Lucas seminar
Posting this a week later. The take-away I got from the Jeff Lucas Seminar in Orange Beach was this, and I'm paraphrasing a little:
"When you encounter an apparent discrepancy in the record lines and the obvious, well-established occupation lines, then you become a court. A non-binding court, but a court just the same. If you don't talk to the adjoining owners, then they don't have their day in your court. You can't know how to proceed until you talk to the adjoining owners."
Very well stated I think.
Stephen
I agree whole heartily. Doing so preserves harmony and allows for the occupation to be corrected to match record or for the record to be changed to match occupation. Around here the record will usually hold by agreement between owners. Do your PR properly and the discrepancy can usually be resolved without the courts getting involved. It also helps if you can find in the record where the problem came about in the first place and explain it to the effected owners.
jud
I agree!
So, because a surveyor can't read a deed they must put the line where the adjoiner tells them to?
Sometimes adjoiner testimony might help, other times I can proceed just fine without it.
But I'm glad we've been elevated from illiterate to honorable in the seminar:)
Despite my sarcasm, I generally like what Lucas puts forth.
Some of you probably remember my posts in the past about being very proud of bringing in to the court, a 80 year old landowner who has personal knowledge of where and how the fence was built on the line, as they knew it; and that I would be glad to put this evidence up against your finest measuring devices.
Some simply can't get past their measuring devices!
Keith
> Despite my sarcasm, I generally like what Lucas puts forth.
Yeah, and what a great job it is, too. I mean talking (or writing gaseous prose) about how to survey is so much less effort than actually surveying, and the success rate has to be close to 100% if you're only working on self-invented problems. Add the attraction of having a hotel ballroom full of eager faces yearning for the secret that will make their surveying lives easy and successful, collect a nice price of admission from them, and how can you lose? It has to beat actually surveying, right?
I'm thinking not. The dark side to the seminar circuit has got to be that once a seminar gypsy gets accustomed to the easy money and the foamy rhetoric, he or she is pretty well ruined for actual survey work, particularly in the real world.
I wouldn't think of writing a monthly surveying column or speaking on the seminar circuit as easy money. I like to think I can write a pretty good essay, but not at the drop of a hat on demand. Public speaking is not something I'm comfortable with, either without a real passion for the subject matter. Slamming the profession I've grown up with is not something I could really sink my teeth into, in print or in person.
> I wouldn't think of writing a monthly surveying column or speaking on the seminar circuit as easy money.
Well, possibly this is because you are tied to the Old Paradigm of discourse. Under that Old Paradigm, the object is to convey knowledge efficiently. Under the New Paradigm, the object is to keep the conveyor of knowledge gainfully employed. It's sort of the surveying equivalent of Scheherazade and the 1001 Arabian nights.
Cooley, in his 'Judicial Functions..' says:
".... It is often the case when one or more corners are found to be extinct, all parties concerned have acquiesced in lines which were traced by the guidance of some other corner or landmark, which may or may not have been trustworthy; but to bring these lines into discredit when the people concerned do not question them not only breeds trouble in the neighborhood, but it must often subject the surveyor himself to annoyance and perhaps discredit, since in a legal controversy the law as well as common sense must declare that a supposed boundary long acquiesced in is better evidence of where the real line should be than any survey made after the original monuments have disappeared. ..."
Boundary location is the land owner's responsibility, not the surveyors. Our responsibility in retracement surveys is to confirm the accuracy of the record or, detect errors and provide the means to help the owner correct errors in order to prevent fraudulent land transactions.
Established, legal boundaries must not be moved to make an inaccurate record valid.
If not the surveyor, who is capable of detecting title defects caused by inaccurate records?
Richard Schaut
Well, in defense of the speaker, the ballroom is usually also populated with indignant faces. Many who resent being forced to acquire CEU's through this process, think they know everything already, and are merely looking for some good entertainment.
A bit of shock and awe, a touch of humor, a little sleigh of hand, and the audience will feel good about it if you validate a preconception or two. A good writer/seminar speaker presents a show rather than a lesson plan. Still, some in the audience will learn from a good show. And the ones that don't learn from a good show probably wouldn't learn from a good lesson plan anyway.
