California Surveyors Forums

Gentlemen,

Recently public agencies have been requesting and receiving pre engineered site plans at the tentative map submittal stage. (parcel maps)

They request road design with cut / fills, preliminary curb design, if applicable etc.

As a "land Survey only" firm, I'm am forced to locate an available civil engineer, then await supplimentary contract administration and suffer through the clients complaints about the need for Civil engineering and additional cost.

Section 66424.5 states in part . . . . "need not be based uopn an accurate or detailed final survey of the property".
HOWEVER, the preceeding words , do state . . . ""for the purpose of showing the design and improvement of a proposed subdivision and the existing conditions in and around it" . . .

Planning departments and Public works interpret the first part to mean to literally show the "preliminary" final design. In order to have a civil work do any work on a project under those circumstances, they justifiably request a full topo.

The sum of this professional work drives the cost of the investment way up and discourages clients from continuing. Those clients who do continue, pre-decide that the project should then be approved basd simply on their investment. I cant blame them. The trouble comes when a project is not approved at the commission and counsel (board of sup's) level. Shortly afterward, we hear from an attorney who wants to review our files and hold us in contempt for any possible point missed, causing the non approval.

Should We surveyors even be preparing tentative maps ?

Perhaps Engineers and attorneys should prepare tentative maps.

I see us Land Surveyors as evolving into "Boundary locating punching bags"
HELP !!!!!!!

signed
Nolan Voide

Nolan (really bad pun, BTW):

It has so evolved.

In the southern counties, the old bare dirt lot split is a thing of the past.

In the “old e days”, an owner could simply carve their 20-acre parcel into four 5-acre parcels. They didn’t have to show anything at all. Then came the requirement to show streets to access the interior parcels.

Some took advantage of this and created paper streets that could never be built. I can take you to one such subdivision within 10 miles of where I sit that has a “paper street” with a slope of over 70%! And the monuments are all in! To stop this practice, the local jurisdictional agencies (LJA) began requiring topography to be shown on the TPMs.

Some took advantage of the fact that USGS Quads are wide open and, often, the people at the LJA do not know how to read the topo. So, the LJA began to request an exemplar grading plan showing that pads COULD be built on the parcels. Full of their successes in bullying us into complying with these new conditions, they the planners began to demand “centerline studies” of the proposed roads. Then came the requirement for these studies to be a set of road construction plans that simply lack the cost estimate. The “rudimentary” grading plans for the pads became the limits for future grading plans.

Now, the LJA have pushed the surveyors out of the TPM market. Al we have left is the Parcel Map.

As one agency surveyor told me a few years ago, Parcel Maps are rapidly becoming a thing of the past in California…and good riddance to them! (His words, not mine!)

Until this latest requirement for full blown engineering plans, we got to the point where we were telling our clients that a parcel map would run $40K, minimum, from start to recorded Parcel Map. As one potential client told me yesterday, two and three lot splits just don’t pencil out anymore!

Nolan??!!

Our company regularly runs all land division projects through our Civil department. The actual map is only a phase of the process anymore. The engineers also seem more adept at handling all the other requirements for property division these days.

Hope all is well with you. Say hi to the "boss" for me.

Thanks Guys,
All is well with the "Boss" too. . .
(Ian, Scott is referring to my wife)


It looks like I will be sending flowers to my favorite Civil Engineer and resculpting contracts accordingly.

I actually don't disagree with the proceedures, as in the interest to protect the public.
We don't want any more John Bensons out there.

In reality just about every Lot division is a "development project"
I also dont agree with some well meaning helpers who say "just plug the data into land cad and let it spit out the answers"
This is still Civil engineering in California . . .right ?

DH