California Surveyors Forums

1. I see attorney written boundary line agreements written up splitting the difference between the locations opined by two surveyors as to the location of a boundary line when the evidence clearly points to one location over the other. The law states that if the line can be identified then boundary line agreements are not the proper way to go.

2. I see elaborate easements crafted and granted only to avoid the process of undertaking a lot line adjustment.

When are boundary lines going to be erased in favor of the whims of lawyers?

But we land surveyors are held to a different standard?

"Measurement is dead."

Is Land Surveying dead?

I'm getting sick. Not to mention the 7 boundary and topo maps I looked over in the last two weeks in order to propose on engineering services. The work of slobs. I am embarrassed to call myself a land surveyor. Are you kidding me? Clowns.

This industry is made up of clowns.

What do you expect CLSA to do? What can CLSA do?

CLSA is a volunteer organization run by business owners, employees, public workers, etc. Maybe CLSA can use your help on these matters.

Clark, you are right on and your concerns are valid. There are several steps that I believe should be taken. You have made an important one by expressing your concerns. There are four fronts that must be addressed. The first is with ourselves, the second is at the State Board, the third is education, and the fourth is CLSA. At a personal level I am trying as hard as I can whenever I can. Unfortunately, most people do not like change. We are losing ground and must redirect ourselves.

You seem to give your non-expert (silly pun) practicing professional land surveyors a brow beating with your article. I'm not having it. You want to dine with the sinners then you sit at the table with the sinners.

I expect your next article to take these thoughts into consideration.

Cheers.

__________________
Clark E. Stoner, PE, PLS

Parties hire their indepenent "expert".

Surveys results differ.

Parties affected don't want a protracted and expensive court battle, when harmony can be restored, (by the egos of both), to split the difference.

That is the "practical" side.

It does not mean that all other lines of that "good and correct" survey cannot be respected and the "bad one" dismissed.

Phil - Sonoma

PS - I know of an instance in Sausalito when exactly what Pallamary is talking about . . . the "good and correct" surveyor's client caved. It would have caused even greater fiscal difficulty go to court. (So many things wrong with that conflict - I get as upset as Michael P.)

I meant Clark too . . .

Beep Beep . . . it's been a long week!

Phil - Sonoma

My apologies to those offended.

The basic issue is that the lot line adjustment process is being circumvented at times by the use of boundary line agreements. Easement grants are another issue I reckon.

Is this a good way to go?

What is going to happen when the owners cannot get a certificate of compliance?

Clark, there is a lot of this going around. I blame a lot of surveyors for their own demise. In many instances, the lawyers are filling a void created by the surveyors. The laws are changing and far too many surveyors are unfamiliar with these changes and the basic laws. Whereas the surveyors should be advising the lawyers and clients, they don't because they don't understand this area of law. Forgive the over generalization. The point is, far too many lawyers are not familiar with this area of law and whereas the surveyors should be, they are not. The surveyor should be intimately familiar with these laws and they aren't. It is for this reason that we get crummy decisions. More to follow.

mpallamary wrote:Clark, there is a lot of this going around. I blame a lot of surveyors for their own demise. In many instances, the lawyers are filling a void created by the surveyors. The laws are changing and far too many surveyors are unfamiliar with these changes and the basic laws. Whereas the surveyors should be advising the lawyers and clients, they don't because they don't understand this area of law. Forgive the over generalization. The point is, far too many lawyers are not familiar with this area of law and whereas the surveyors should be, they are not. The surveyor should be intimately familiar with these laws and they aren't. It is for this reason that we get crummy decisions. More to follow.

In my few encounters with the legal system, I was surprised how inadequate the lawyers knowledge of real property law was. They are expecting us to be the experts while a lot of land surveyors think they just stake the deed and the judge has some magical way of fixing it, so called unwritten rights which equals adverse possession which means forget it. None of this is a big secret, just read the appellate opinions. Like anything there are good justices who write well and there are some who aren't so great.

Another thing I read about after the fact relates to the misunderstanding on how many times a section s to be subdivided (once hopefully). Surveyor surveys a 40 in 1890. In 1980 or so surveyor (now deceased) who has a reputation for helicoptering into settled sections and "fixing it" does a new subdivision of section. Some decades before that a deed was written tying to the old 1/16th corner monuments. It runs 500' along the section line and there is an old fence corner there. Well a couple of years ago a surveyor stakes the deed corner from the new 1980 1/16th moving the boundary about 40 or 50' off of the long established deed line. The property owner who lost on this foolishness didn't have 40 or 50' to lose. Of course he is poor and can't afford attorneys and high priced experts so he tries to do it himself against the deed staking expert, a very bad idea because the judge wouldn't let him bring into evidence any of the unrecorded old field notes and maps.

He loses and there is no use appealing (can't afford to anyway) because it is a fact decision and almost certainly the appellate court won't overturn the trial court on a finding of fact,

We are killing our profession with this type of cr*p.

The professiona is already dead. All that is left is to administer the last rites.

Dave,

Good post and surveyors are doing their own misdeeds; sometimes private surveyors and sometimes BLM surveyors.

The biggest issue of the day, is the "bogus theory" of subdividing a PLSS section and all PLSS surveyors should take a serious look at it.

This problem is created by surveyors who only have knowledge of how accurate their measuring machines are and........by some who actually believe that only government surveyors can survey the protracted center lines of the sections.

Testimony has been heard and read, where these protracted lines are legislatively mandated, similar to the legislatively mandated section lines and this really comes down to ONLY GOVERNMENT surveys can survey these lines.

Think about it.

Keith

Good points Mr. Karoly.

And Mr. Danskin, my review of a past survey of yours is spot on concerning the subject at hand. Your work was impeccable, it highlighted pedigreed local evidence that clearly trumped a previous math solution concerning the location of boundary lines, a discrepancy of several feet. Enter lawyer and boundary line agreement.

Phil, your work was right, the previous surveyor's work was wrong, grotesquely. Your client lost title to property for fear of the expenditure of defending it, or the hassle. Your client got strong armed into a boundary line agreement. That is not how boundary line agreements are supposed to serve the public.

Adios to the Land Surveyor. Examples like this exploit the reality that in the future the BLA will handle every type of disagreement, question, and not to mention "uncertainty" concerning the location of property boundaries. Poor title companies.

I do not accept this!

The vast majority of lawyers are not up to speed on local land use ordinances to interject some cavalier fixit solution, inappropriately applied, and expect positive results.

The profession is far from dead. I hear the doom & gloom from those reading the signs that "the end is nigh upon us!": The average age of a licensed surveyor is 59 years old.... There aren't enough surveyors to do the work that needs to be done..... Surveyors haven't embraced emerging areas of practice and so are becoming irrelevant....

And so the wailing continues.

Having lived and worked through many economic up & down cycles, I can say that there are never enough surveyors when the economy is at a peak, and there are always too many when the economy is in a trough. The same can be said for practically all professions and other lines of work. (Except that there are always too many lawyers, regardless of economic conditions. We can probably all agree on that.)

Our profession is probably the most neurotic about there not being enough members of our profession. The evidence is that so many of us wring our hands over the supposed problem even when we all know licensed surveyors, LSITs, and technicians who are unemployed or underemployed. It's ridiculous!

Think about it logically: Technology has advanced so that what took a crew of 4 or 5 to do when many of us started 30 or 40 years ago is now routinely done by one or two. What used to take several days to map can now be accomplished in an afternoon. Longhand calculations and point plotting that used to take days is done in a couple hours. It simply takes fewer people to do more work... lots more work in the same amount of time.

Some of us fret because there are civil engineers who suggest that due to an adequate number of surveyors, CEs should be again allowed to survey. Actually, I've heard this more from handwringing surveyors than I have from engineers. The fact is, they are already authorized to do a lot of the survey work they complain there isn't enough of us to do. so why aren't they already doing it?

I think it's because the threat isn't real and that it's mostly in the overwrought imaginations of many surveyors.

Get over it already! Take some Zoloft, Prozac, or whatever clams you down, get some therapy and just go do what no other profession is qualified to do! Stop bedwetting and go survey dammit!!

I heard at the conference this past week that the average age of licensed surveyors in CA is 59. Am I worried? Is it cause for concern? Heck no! It means I'm still one of the young fellas compared to the majority of my peers. Who knew? At 50, I still have 3 or 4 decades of productive potential. I feel like a kid!

Again, let's look at this "concern" logically. Average life spans are greater with each successive generation, meaning that one's productive career span doesn't end at 65. It can go on well into one's 80s for many people. Heck, Hal Davis is still kicking around and he's got to be 110. I see that as inspiration! When not done with some engineer pressuring you to slash your estimate so that your company's project bid will be more competetive (why don't they ever cut the engineering budgets to do that instead?), or to rush a job out that needs another day of consideration or a little more fieldwork before you're comfortable drawing the dark line, surveying is enjoyable, being bothe physically and intellectually stimulating. Many of us would gladly keep ourselves active in it part time for several years in semi-retirement through our 60s and 70s. The license is a source of professional pride and a symbol of accomplishment for many. I suspect that there are quite a few who maintain their license after retirement "just in case I decide to survey something".

The real metrics to be looking at there is whether the average age of attaining one's first license has increased significantly, and whether there are enough new licensees and unlicensed employees to do the same amount of work as those who are leaving the profession.

Given that technology allows less people to do more, fewer people are needed. And given that attrition due to age and age related health issues should be decreasing as time goes on, one should expect that the top end of the profession would show demographics for an older population. The US population as a whole has a higher average age than at any time in history. You may or may not be aware, but there was a phenomenon that I got in on the tail end of known as the "baby boom". That is, an incredible population increase due to a very high birth rate (coupled with increased infant survival rates) that went from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. That birth rate trend has tapered off significantly since then. Do the math, how old are all those baby boomers now? The age thing will level off and begin trending back down toward 50 or a bit below in a few years. Take a few deep breaths and cover this one in the therapy sessions too.

"Surveyors have missed the bus on GIS" (or whatever emerging area of practice you choose to identify). What this observation fails to recognize is that GIS was never something that fell squarely and solely in the domain of the surveyor to begin with. There are other geographic sciences equally as qualified to have taken the lead on this, and given the wide applications, perhaps better qualified. Certainly there are areas of GIS that surveyors are best qualified to oversee. And in many places, I see them doing exactly that. Just because we, as a profession don't own GIS as a protected area of practice doesn't mean we've missed the bus. It merely means that we need to get involved in those areas best suited to be addressed by our unique qualifications. In fact, the ship may be just coming into port for surveyors to get involved to fix many of the cadastral base layer problems that make GIS info unreliable in many systems.

The way I see it is that if surveying dies as a profession, it will be for two reasons: 1) We allow the Chicken Littles among us to convince us and everyone else that we are not worthy of being recognized as a profession and have ceased to provide a valuable and unique service to society; and 2) We lower the bar on the standards of practice in order to boost our numbers, thereby fulfilling the self-prophecy of irrelevance with no outside help.

Oh, and a third reason: Our doom & gloomers stop taking their antidepressants and we allow them to cause the rest of us to give up on the profession we found and stuck with.


Don' worry. Go survey!

Well said Evan!

As with all things in life, I think the secret is evolution or more properly, adaptation.

Level headed Mr. Page! Well stated.

I spent a few minutes with a landscape architect today. He was dressed like a geologist about to go down into a hole, or a land surveyor about to cut line through a mountainside of poison oak. He had a brush hook in his hand. He was cutting through this area to get a feel for it, he was in design mode. I was impressed.

I too was dressed like a land surveyor about to cut line through a mountainside of poison oak, or maybe I was dressed like a civil engineer, or a geologist about to climb down into a hole.

I was not pushing a lawn mower; I was not holding a pool skimming net.

I was participating in the teardown of this 1962 funkpad on an acre, dilapidated, falling apart, bought in 2011 for $1.9mil, shortly prior to the approval of the design and construction of this awesome $5.5mil spec house which I just laid out the foundation for, after doing the civil design work.

These tech geeks are creating the future, each and every day. These are the drivers of the present day California economy. These are the folks responsible for the reconstruction of much of the residential and commercial properties in the affluent sectors of the Bay Area.

They tell their landscapers and pool cleaners to keep an eye on us.

Nothing happens without our first creating the physical reality for which it can take place.

Something we might want to contemplate on.

Self value.

Ryan said it before I could. Clark what are you doing? You contribute to this forum regularly and complain about what CLSA isn’t doing. There are two CLSA chapters in your geographic area. I attend most of the meetings for both. I don’t recall having seen you at a CLSA chapter meeting at either location in several years. Complaining about what CLSA doesn’t do while not participating and offering to help solve the perceived problems has a hollow ring to it.

The next Sonoma County Chapter meeting is Wednesday May 14th 6:30 p.m. at the Union Hotel Restaurant on Mission Blvd. in Santa Rosa. The Marin County Chapter meeting is Wednesday May 21st 6:00 p.m. at the Basque Restaurant on North San Pedro Rd. in San Rafael. Come join us and become a part of the solution.

Mr. Ford:
1. I contribute to this forum to participate in its irrelevancy, to test the waters. I have complained to CLSA for what it is not doing twice in the four years since I have been participating in this forum. I brought up valid points. I questioned and received answers like those of yours and Mr. Versteeg, but I also received words of encouragement from the likes of Mr. Pallamary in the midst of having been told "been there and done that" at the same time.
2. Concerning my lack of attendance at local meetings, I have family and church commitments on Wednesdays which take precedent through July this year. Plus, I don't know if the Sonoma chapter is where I want to call home. There are other options out there.

Plus, attending chapter meetings in my mind does not necessarily make one CLSA member better than another.

LS_8750 wrote:Plus, attending chapter meetings in my mind does not necessarily make one CLSA member better than another.

Not better, just more active in a venue where your concerns are more likely to get taken to the BOD and heard by the executive committee. Also a place where you can find out if there are like-minded members in your area.