Time for Board to enforce California Law 8762?
This thread should be obligatory reading for anyone working in a non-recording state who thinks mandatory recording is the way to go. Mandatory recording will never decrease the cost of purchasing a survey and will always increase the potential for administrative creep. Even in the low growth states where mandatory recording appears to be working, bureaucrats will eventually realize they hold the cards.
Don't mandate the recording of anything other than subdivisions, keep recording fees dirt cheap but encourage all your client's to record their surveys.
If I were in CA I would encourage my state organizations to repeal the law.
Recording is not the problem. The problem occurs when the law allows the bureaucrats to do more than check legibility of the drawing.
This thread should be obligatory reading for anyone working in a non-recording state who thinks mandatory recording is the way to go. Mandatory recording will never decrease the cost of purchasing a survey and will always increase the potential for administrative creep. Even in the low growth states where mandatory recording appears to be working, bureaucrats will eventually realize they hold the cards.
Don't mandate the recording of anything other than subdivisions, keep recording fees dirt cheap but encourage all your client's to record their surveys.
If I were in CA I would encourage my state organizations to repeal the law.
It actually works quite well in most parts of California. In our county, the turnaround time is under 1 week and the review fee is $291. All of our maps are online via a GIS and a map index.
What is wonderful is having a way to have a repository of surveys without them being officially recorded. We add new surveys on a regular basis to our files in the two counties where I am the reviewer of ALL surveys that are to be recorded and the two others where I share that job with another surveyor. That way the repository is not subject to all the other BS that goes with officially recording it. The surveyors who need access to that information for later work have a much greater total resource to search. This is especially helpful for surveys of city lots and blocks that have no real need to be officially recorded.
Not this again. Arguing against the concept of recording because a few of the many jurisdictions that require it have done it badly is faulty logic. Most mandatory recording jurisdictions done even have such a thing as a "check fee" and recording costs something like $20. That is a very small price to pay versus the value it brings the public, our clients, and the proffesion.
@holy-cow we have filed (not recorded) Surveys at the County Recorders since the 19th century.
The trouble with private records is they can disappear when their steward leaves the scene. Even pseudo public records such as the Public Works Department files can face destruction when some records retention milestone is arrived at. We are missing most of the survey records produced prior to about 1950; they were in other offices and got dumpstered when the Department reorganized.
The County Recorder never throws anything away.
So it may seem annoying to have to comply with rules but it isn??t that much of a burden in light of the fact the record may be around for 100+ years.
My point is that records are being placed in this other repository willingly by surveyors so that surveys that are not required to be recorded officially and maintained until Hell freezes over still have a place to be stored which aids everyone.
Our other repository is indexed in great fashion such that it is incredibly easy to search quickly and efficiently. The official recording is indexed in only one way and that is tying it to the property involved only. That is highly restrictive. It gets worse in some counties compared to others. Literally, slinging 40 pound books for hours on end is no fun. Meanwhile in OUR files, our indexing is vastly superior.
Say you are working in the NW4 of Section 9. It is fairly routine to search Sections 3,4,5,8,9,10,15,16 and 17 for surveys that may be of help on at least one of the government corners needed to solve the breakdown of Section 9. We have about 40 years of section corner reports and some of those are wrong. There are a huge number of corners that have no filed/recorded survey since the GLO work. The historic center for filing surveys was in OUR files, not the Recorder's Office or the Clerk's Office. Virtually all boundary survey work prior to about 1950 passed directly through the County Engineer/Surveyor Office. Those will not be found in the OFFICIAL office where certain surveys are to be recorded. The Recorders office, which in our case is the Register of Deeds Office, is the search of last resort as so few have been recorded compared to the tons of information available in the next room down the hall.
What is wonderful is having a way to have a repository of surveys without them being officially recorded. We add new surveys on a regular basis to our files in the two counties where I am the reviewer of ALL surveys that are to be recorded and the two others where I share that job with another surveyor. That way the repository is not subject to all the other BS that goes with officially recording it. The surveyors who need access to that information for later work have a much greater total resource to search. This is especially helpful for surveys of city lots and blocks that have no real need to be officially recorded.
What is "all the other BS that goes with officially recording it"? I walk it across the street to the Recorder's Office and tell them to record the maps. Easy peasy.
My point is that records are being placed in this other repository willingly by surveyors so that surveys that are not required to be recorded officially and maintained until Hell freezes over still have a place to be stored which aids everyone.
Our other repository is indexed in great fashion such that it is incredibly easy to search quickly and efficiently. The official recording is indexed in only one way and that is tying it to the property involved only. That is highly restrictive. It gets worse in some counties compared to others. Literally, slinging 40 pound books for hours on end is no fun. Meanwhile in OUR files, our indexing is vastly superior.
Say you are working in the NW4 of Section 9. It is fairly routine to search Sections 3,4,5,8,9,10,15,16 and 17 for surveys that may be of help on at least one of the government corners needed to solve the breakdown of Section 9. We have about 40 years of section corner reports and some of those are wrong. There are a huge number of corners that have no filed/recorded survey since the GLO work. The historic center for filing surveys was in OUR files, not the Recorder's Office or the Clerk's Office. Virtually all boundary survey work prior to about 1950 passed directly through the County Engineer/Surveyor Office. Those will not be found in the OFFICIAL office where certain surveys are to be recorded. The Recorders office, which in our case is the Register of Deeds Office, is the search of last resort as so few have been recorded compared to the tons of information available in the next room down the hall.
Our recorded maps are in an awesome GIS. Click on the property and get all of our recorded maps back to the 1850's.
