California Surveyors Forums

I've got a half rant, half question I'm hoping to get some thoughts on from SoCal surveyors on San Diego County's fees to download survey records from their website. Now back when I started in this field (2013) a few counties had you pay per document for survey records. As I understand it after Orange County lost in the lawsuit with the Sierra Club over a public records request for its GIS landbase to be provided free of charge "things changed" and it seemed like every county since transitioned over to providing survey documents online free of charge...except San Diego County.

Usually whenever starting research on a new project in SD county I'll just ask our title officer for any record documents I need and some cities in the county have some great records too, but every once in a while I'll need to get something from the county, for example a corner record, and I think its just absolutely insane that we're paying $4 for a PDF of a single corner record. That is probably the cheapest document on there too, the prices only go up for the larger multi-paged documents.

I'm half tempted to send their survey department a public records act request for all of their record documents and have someone in our office go down there with a hard drive to copy it all over. Has anyone done that before in SD? Is anyone over here actually paying full price to download these documents?

I'm half tempted to send their survey department a public records act request for all of their record documents and have someone in our office go down there with a hard drive to copy it all over.

That might not work out. Agencies have a legitimate need to control access to their internal networks, and they might balk at allowing just anyone to hook up a device and start copying. What I did when I filed a PRA request in Yolo County was offer to provide the digital media and pay up to $100 for media and staff time to accomplish the copying. The first time they didn't charge me anything, the second time (for updates) I think I provided a thumb drive and paid a nominal fee (less than $50) for staff time.

I had a different experience with Solano County and their aerial imagery. The GIS manager didn't want to provide the TIFFs, he said I needed to connect directly to their service provider through a GIS interface. When I said that I'd rather just get the TIFFs, he said that's old school and he wasn't going to facilitate that. When I mentioned PRA, he said that he'd come up with a "loaded rate" to make it painfully expensive, along with some words to the effect that he was intent on "training" me to use modern methods (arrogant bureaucratic SOB that he is). He said that it's easy with C3D (which I don't have) and ArcMap (which I also didn't have). I tried to access the provider's resource via QGIS, but wasn't successful, so I bought a 1-year subscription to ArcMap. I was able to access the imagery, but manipulating it was slow and I never did figure out how to export a CCS83 georeferenced TIFF. I don't need Solano imagery often, so I let the ArcMap subscription expire, and I haven't bothered (yet) to do a PRA and fight city hall.