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.
We Lost San Diego
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DWoolley
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We Lost San Diego
Last edited by DWoolley on Tue Sep 01, 2026 6:58 am, edited 2 times in total.
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hellsangle
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Re: We Lost San Diego
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
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
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DWoolley
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Re: We Lost San Diego
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
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
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DWoolley
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Re: We Lost San Diego
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
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
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mpallamary
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Re: We Lost San Diego
Well said, Dave. And now we do not have a City Surveyor!
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pls5528
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Re: We Lost San Diego
With this, San Diego has accepted an Architects mentality! Simply geometry floating in space with no validation?
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PLS9196
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Re: We Lost San Diego
A lot of valid points, and a respectable position. Here is the rub. It seems the big issue is validation of the points being found, the particular example posted looks to be sideline control of some sort; to validate these positions we are talking a full-blown boundary survey and an ROS being filed. Perhaps the work being performed is right of way rehabilitation, repair and replace, in place.
8771(a) "the perpetuation or easy reestablishment of any point", judging soley by the example provided, point one was occupied, two was back sighted, three and four were radially located. Point's one and three are noted as being used in field procedure, no idea what that actually means, but I can only assume one or three were occupied and four was reset. In any event, I have a reasonable idea of the procedures used to locate and reset the monument, I have coordinates I can calculate distances AND angles between the control. I I were surveying in the area I have more than enough to check the quality of the work performed to replace point 4, and to check the initial integrity of points one, two and three, assuming they are still in place.
I'd rather follow a Corner Record that states procedure and reports coordinates (that I can calculate into angles and distances as a check), than one that shows four RP's simply states distance ties to a found monument, which in some cases have turned out to be slope chained in with rag tape. That procedure seems to have stopped, but in the jurisdiction I'm alluding to, there isn't any form of procedure noted, more of a "bro take my word for it"
While your opinion may differ, I see a Corner Record as a tool to perpetuate monuments in situations where a full-blown boundary survey wasn't necessary, but there are monuments that will be destroyed. Do we document their position, reset them and perpetuate the positions, or do we skirt the law and blow them off?
Again I'd rather follow assumed coordinates that state a backsight and occupation over simple "bro take my word for it" distance ties. Your milage may vary.
Respect.
8771(a) "the perpetuation or easy reestablishment of any point", judging soley by the example provided, point one was occupied, two was back sighted, three and four were radially located. Point's one and three are noted as being used in field procedure, no idea what that actually means, but I can only assume one or three were occupied and four was reset. In any event, I have a reasonable idea of the procedures used to locate and reset the monument, I have coordinates I can calculate distances AND angles between the control. I I were surveying in the area I have more than enough to check the quality of the work performed to replace point 4, and to check the initial integrity of points one, two and three, assuming they are still in place.
I'd rather follow a Corner Record that states procedure and reports coordinates (that I can calculate into angles and distances as a check), than one that shows four RP's simply states distance ties to a found monument, which in some cases have turned out to be slope chained in with rag tape. That procedure seems to have stopped, but in the jurisdiction I'm alluding to, there isn't any form of procedure noted, more of a "bro take my word for it"
While your opinion may differ, I see a Corner Record as a tool to perpetuate monuments in situations where a full-blown boundary survey wasn't necessary, but there are monuments that will be destroyed. Do we document their position, reset them and perpetuate the positions, or do we skirt the law and blow them off?
Again I'd rather follow assumed coordinates that state a backsight and occupation over simple "bro take my word for it" distance ties. Your milage may vary.
Respect.
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David Kendall
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Re: We Lost San Diego
Generally I agree with this statement but I disagree with the gradual degradation of our work product.PLS9196 wrote: Wed Sep 02, 2026 7:41 pm I'd rather follow assumed coordinates that state a backsight and occupation over simple "bro take my word for it" distance ties.
Accepting this product as a county standard is problematic.
I could make it work with some level of confidence.... Does it really cost that much more to report a bearing and distance?
I advocate and practice tying two record monuments together on my corner records. I find the swing ties to be cluttering the record and holding marginal value as a survey document. Also I save a dollar and the wear on my hammer head by not having to pound 4 concrete nails
I have too much esteem for my license to stamp this kind of document, or even the ones with a monument and four random pk nails set around it.
My position is that a qualified LS ought to report a measurement to another found record monument (prefereably two) or go get a Civil Engineer license if this is the kind of product that you honestly consider to be the practice of land surveying
The race to the bottom continues!
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DWoolley
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Re: We Lost San Diego
PLS9196:
Thank you for the comments. You engaged the thread rather than offering agreement or silent disagreement, and that moves the conversation forward.
Start with what you did in your second paragraph, because I want other people reading this to notice it.
You took a corner record and reconstructed the field procedure from it. Point 1 occupied, 2 backsighted, 3 and 4 radially located. You worked out which point was probably occupied for the reset.
That is a reasonable approach, and it is exactly what the next retracement surveyor will attempt.
Now look at what it cost you.
You wrote that the procedure note gave you "no idea what that actually means, but I can only assume." That is the point. You assumed which point was occupied on the reset. Then you derived the geometry by inverse. That is arithmetic on the answer, not an observation of anything. Boundaries are not established on unprovable assumptions, and on that we will all agree.
Three inferences and an inverse to recover information the filing surveyor already possessed and did not put on the record. That is the failure.
You are a capable surveyor doing salvage work on a record that could have handed you the underlying observations. And you did it with all four points still available, with no way to check any of it against anything independent. No traverse. No distance-distance. No angle-angle. Nothing to test against the other found monuments and improvements in the event there is an issue.
Now put yourself thirty years out, with two of those points gone. Or with one of the four coordinates simply shown wrong, and no way to determine which one.
On the Inverse, the Crux
You said you can inverse the coordinates, obtain angles and distances, and check the quality of the work. You can obtain the numbers. They are not measurements. They are byproducts of measurements, and they arrive without qualification. What you cannot obtain is an independent check on the observations that produced them.
An inverse is arithmetic performed on the conclusion. If the crew turned the wrong angle, observed the wrong point, used the wrong rod height, or ran a short backsight into a long foresight, that error was absorbed into the computed coordinates. The inverse does not expose it. It faithfully reports the geometry of the coordinates containing it.
No redundancy. No check. No qualification. Our entire professional life is built on checking, documenting, redundancy, and evidence.
Here is how I explain it to an inexperienced surveyor in my office.
Take two independently measured distances to the same point from two different monuments. They disagree by two tenths. That disagreement is information. Something is wrong, and now I have an obligation to figure out what is wrong. Maybe an observation is bad. Maybe a monument moved. Maybe there is a solution the first surveyor did not consider.
Now give me two coordinates and let me inverse between them. I get one mathematically exact distance. Inverse them tomorrow and I get the same distance. There is no independent observation in that calculation capable of disagreeing with the first one. A traverse computed entirely from its own reduced coordinates can be made mathematically perfect. That perfection says nothing about whether the underlying observations were correct. The inverse checks the arithmetic relationship between the coordinates. It does not check the observations that created them.
The Coordinates Are Not Qualified in Any Way
This is the part that gets no attention and rests at the heart of the issue. Those corner record coordinates carry no statement of how they were determined. Nothing stating the monuments were double determined, four angles, two distances, an adjustment, and a resulting accuracy statement. Just coordinates, absolute coordinates. Shot from two hundred feet with a twenty foot rod? We will never know.
Lean the rod, collect the coordinate, put it on the corner record. Nobody will ever know, including both signers. And before somebody says the receiver would have caught it, that is the whole argument. You are trusting the instrument because the record gives you nothing else to trust.
With four measured local ties, all four are not going to be wrong. I have found reset monuments that would not fit the local ties, and the reason was that the surveyor who set the post-construction monument had the north arrow upside down. I had enough evidence to work out the problem.
That is the difference between a record you can evaluate and a record you can only accept.
On the Comparison
Would you rather follow a corner record with coordinates (with no ancillary procedure notes or information) rather than four tagged reference monuments with bare distance ties, no angles, no procedure, the way it has been for over 100 years?
Your complaint about that record is legitimate, and I suspect it comes from experience. An undocumented tie with no record, do redundancy, or a procedure is a poor record and I am not defending it. But look at the choice you were handed: two deficient records, pick one. That is a false choice.
The comparison is not coordinates against chained ties. It is coordinates against a properly documented perpetuation record. Measured angles and distances, the field procedure, a defined basis of bearings where appropriate (assumed is acceptable), identifiable monuments, and the coordinates right there alongside them, so long as the measurements and procedures are included.
And I would not write off the chained tie so quickly. A couple of years ago I recovered ties set in 1917. They proved that a parcel map submitted for checking more than 100 years later was off half a foot. Those ties outlived the man who set them, the equipment he used, and the surveyor they eventually corrected. In fact, I suspect Gawd caught wind of his missing the original monuments and the ties and called him home before his time.
The difference between the two records you are comparing is this. A bad measurement can still be recognized as bad. A missing one cannot.
On the Scope Question
You asked whether this means a full boundary survey and a record of survey every time a monument is threatened by construction.
No. Showing measurements between the corner and identifiable reference monuments does not, by itself, turn a monument preservation survey into a boundary survey. Section 8771 lets you file either a corner record or a record of survey for the perpetuation work, your choice. A separate record of survey obligation can arise if the field survey discloses one of the conditions in section 8762, but that is a different question and it has nothing to do with whether you drew the ties.
Section 464(a)(10) asks for exactly what we are discussing. Measurements that relate the corner to other identifiable monuments. The technical burden you are painting is not what I am advocating.
Why This Matters Beyond the Paperwork
Independent measurements can conflict with one another. That conflict is not noise to be cleaned out of the record. It is information, and professional judgment lives in evaluating it.
That is land surveying.
If a coordinate is sufficient, then this is not land surveying, and there is no principled reason a contractor or a GIS technician with an RTK rover could not perpetuate monuments just as well.
Which Brings Me to Crownholm
Crownholm went to federal court arguing that California could not constitutionally reserve this work to licensed land surveyors. He lost. The Ninth Circuit rejected the challenge and affirmed dismissal. The Supreme Court denied certiorari, and later denied rehearing. That litigation is over.
So the profession just came through a direct challenge to the licensing boundary with the license intact and the practice questions answered once and for all.
Then, San Diego went to work on it from the inside. They started filing corner records with coordinates and no measurements - a record with no professional judgment in it. Nothing weighed. Nothing tested. Nothing resolved. Occupy a point, record a number, file the sheet.
The courts declined to strip the practice of its need for licensure to protect the public. San Diego filed several hundred records demonstrating that a rover and an afternoon will do.
"Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome", said Charlie Munger. The incentive was four fewer ties per monument and not showing the measurements. Against that we set the rules of evidence, the art and science of measurement, and our own license. The ties won.
Nobody has to deregulate us if we are willing to document ourselves out of the practice. We are building the case for the other side, filing it in the public record, and getting it stamped on the way in.
The license is not a toll booth. It is not there to tax the public. It exists because the work requires judgment about evidence, and the only place we ever prove that is the record we leave behind.
Right now, in San Diego, that record says we did not exercise any professional judgment and denied decades of faithful, consistent practice.
In Closing
9196, you placed value on the procedure note, and rightly.
Take your own reasoning one step further. If the procedure is valuable because it preserves what the surveyor actually did, why would the measurements produced by that procedure be less valuable than the coordinates computed from them?
Procedure plus measurements gives the succeeding surveyor the evidence. The coordinates can then accompany the measurements, in the "optional" field on page one. Ask yourself why the Board printed the word optional there.
They have always had coordinates. So why do we have a hundred and fifty years of filed records without them? Land surveying and land survey law are old and stable. There is very little left to discover. And yet around 2018 San Diego apparently found something that had escaped everyone in the history of California land surveying, really?
What appears to have happened is that monument preservation stopped being surveying and became a staking exercise. Real property corners that keep civil peace and stabilize land title are not sanitary sewer line and grade.
My next post takes up the untagged scribed X and the untagged mag nails, which is a separate problem.
Keep the conversation rolling. This thread is more useful with you questioning me than without, and I would rather have the argument tested than agreed with. I only wish one of 340 licensed surveyors in San Diego had done what you are doing here, back in 2018.
Respect returned.
DWoolley
Thank you for the comments. You engaged the thread rather than offering agreement or silent disagreement, and that moves the conversation forward.
Start with what you did in your second paragraph, because I want other people reading this to notice it.
You took a corner record and reconstructed the field procedure from it. Point 1 occupied, 2 backsighted, 3 and 4 radially located. You worked out which point was probably occupied for the reset.
That is a reasonable approach, and it is exactly what the next retracement surveyor will attempt.
Now look at what it cost you.
You wrote that the procedure note gave you "no idea what that actually means, but I can only assume." That is the point. You assumed which point was occupied on the reset. Then you derived the geometry by inverse. That is arithmetic on the answer, not an observation of anything. Boundaries are not established on unprovable assumptions, and on that we will all agree.
Three inferences and an inverse to recover information the filing surveyor already possessed and did not put on the record. That is the failure.
You are a capable surveyor doing salvage work on a record that could have handed you the underlying observations. And you did it with all four points still available, with no way to check any of it against anything independent. No traverse. No distance-distance. No angle-angle. Nothing to test against the other found monuments and improvements in the event there is an issue.
Now put yourself thirty years out, with two of those points gone. Or with one of the four coordinates simply shown wrong, and no way to determine which one.
On the Inverse, the Crux
You said you can inverse the coordinates, obtain angles and distances, and check the quality of the work. You can obtain the numbers. They are not measurements. They are byproducts of measurements, and they arrive without qualification. What you cannot obtain is an independent check on the observations that produced them.
An inverse is arithmetic performed on the conclusion. If the crew turned the wrong angle, observed the wrong point, used the wrong rod height, or ran a short backsight into a long foresight, that error was absorbed into the computed coordinates. The inverse does not expose it. It faithfully reports the geometry of the coordinates containing it.
No redundancy. No check. No qualification. Our entire professional life is built on checking, documenting, redundancy, and evidence.
Here is how I explain it to an inexperienced surveyor in my office.
Take two independently measured distances to the same point from two different monuments. They disagree by two tenths. That disagreement is information. Something is wrong, and now I have an obligation to figure out what is wrong. Maybe an observation is bad. Maybe a monument moved. Maybe there is a solution the first surveyor did not consider.
Now give me two coordinates and let me inverse between them. I get one mathematically exact distance. Inverse them tomorrow and I get the same distance. There is no independent observation in that calculation capable of disagreeing with the first one. A traverse computed entirely from its own reduced coordinates can be made mathematically perfect. That perfection says nothing about whether the underlying observations were correct. The inverse checks the arithmetic relationship between the coordinates. It does not check the observations that created them.
The Coordinates Are Not Qualified in Any Way
This is the part that gets no attention and rests at the heart of the issue. Those corner record coordinates carry no statement of how they were determined. Nothing stating the monuments were double determined, four angles, two distances, an adjustment, and a resulting accuracy statement. Just coordinates, absolute coordinates. Shot from two hundred feet with a twenty foot rod? We will never know.
Lean the rod, collect the coordinate, put it on the corner record. Nobody will ever know, including both signers. And before somebody says the receiver would have caught it, that is the whole argument. You are trusting the instrument because the record gives you nothing else to trust.
With four measured local ties, all four are not going to be wrong. I have found reset monuments that would not fit the local ties, and the reason was that the surveyor who set the post-construction monument had the north arrow upside down. I had enough evidence to work out the problem.
That is the difference between a record you can evaluate and a record you can only accept.
On the Comparison
Would you rather follow a corner record with coordinates (with no ancillary procedure notes or information) rather than four tagged reference monuments with bare distance ties, no angles, no procedure, the way it has been for over 100 years?
Your complaint about that record is legitimate, and I suspect it comes from experience. An undocumented tie with no record, do redundancy, or a procedure is a poor record and I am not defending it. But look at the choice you were handed: two deficient records, pick one. That is a false choice.
The comparison is not coordinates against chained ties. It is coordinates against a properly documented perpetuation record. Measured angles and distances, the field procedure, a defined basis of bearings where appropriate (assumed is acceptable), identifiable monuments, and the coordinates right there alongside them, so long as the measurements and procedures are included.
And I would not write off the chained tie so quickly. A couple of years ago I recovered ties set in 1917. They proved that a parcel map submitted for checking more than 100 years later was off half a foot. Those ties outlived the man who set them, the equipment he used, and the surveyor they eventually corrected. In fact, I suspect Gawd caught wind of his missing the original monuments and the ties and called him home before his time.
The difference between the two records you are comparing is this. A bad measurement can still be recognized as bad. A missing one cannot.
On the Scope Question
You asked whether this means a full boundary survey and a record of survey every time a monument is threatened by construction.
No. Showing measurements between the corner and identifiable reference monuments does not, by itself, turn a monument preservation survey into a boundary survey. Section 8771 lets you file either a corner record or a record of survey for the perpetuation work, your choice. A separate record of survey obligation can arise if the field survey discloses one of the conditions in section 8762, but that is a different question and it has nothing to do with whether you drew the ties.
Section 464(a)(10) asks for exactly what we are discussing. Measurements that relate the corner to other identifiable monuments. The technical burden you are painting is not what I am advocating.
Why This Matters Beyond the Paperwork
Independent measurements can conflict with one another. That conflict is not noise to be cleaned out of the record. It is information, and professional judgment lives in evaluating it.
That is land surveying.
If a coordinate is sufficient, then this is not land surveying, and there is no principled reason a contractor or a GIS technician with an RTK rover could not perpetuate monuments just as well.
Which Brings Me to Crownholm
Crownholm went to federal court arguing that California could not constitutionally reserve this work to licensed land surveyors. He lost. The Ninth Circuit rejected the challenge and affirmed dismissal. The Supreme Court denied certiorari, and later denied rehearing. That litigation is over.
So the profession just came through a direct challenge to the licensing boundary with the license intact and the practice questions answered once and for all.
Then, San Diego went to work on it from the inside. They started filing corner records with coordinates and no measurements - a record with no professional judgment in it. Nothing weighed. Nothing tested. Nothing resolved. Occupy a point, record a number, file the sheet.
The courts declined to strip the practice of its need for licensure to protect the public. San Diego filed several hundred records demonstrating that a rover and an afternoon will do.
"Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome", said Charlie Munger. The incentive was four fewer ties per monument and not showing the measurements. Against that we set the rules of evidence, the art and science of measurement, and our own license. The ties won.
Nobody has to deregulate us if we are willing to document ourselves out of the practice. We are building the case for the other side, filing it in the public record, and getting it stamped on the way in.
The license is not a toll booth. It is not there to tax the public. It exists because the work requires judgment about evidence, and the only place we ever prove that is the record we leave behind.
Right now, in San Diego, that record says we did not exercise any professional judgment and denied decades of faithful, consistent practice.
In Closing
9196, you placed value on the procedure note, and rightly.
Take your own reasoning one step further. If the procedure is valuable because it preserves what the surveyor actually did, why would the measurements produced by that procedure be less valuable than the coordinates computed from them?
Procedure plus measurements gives the succeeding surveyor the evidence. The coordinates can then accompany the measurements, in the "optional" field on page one. Ask yourself why the Board printed the word optional there.
They have always had coordinates. So why do we have a hundred and fifty years of filed records without them? Land surveying and land survey law are old and stable. There is very little left to discover. And yet around 2018 San Diego apparently found something that had escaped everyone in the history of California land surveying, really?
What appears to have happened is that monument preservation stopped being surveying and became a staking exercise. Real property corners that keep civil peace and stabilize land title are not sanitary sewer line and grade.
My next post takes up the untagged scribed X and the untagged mag nails, which is a separate problem.
Keep the conversation rolling. This thread is more useful with you questioning me than without, and I would rather have the argument tested than agreed with. I only wish one of 340 licensed surveyors in San Diego had done what you are doing here, back in 2018.
Respect returned.
DWoolley
-
dharri
- Posts: 37
- Joined: Tue May 03, 2016 7:20 am
Re: We Lost San Diego
Dave my friend:
I am concerned that you are overthinking this CR situation a little bit. I was the LS responsible for the review of Corner Records for the San Diego County Surveyor from 1978 until 2007. The CR example that you provided is a pre/post construction CR and not a property line retracement CR. During the 80’s and 90’s, survey monument perpetuation after construction was a relatively new concept. Your example is a simple, inexpensive method to accomplish that task. I think that it is a better method than a number of “swing ties”. In your example, all monuments are related to one another so that in the future, any missing monuments can be replaced by locating two existing monuments found from the CR. I suspect that the bearings and distances shown on filed maps over the last hundred years are the result of field measurements processed through some form of coordinate geometry process and not direct field measurements.
Dan D. Harrison
PLS 4557
I am concerned that you are overthinking this CR situation a little bit. I was the LS responsible for the review of Corner Records for the San Diego County Surveyor from 1978 until 2007. The CR example that you provided is a pre/post construction CR and not a property line retracement CR. During the 80’s and 90’s, survey monument perpetuation after construction was a relatively new concept. Your example is a simple, inexpensive method to accomplish that task. I think that it is a better method than a number of “swing ties”. In your example, all monuments are related to one another so that in the future, any missing monuments can be replaced by locating two existing monuments found from the CR. I suspect that the bearings and distances shown on filed maps over the last hundred years are the result of field measurements processed through some form of coordinate geometry process and not direct field measurements.
Dan D. Harrison
PLS 4557
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Peter Ehlert
- Posts: 719
- Joined: Sun Oct 26, 2003 2:40 pm
- Location: N31°43', W116°39'
- Contact:
Re: We Lost San Diego
Good to hear from you Dan.
...
Our work products need to be understood by the land owners. The man on the street.
A bucket of numbers is worthless.
We, the Professionals, much keep that in mind before we spit this stuff out.
...
Our work products need to be understood by the land owners. The man on the street.
A bucket of numbers is worthless.
We, the Professionals, much keep that in mind before we spit this stuff out.
Peter Ehlert PLS 5116 (retired)
-
DWoolley
- Posts: 1079
- Joined: Tue Aug 01, 2006 3:21 pm
- Location: Orange County
- Contact:
Re: We Lost San Diego
Dan:
Some context for everyone reading this thread. Dan and I go back more than thirty years, much of it working collaboratively on opposite sides of the counter. He has reviewed a great deal of my work, and his reviews were careful, honest, technical and fair every time. When Dan Harrison tells me I may be overthinking something, I do not brush it off. I go back and think about it again.
I have thought it through. Here is where I landed:
You are right that the example is a pre and post construction perpetuation record and not a property line retracement. I am not suggesting a boundary survey for every threatened monument, and if I gave that impression I said it poorly.
You are also right about the utility. With two of those monuments identified and recovered, I can inverse the coordinate values, reconstruct the relative geometry, and reset the missing point. I concede that without reservation.
And your last point is the best argument anybody has made in this thread. You are correct that the bearings and distances on filed maps over the last hundred years were largely the product of field observations run through some form of coordinate geometry rather than raw instrument readings. My earlier distinction between measurements and computed values was too simple. A published bearing or distance can itself be the product of reduction and computation. You are right about that, and I appreciate the correction.
Here is what I think survives that correction.
When a surveyor publishes a bearing and distance between two identifiable monuments, he is expressly reporting that relationship. Publish several of them and the succeeding surveyor inherits more than the resulting geometry. He inherits the ability to test each reported relationship against the physical evidence he recovers, and against the others. We are surveying again.
The same field work can be reduced and adjusted into a set of coordinates representing a perfectly consistent final geometry. I can inverse those coordinates six ways from Sunday. But every inverse comes out of that same reduced solution, and the solution agrees with itself because it was made to agree. That consistency was produced in the reduction. It was not observed in the field.
What I cannot recover from the coordinates alone are the discrepancies that existed before the reduction resolved them.
If three reported relationships fit the evidence I recover and one does not, I have something to investigate. Maybe a monument moved. Maybe an observation was bad. Maybe something got transposed. If all I have is a coordinate set, everything fits, and it will fit tomorrow too.
Same crew, same day, same instrument. Less of what the crew knew reaches the permanent record.
Your History Helps, and Raises a Question
You watched this develop from 1978 to 2007, and your point that post construction monument perpetuation as a corner record was a relatively new concept in the eighties and nineties changes how I have been thinking about it. The obligation existed before that in another form. We had ties. What was new was the form and filing location.
I had been carrying around an account in which a profession abandoned something it understood. What you describe is different. A new obligation arrived in a new form, people worked out how to meet it with the tools they had, cost pressure was constant, and the practice developed one filing at a time. That is a more useful and considerably more forgiving explanation than mine, and I should have had it from the start.
But it leaves me with a question I cannot answer, and you may be the only person who can.
You held that red pen and yellow highlighter for twenty-nine years. Coordinates were available the entire time. Your crews computed them, your submitters computed them, and the arithmetic was no harder in 1995 than it is now.
The records I am looking at start around 2018. Eleven years after you left.
So what was the standard while you were there? If a surveyor had submitted a preconstruction corner record showing four monuments and nothing but a local coordinate table, would it have been filed? I do not recall seeing one in San Diego or any other county. If so, why is that?
I am not asking to make a point. I am asking because if the answer is no, then something changed after 2007, and I would like to understand what.
What Bothers Me
The phrase that stuck with me is simple, inexpensive method. I know exactly what you mean, and the field operation is simple. Modern equipment has made it remarkably inexpensive.
But I think it points at how we have come to see the task. A monument does not exist in isolation. It is one end of a line.
We may not be determining that boundary when we file a preconstruction record. We may not be retracing anything or expressing any opinion at all. But the monument being preserved may be one end of a boundary that has been settled and relied upon for generations.
Think about an old neighborhood. A piece of iron, lead and tack, or a concrete monument sits in the street for a hundred years. Nobody walking past knows what it is or what it represents. Nobody thanks it. It costs nothing to maintain. And it is quietly holding the neighborhood together. Survey after survey has relied on it. Deeds have been interpreted through it. Improvements went in against it. Houses have been bought and sold. Fences stayed where they are. Neighbors have lived next door to one another without ever discovering there was a boundary question available to fight about.
Then a construction project shows up and we know the monument is coming out. The construction is finished in six months. The settled boundary outlives all of us. The cost of setting the point is measured in dollars. The value of the monument is measured in what it settles, secure title, undisputed ownership.
Where We May Disagree
You are satisfied that with sufficient surviving monuments the coordinate network reproduces the missing point. I agree that it can.
My question is whether reproducing the point is the same thing as perpetuating the monument. I do not think it is, because the loss of that monument could cause a lot of instability in the title infrastructure.
You were reviewing these records before I was in middle school, and from the other side of the counter. If there is something about the history or the purpose of the practice of land surveying that I am missing, I want to hear it. You have been giving me straight answers for thirty years, including a fair number that made me a better surveyor, and I would expect nothing different now.
I am glad you joined the discussion.
Dave
I have two additional posts I am still rolling around in my mind.
Some context for everyone reading this thread. Dan and I go back more than thirty years, much of it working collaboratively on opposite sides of the counter. He has reviewed a great deal of my work, and his reviews were careful, honest, technical and fair every time. When Dan Harrison tells me I may be overthinking something, I do not brush it off. I go back and think about it again.
I have thought it through. Here is where I landed:
You are right that the example is a pre and post construction perpetuation record and not a property line retracement. I am not suggesting a boundary survey for every threatened monument, and if I gave that impression I said it poorly.
You are also right about the utility. With two of those monuments identified and recovered, I can inverse the coordinate values, reconstruct the relative geometry, and reset the missing point. I concede that without reservation.
And your last point is the best argument anybody has made in this thread. You are correct that the bearings and distances on filed maps over the last hundred years were largely the product of field observations run through some form of coordinate geometry rather than raw instrument readings. My earlier distinction between measurements and computed values was too simple. A published bearing or distance can itself be the product of reduction and computation. You are right about that, and I appreciate the correction.
Here is what I think survives that correction.
When a surveyor publishes a bearing and distance between two identifiable monuments, he is expressly reporting that relationship. Publish several of them and the succeeding surveyor inherits more than the resulting geometry. He inherits the ability to test each reported relationship against the physical evidence he recovers, and against the others. We are surveying again.
The same field work can be reduced and adjusted into a set of coordinates representing a perfectly consistent final geometry. I can inverse those coordinates six ways from Sunday. But every inverse comes out of that same reduced solution, and the solution agrees with itself because it was made to agree. That consistency was produced in the reduction. It was not observed in the field.
What I cannot recover from the coordinates alone are the discrepancies that existed before the reduction resolved them.
If three reported relationships fit the evidence I recover and one does not, I have something to investigate. Maybe a monument moved. Maybe an observation was bad. Maybe something got transposed. If all I have is a coordinate set, everything fits, and it will fit tomorrow too.
Same crew, same day, same instrument. Less of what the crew knew reaches the permanent record.
Your History Helps, and Raises a Question
You watched this develop from 1978 to 2007, and your point that post construction monument perpetuation as a corner record was a relatively new concept in the eighties and nineties changes how I have been thinking about it. The obligation existed before that in another form. We had ties. What was new was the form and filing location.
I had been carrying around an account in which a profession abandoned something it understood. What you describe is different. A new obligation arrived in a new form, people worked out how to meet it with the tools they had, cost pressure was constant, and the practice developed one filing at a time. That is a more useful and considerably more forgiving explanation than mine, and I should have had it from the start.
But it leaves me with a question I cannot answer, and you may be the only person who can.
You held that red pen and yellow highlighter for twenty-nine years. Coordinates were available the entire time. Your crews computed them, your submitters computed them, and the arithmetic was no harder in 1995 than it is now.
The records I am looking at start around 2018. Eleven years after you left.
So what was the standard while you were there? If a surveyor had submitted a preconstruction corner record showing four monuments and nothing but a local coordinate table, would it have been filed? I do not recall seeing one in San Diego or any other county. If so, why is that?
I am not asking to make a point. I am asking because if the answer is no, then something changed after 2007, and I would like to understand what.
What Bothers Me
The phrase that stuck with me is simple, inexpensive method. I know exactly what you mean, and the field operation is simple. Modern equipment has made it remarkably inexpensive.
But I think it points at how we have come to see the task. A monument does not exist in isolation. It is one end of a line.
We may not be determining that boundary when we file a preconstruction record. We may not be retracing anything or expressing any opinion at all. But the monument being preserved may be one end of a boundary that has been settled and relied upon for generations.
Think about an old neighborhood. A piece of iron, lead and tack, or a concrete monument sits in the street for a hundred years. Nobody walking past knows what it is or what it represents. Nobody thanks it. It costs nothing to maintain. And it is quietly holding the neighborhood together. Survey after survey has relied on it. Deeds have been interpreted through it. Improvements went in against it. Houses have been bought and sold. Fences stayed where they are. Neighbors have lived next door to one another without ever discovering there was a boundary question available to fight about.
Then a construction project shows up and we know the monument is coming out. The construction is finished in six months. The settled boundary outlives all of us. The cost of setting the point is measured in dollars. The value of the monument is measured in what it settles, secure title, undisputed ownership.
Where We May Disagree
You are satisfied that with sufficient surviving monuments the coordinate network reproduces the missing point. I agree that it can.
My question is whether reproducing the point is the same thing as perpetuating the monument. I do not think it is, because the loss of that monument could cause a lot of instability in the title infrastructure.
You were reviewing these records before I was in middle school, and from the other side of the counter. If there is something about the history or the purpose of the practice of land surveying that I am missing, I want to hear it. You have been giving me straight answers for thirty years, including a fair number that made me a better surveyor, and I would expect nothing different now.
I am glad you joined the discussion.
Dave
I have two additional posts I am still rolling around in my mind.