California Surveyors Forums

A small group of land surveyors from the Central Valley Chapter of CLSA are starting work on a program to inventory and maintain PLSS monuments within San Joaquin County. This program will be supported entirely by volunteers.

The program is still in its infancy, but we hope to have our first planning meeting in June. Our goal is to have a horizontal datum established for the County and filed as a Record-of-Survey by the end of 2009. We will then begin the work to inventory and locate existing corners in our first township.

This first township will serve as our "pilot project" and will allow us to iron out kinks in the program.

If you work in San Joaquin County and are interested in voluntering with this program, please send me an e-mail to lblake@ksninc.com or sunburned.surveyor@gmail.com. I believe there will be some excellent learning opportunities for those that participate, and I hope this program will eventually be a model of a way land surveyors can make a real and tangible difference in their communities and in their profession.

You can read a proposal that I presented for the program at our last CLSA meeting here:

http://www.redefinedhorizons.com/shared ... oposal.pdf

Please note: At this point our program is very informal, and it does not have any official support from the County, CLSA, or our CLSA chapter. Things are still developing, but I wanted to get this e-mail out to those in our area that want to be involved but weren't able to attend our last chapter meeting.

The Sunburned Surveyor (PLS 8489)

Sounds like a worthy cause. I'm too far away to help, or I would.

Oregon has a Govt. corner preservation fund that was created through legislative session a few years back. Portions of county recording fees go into this fund to be used by the respective county surveyors. There is some abuse of fund usage statewide, but overall a good idea.

Be pretty tough getting this idea approved in the current economic crisis.

This is interesting and sounds like a nice idea to have an inventory. I think there could be some concerns with this though. What kind of liability issues will there be, when you find a IP with a tag at what is thought to be a section corner, but 10 feet away is also a found stone that was originally set by the GLO? Are you going to be calling the found monuments section corners? Are you going to be surveying every section line, or are you just going to plot the section lines and then plot where you found a monument, and say what you found. Are you planning to pull references for everything that's found? Someone in the future might think this was a boundary survey and use it as such. If I were doing this, and I did an RS, I would have a really big note on each sheet explaining the purpose of the map as an inventory and not a survey and that section lines are ploted for reference only.

I'm sure you've probably thought of all this, but I'll throw it out there anyway.

Ryan.

Ryan,

You have asked some good questions that deserve some thought. I don't know that we've got answers to all of your questions...yet. I believe these are some of the things we will need to discuss as a group, and hopefully we will work out some of these issues on our pilot project.

It may be that these questions will need to be addressed on a corner by corner basis. I think it is reasonable that we may accept corner monuments as the actual corners when there is ample evidence that this is the case. When there is conflicting evidence, or not enough evidence, we may state on the map what we found, and not make a judgement on the status of the monument as an actual PLSS corner location.

I think the discussion that will occur among the members about this very issue will be one of the greatest benefits to the program. It will help us understand how our peers gather, evaluate, and base decisions on the avialable evidence.

At the end of the day, even if we haven't accepted a single corner monument as the actual PLSS corner, we will have at a minimum perserved some importance evidence of what could be the actual PLSS corner for future generation of surveyors.

Ultimately, each surveyor will have to consider the information we have gatherd and filed on our map and make his (or her) own decision on the status of the monument as a PLSS corner. Hopefully we will provide some data that will make this job easier for him (or her).

One advantage of our approach is that we will be evaluating evidence as a group, and not as individual surveyors. As a new and less experienced land surveyor I look forward to tapping into the collective local knowledge and experience our our group.

The Sunburned Surveyor (PLS 8489)

Ryan asked if we will be doing research on found monuments.

We do plan on performing this research as part of the inventory. That would include a search of all Record-of-Survey maps, Parcel Maps, Subdivision (Tract) Maps, Corner Records, GLO Platt/Field Notes, and other survey records available at our County. Ideally, the inventory will allow a land surveyor to see the records associated with each corner. We hope to incorporate this informaiton into one or more GIS layers.

The Record-of-Survey filed for the township will provide California State Plane Coordinates and Latitude/Longitude values for the found property corner monuments based on the County horizontal datum we create for the County. It may show bearings and distances between adjacent corners when appropriate. The final content of the map, and the statements it contains, will need to be decided by the volunteers that stamp and sign the final Record-of-Survey.

I'm a little nervous about stating too many details, because much of this will still need to be decided, and it won't be my sole decision. I will be only a single voice among a handfull of voices. I know we will be doing SOMETHING to try and improve our local PLSS network, and that is certainly a change from the status qoa.

The Sunburned Surveyor (PLS 8489)

I've got some sites you guys can "volunteer" for down here. Let me know if you would like to do some volunteer topo's and construction staking too. I'll sign and stamp everything, no worries! It's lots of fun!

Seriously, I was thinking of doing a little hobby PLSS corner hunting except I'm worried that I'll get all the landowners up in a tissy if I show up on Saturday looking for corners.