We Lost San Diego

[DWoolley]

We Lost San Diego

For generations, Southern California has had a rich tradition of excellent land surveying and exceptional land surveyors. Within that tradition, San Diego stood near the pinnacle—home to the largest concentration of licensed land surveyors in California and many of the profession’s finest practitioners.

That is why I had trouble believing what I was being told.

This practice was brought to my attention only recently. At first, I did not fully understand what was being described. A couple of Saturdays ago, I spent the better part of the day going through the actual Corner Records.

I expected to discover that something had been lost in the telling.

It had not.

It was true. And what I found in the Corner Records was considerably worse than I had imagined.

For years, San Diego County accepted Corner Records purporting to perpetuate monuments using assumed coordinates on an assumed basis of bearings, without measured angles, bearings, or distances relating the corner to other physical monuments.

The regulation is not obscure:

“Except for those corners referenced in subdivision (9), a drawing shall be made which shows measurements that relate the corner to other identifiable monuments.”
— 16 CCR § 464(a)(10)

The very next subsection provides:

“A reference to the California Coordinate System is optional at the discretion of the preparer of the record.”
— 16 CCR § 464(b) [Arguably, the CCS is repeatable, but even the PRC recognizes the weakness, requires ties and prohibits using coordinates to describe property].

Measurements shall relate the corner to other identifiable monuments. Coordinates are optional.

For nearly 150 years, California land surveyors managed to map, recover, perpetuate, and reestablish monuments without concluding that an assumed coordinate could substitute for a measured relationship between physical monuments.

Then, sometime around 2018, San Diego solved string theory.

The solution, apparently, had been hiding in plain sight: dispense with the measurements between identifiable monuments and simply assign the monument a coordinate.

One wonders how generations of land surveyors missed it.

Instead, with a remarkable degree of institutional arrogance, a profession steeped in the evaluation of evidence and charged with understanding the statutes and regulations governing its practice allowed the product of measurement to substitute for the measurement itself.

Incompetence will do what incompetence does. That is not the interesting part.

The interesting part is that the San Diego professional community did not flinch.

A surveying community with the history, numbers, knowledge, and professional talent to recognize the problem instead allowed the practice to become accepted and routine.

There are defeats in history that matter because of who was defeated.

Alexander’s destruction of Thebes shocked the Greek world because it was Thebes. Hannibal’s destruction of the Roman legions at Cannae mattered because they were Roman legions.

That is the uncomfortable parallel.

This was not some land surveying backwater with half a dozen licensees where an aberrant practice quietly slipped through unnoticed.

This was San Diego. The home of Curt Brown.

It happened in one of the strongest surveying communities in California, in plain sight, for years, and the profession did not stop it.

San Diego did not lack qualified land surveyors.

The profession surrendered the practice.

And that surrender has consequences.

If licensed land surveyors accept that monument perpetuation can consist of generating and recording a coordinate, on what principled basis can we tell Kiewit, Granite, any grading contractor, a GIS technician, or anyone else capable of generating a coordinate that monument perpetuation requires the knowledge and judgment of a licensed land surveyor?

Licensure is not a franchise granted to its holders to impose a tax upon the public. It exists because the license represents specialized knowledge and judgment necessary to protect the public.

We, the professional land surveyors, therefore have an obligation to demonstrate that knowledge.

For anyone who has become confused about coordinates, the hierarchy is not particularly complicated:

Monuments hold paramount in boundary establishment.

Measurements are evidence.

Does this familiar? "When permanent and visible or ascertained boundaries or monuments are inconsistent with the measurement, either of lines, angles, or surfaces, the boundaries or monuments are paramount." Notice, it does not mention coordinates - this is for good reason, this is the California Code of Civil Procedures. When coordinates are listed in any hierarchy of evidence, not in California law, rather, in textbooks, it states coordinates are last to be considered.

Coordinates are evidence of a position within a coordinate system. They are not the measurements relating one identifiable monument to another that § 464(a)(10) requires.

The regulation understood the distinction precisely. Generations of land surveyors understood the distinction. Somehow, the San Diego professional community lost it.

And now, predictably, watch what happens next.

Not: How did we allow this to happen?

Not: How many Corner Records are affected?

Not: How do we correct the practice?

Wait for it. There will be rationalization. There will be justification. There will be anger at the criticism. There will be elaborate explanations for why words such as “shall,” “measurements,” and “other identifiable monuments” somehow do not mean what they plainly say.

And finally, when all else fails, someone will call Sacramento for an interpretation.

Think about what that request actually concedes. Section 464 is one page. The operative language is two sentences. Asking the Board what "shall" and "measurements" mean is not the exercise of professional judgment. It is the substitution of permission for judgment, and it is the same reflex that produced the practice in the first place. The County said do it, so we did it. Now we will ask Sacramento whether we may keep doing it.

Nobody in that sequence read the regulation.

Humpty Dumpty explained the method rather well:

“When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

“Shall.” “Measurements.” “Other identifiable monuments.”

The words are not difficult.

What I do not expect to see much of is accountability.

Coordinates! Coordinates! Coordinates for everyone!

That response will tell us something important about how we lost San Diego in the first place.

DWoolley

PS: I recorded a Ten Minute Surveyor on topic. Before I can publish, I have to edit the 1.5 hours of video down to 10 minutes.

[hellsangle]

Can you post a redacted sample, Dave?
Are the coordinates from GIS? Hand-held GPS? Phone? Do the coords have qualifiers?
You'd have to an idiot to hold coordinates OVER a valid monument! (CCP 2077)

Interesting stuff . . .

Have a good week, all.

Crazy Phil - Sonoma

[DWoolley]

Phil:

I redacted page 2 of one Corner Record as a sample, but the redaction almost seems beside the point. This is not an isolated record or a one-off mistake. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these records in San Diego. There is no shame in their game; the practice is right there in the public record.

I also spoke with someone in another county who told me that a San Diego surveyor attempted to submit a similar Corner Record there. The county rejected it. Unsurprisingly, the surveyor became indignant that what had become routine in San Diego was not acceptable elsewhere.

That exchange is part of what interests me. After enough years of institutional acceptance, an aberrant practice stops looking aberrant to the people practicing it.

I will post the redacted example.

Dave

[DWoolley]

A Coordinate Is a Conclusion

I am going to publish two posts, maybe three, to restate the fundamentals. This is not intended to be condescending. If you know it, skip reading it.

Set the law aside for this one. No section 464, no section 8771, no California Coordinate System, no state plane, no zones or datums. Assume no statute says anything about how a monument gets perpetuated.

The problem is still there. And if the only reason we preserve measurements is that a rule tells us to, we never understood why the rule existed.

A hundred and fifty years of doing it the other way

California has been surveyed and mapped for more than a century and a half. Tract maps, parcel maps, records of survey, highway surveys, city tie books, county tie sheets, corner records. Thousands upon thousands of documents.

Coordinates are not new. Our predecessors computed them by hand, then by calculator, then by early COGO. Any surveyor in 1950 could have filled a tie book with northings and eastings, and it would have been faster than what he actually did.

He did not. Neither did the generation before him or the one after. Across a hundred and fifty years, the permanent record fills up with bearings, distances, angles, and ties between physical monuments. That is not nostalgia. They understood something we appear to be forgetting.

Evidence Versus Conclusion

A measurement is an observation of a relationship between two physical things. I occupied this monument, I sighted that one, here is the angle, here is the distance. Facts about the world, recorded at the moment of observation.

A coordinate is not an observation of anything. It is what comes out the other end after observations are combined with a datum, an orientation, a set of assumptions, a reduction, and usually an adjustment. It is arithmetic performed on evidence.

A measurement is evidence. A coordinate is a conclusion drawn from evidence. And evidence can be tested. A conclusion, standing alone, cannot.

The Geometry, Where This Becomes Obvious

Two measured distances are two circles. They intersect, and the intersection is a solution. Two measured bearings are two lines, and they do the same. A bearing and a distance are a line and a circle. A triangle yields angles and sides, a traverse yields closure, and several independent measurements yield redundancy.

Every one of those is a geometric constraint. Constraints can disagree with each other, and when they do the surveyor has something to work with. Which observation is bad. Whether a monument has moved. Whether there is a solution the first surveyor did not consider. What weight each piece of evidence deserves. Professional judgment lives in the disagreement between pieces of evidence.

Now hand the next surveyor a northing and an easting and nothing else.

No figure. Nothing to intersect. Nothing to close. No redundancy. No second solution to compare against the first. Nothing internal to the record that can disagree with anything else in the record. The judgment has already been exercised by whoever computed the number, and the successor receives the output with no way to examine it.

If the coordinate is wrong, it is precisely wrong, and it stays precisely wrong until somebody develops independent evidence from outside the record entirely.

Two Questions That Answer Themselves

Look at the instrument in your truck. Every data collector on the market maintains a raw data file. The manufacturers could have shipped a device that stores only reduced coordinates, and the file sizes would be smaller and the software simpler. They do not, and no surveyor would buy it if they did.

Why? Because the coordinate is not checkable and the raw data is. When a job does not close, nobody opens the coordinate file. You go back to the observations. Angle right, distance, height of instrument, height of rod, the setup where somebody may have bumped the tripod.

Every surveyor in this state already relies on this principle daily. We simply stopped applying it to the permanent public record.

Second question. Why do courts take field notes?

California Evidence Code section 721 expressly permits an expert to be fully cross-examined concerning the matter upon which the opinion is based and the reasons for that opinion. Section 1237 recognizes the evidentiary significance of a contemporaneous writing under the doctrine of past recollection recorded, provided its foundational requirements are satisfied.

A surveyor's contemporaneous field notes illustrate the point. They preserve what was observed when the observations were made. Years later, those observations can be examined, tested, compared, and challenged.

The conclusion is not a substitute for the evidence underlying it.

I have testified as an expert more than fifty times. I have never once been permitted to state a conclusion and decline to produce what it rests on. Nobody would allow it, and nobody should.

A coordinate filed without the measurements is an expert opinion submitted with the basis withheld. Any lawyer would object. And unlike most foundation problems, this one cannot be cured, because the underlying observations were never recorded in the record.

What a Perpetuation Record is For

A surveyor files a record for a single reason. Somebody he will never meet, decades from now, has to be able to put that corner back.

That successor does not need to know what the first surveyor concluded. He needs to know what the first surveyor observed, so he can go find the same physical evidence, repeat the same measurements, and determine for himself whether the conclusion holds.

Our predecessors filed the measurements because measurements preserve the ability of the next professional to independently solve the problem. They did not preserve only their answer.

They preserved enough evidence for the next surveyor to disagree with them.

That is the design. A good survey record does not ask the next surveyor to trust the last one. It gives him what he needs to reach his own conclusion, including the conclusion that the last one got it wrong.

A coordinate asks for trust. Measurements offer proof.

No statute is required telling a professional land surveyor how to execute fundamental land surveying.

Somewhere along the way, we lost San Diego.

DWoolley