Does a county chip seal project trigger Section 8771?

[Sunburned_Surveyor]

Evan:

The particular road in question is a straight two lane rural road running through agricultural land. There are section corners and 1/4 section corners along the length of the road, as well as other property corner monuments. The chip seal in question is a "rubberized chip seal". It looks like they put 1 to 2 inches of material on top of the existing pavement.

In the 3 or 4 mile stretch of road in question only three monument wells remain. The other 22 monuments we identified were covered.

The chapter is going to wait for the project to complete to see if the County follows up on a commitment to place monument wells on all the monuments we identified.

If I extrapolate the ratio of covered to uncovered monuments to the other road segments in the project, I think we could have easily covered 100+ monuments with this rubberized chip seal project.

I don't want to weigh in on this particular issue until my chapter makes a decision about how to proceed, but here are a few things I was thinking about:

(1) What is the safety risk of having a field crew in the center of the road chipping out monuments? How much does the work of chipping out a monument increase the time a crew spends in the road?

(2) What type of trouble could a field crew get into for damaging a brand new chip seal?

(3) How would the land owners adjacent to the chip seal feel about having every property corner along that road for a couple miles covered by the project?

(4) Could the issues of safety, chip seal damage, and protection of propery owners be avoided if the County would simply locate the monuments before construction and file record of survey showing the position of the monuments in relation to other local monuments? They could even tie them out to local survey control points. That would keep everyone out of the road.

The Sunburned Surveyor
California PLS 8498

[Anthony Maffia]

Section & 1/4 corners? IMO, the county should have, at minimum, surveyed through them prior to construction and filed a ROS. This will add half a day to all new surveys in the area.

[pls7809]

"(2) What type of trouble could a field crew get into for damaging a brand new chip seal?"

As for this one...too bad (may not be reality), if they brought them to the surface as required no damaging would have been required.

[E_Page]

Thanks for the update, Landon.

In your scenario, it seems that the suggestion of raising only the section corners and 1/4 corners (assuming this straight strectch is along section lines) would seem sufficient. Rather than having to raise 25 mons, the County would raise only 9.

In reply to your things to think about:

1) Safety depends upon many factors including visibility, amount of traffic, width of pavement and shoulders, thickness of surface crew is chipping through, crew's signage... There are many things a crew can and should do to minimize their exposure to traffic. The amount of time needed to chip through depends upon thickness, type, and age of the surface. Getting through an inch or two of c/s doesn't take very long. Scraping the tarry goo off the cap may take longer than chipping it out.

2) I would hope that the local govt would not make an issue of the little holes surveyors make if those local govts decided to save $ by not raising the mons. If they do make a fuss, then they deserve the expense and problems that would come with a complaint for not following §8771 (whether or not it seemed reasonable to do so).

3) None would care unless and until they learn that it cost them an extra hour of crew time to have a surveyor find them, should they ever hire a surveyor. There will be no major outcry from landowners.

4) If the County has good control mons out of the road and in good positions to last, relating any mons in the road to them and filing an RS showing those relationships would be an excellent idea. That county control would need to be very local in nature, not GPS ties to some control mons several miles away.

Keep us posted on the outcome.