting the public as a whole. If that means that after exhausting all reasonable means to communicate with the submitting land surveyor the concerns, then bringing the Professional Practices Committee or Board into the fold may be the only action left. Because simply ignoring it and going ahead and filing that map is never the final action that one can take.

Ric

No doubt about it, Target.

But it's probably gong to cut into the county surveyor's coffee fund before it's over.......