Surveying without a license?

[CBarrett]

Former Kiewitt surveying mangement employee I encountered today. He doesn't have a license, because it is too hard and too boring to learn enough boundaries to pass the test. Brags about being paid $95 an hour to do "construction surveying".

If these companies are complaining surveyors are too expensive, why are these jokers being paid $95 an hour?

20230731_185438.jpg

Maybe he will blab enough for a formal complaint, considering he is all ego and no sense.

[DWoolley]

In the attached image he states "Just saw this." What is he referencing?

Is he saying that he has been performing land surveying without licensed supervision?

California person? NorCal? SoCal?

Thank you in advance for filling in the details.

DWoolley

[CBarrett]

This is a guy from the other group, facebook. He was taking some party chief to task for being only a boundary surveyor, and started bragging how money is in construction. I confronted him on the behaviors, and of course he didnt take it well.
His profile says he worked for kiewitt, and when he discovered I was in CA, he bragged some more how surveyors in CA are so incompetent, he (an unlicensed surveyor, an LSIT and CST 4) from Oklahoma, I gather had to be brought out to show everyone how it's done. Him being a department manager of some sort.
I told him you can't do construction staking surveying in California without a license, he said he is sure he can, because he has done it, that I didnt know what I was talking about.

Then I told him, please do tell, I'm sure we would love to send the board some details, and posted a screenshot of some of the kiewitt fines from recent years, from bpelsg public info.

After that he chickened out, and deleted some of his posts. I didnt get to screenshot all of them.

He is was bragging how a major construction company is paying him 180K a year to do what he does. I explained that he is one of the serious undercutters we are trying to fight. They pay him $95 an hour, and he is daft enough to think that's great money, not having a clue that the work they are having him do is worth around $300 an hour.

Obviously he didn't take that well, and I ended up giving him a permanent ban from the group. He can still be found on linkedin. I dont know if there will be any more useful info coming out of him. My goal at the time was to warn and scare him off rather than get incriminating info.

As a recap...
'Just saw this' was reference to my saying that it is unlawful to do construction staking in california without a license. Yes he is saying he did construction staking work in CA without licensed supervision and without having a license himself.
He didnt specify which company he was with at the time.

[DWoolley]

Thank you for the details.

He is fortunate California land surveyor's apathy will allow him to work unabated. The land surveying practice is theirs for the taking, they simply need to point at what they want and it will be theirs without resistance (we'll hand it to them). We know it, more importantly, he knows it. I prefer it happens quickly. There is no reason to drag it out, that would be cruel to the folks that were counting on practicing more than the next 10 years.

DWoolley

[CBarrett]

Apathy is a mild way of putting it. Ignorance is my assesment. Engineering and surveying communities together are not producing sufficient qualified talent to service the industry needs.

Here, we expect the landscape of predominantly 1 to 10 people shops to understand the needs of large design-build projects. Not going to happen. I had to go through a crash course on how design builds work about 5 or 6 years ago. Not that many surveying mentors around, and definitely not within CLSA. All you have to do is look around to see which players abandoned this ship.

We want the status of a professional, but shirk the needed qualifications. Licensing as we know it only works for micro businesses. A fair chunk of our education too, so we remain at micro levels.

[Ian Wilson]

From a couple of quick searches, here's the link to his LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-barton-5817a437/

According to the Texas Rosters, there are no Robert Bartons who are licensed as RPLs, LSLS, or SITs in the State of Texas.

[CBarrett]

From a couple of quick searches, here's the link to his LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-barton-5817a437/

According to the Texas Rosters, there are no Robert Bartons who are licensed as RPLs, LSLS, or SITs in the State of Texas.

Exactly. If I remember right, Texas also does not require licensing for "construction layout".
This guy got on my radar ibn the other forum, to start with because of being very arrogant looking down n "boundary surveyors: and those stupid enough to work so hard to get licensed, and are still working for $20 an hour doing boundaries. Then he started flaunting how he makes 180K a year doing construction layout, and how surveyors "need to smarten up".

I called him on the BS, telling him no party chief, even in expensive economies makes 180K a year without a lot of OT. That he was misrepresenting the situation. Then he started bragging about how he is a lot more than a party chief, and how he is smarter than all the LS's etc... How he is being flown all over the country at $100 an hour to fix other people's surveying... Massive attitude. And telling us to 'check ourselves'. I had to bite his head off, dumb little half-surveyor with an over inflated ego construction companies are producing.
I also explained to him that making 180K a year and being responsible for that much work is dumb. Salaries for office executives in high markets are 260K for surveyors, and up if you are a VP and in a profit sharing plans. If he was doing his own business and doing it smartly, he's be in 700K a year range. Construction companies t=found some dimwit to whom 180K is the pinnacle of existence, and fed his ego, and are using him to undercut our businesses. In all his "I am so intelligent and great" he doesn't get that part.

Bit this is what happens when you get a highschool dropout material off the street put him in a suit and give him a company "duwamax twuck". He thinks he's the cream of the crop. Welp, I'm sure "Hog Heaven" is an accomplishment for some....
I'm more interested in 30-100 million dollars a year business and a house in newport. Other professionals can do it, a lot, why not surveyors????

[DWoolley]

Not knowing every detail, I ask that you consider removing the ban you have on him. I am genuinely interested in his perspectives. Reflecting on the information you have provided, he is not wrong. Think of it this way, who is going to stop him? This forum's crowd? Nope.

Consider the following brass tacks:

1. Many licensed surveyors, in many jurisdictions in California, establish boundaries from two monuments, any two monuments. Frankly, anyone can do that process with the same or similar results - including the guy referenced. Who cares if he doesn't file, neither do our own folks. [You know, the free market, free country, no laws thing].

2. Site plans - same thing. Do the land surveyor's site plans "have accurate boundaries" as required by the California Building Code? I am betting this guy could prepare a site plan to the same low standards.

3. Record boundaries, ah, aren't they all? If they are a legit work product, why can't he do it? He can and he will.

4. He will not want to set monuments - same as the land surveyors.

Again, read the forum contributors, our own folks are arguing to legitimize the same work. Fine, with the caveat that anyone, including the guy referenced in the first post, can do the same. He isn't asking for permission. God speed to him, live free brother! Don't let anyone tell you no.

We cannot use the license to hold the public captive. If we do not want to survey according to Hoyle we cannot exclude others from the same.

The rules for thee but not for me, a land surveyor's creed?

DWoolley

[DWoolley]

Last thought, I would take any job that paid $95 an hour - especially if I lived in Texas (not sure where he lived).

I must be doing something wrong.

DWoolley

[CBarrett]

Not knowing every detail, I ask that you consider removing the ban you have on him. I am genuinely interested in his perspectives. Reflecting on the information you have provided, he is not wrong. Think of it this way, who is going to stop him? This forum's crowd? Nope.

Consider the following brass tacks:
... snipped for brevity....

Hahaha, you gave me a good chuckle.
We're definitely behind in CLSA. I joined the ACEC Survey committee to to get a read on the situation over there for a bit.
Call it "Research efforts underway."

I'll consider un-banning the guy... but he is just an all around PITA. He likes to dish it out big time, but is not good at taking it when someone confronts him, and that makes him very high maintenance. I don't have enough time babysit his behaviors. If I let him act stupid, then other thousands of people in the group will try doing the same.

[Mike Mueller]

See Dave, thats why I can stick around, I am polite when I say crazy things :)

Mikey Mueller, PLS 9076
Sonoma County

[CBarrett]

Last thought, I would take any job that paid $95 an hour - especially if I lived in Texas (not sure where he lived).

I must be doing something wrong.

DWoolley

MBI pays way more than that for the same position. $180,000 he is getting is around $260,000 and up plus profit sharing MBI, for some of the senior management, probably the same at Psomas and Stantec and similar. We have minor survey dept managers here making over $100 an hour plus profit sharing.

He was advertising that as if it was Party Chief wages initially, turns out he is some sort of senior survey managers. It's hard to tell, because he has two different linkedin profiles, showing two different companies as current employers, and both linkedin profiles seem to be current. One of them seems to be a head-hunting shop.

[DWoolley]

....
Then he started bragging about how he is a lot more than a party chief, and how he is smarter than all the LS's etc... How he is being flown all over the country at $100 an hour to fix other people's surveying.
...

I have been thinking about this guy and the situation.

I am 99.9% convinced he is the real deal. As I read it, he is in California training union surveyors for Kiewit. This is completely plausible. As I have stated before, Local 12 is dispatching their "surveyors" directly to the signatory contractors. Who will these contractors hire to train them, me? You? Nope, they have their guy at less than 50% market rate. Totally makes sense to me.

To those that embrace this as free market principles, you are correct. These contractors i.e. Granite, Skanska, Kiewit, etc will never hire land surveyors again, they can't and remain competitive with each other on lowest responsible bid contracts.

As scarcity settles in on the legitimate construction land surveyors they will not simply accept their fate. No, they will push into the other markets with their low bid mentality. At what scale? He says $5B in construction work in California.
This translats to $150M in construction surveying -includes
as-built surveys, quantities, certifications - transfered out of the A&E firms. Before you protest and state he cannot do certifications, why not? Specifications are usually associated with an accuracy - something we want nothing to do with. His unsigned and unsealed certifications, cutsheets, etc. is indistinguishable from the typical unsigned and unsealed work product of the licensees, luckily for him we would rather not have any standards or laws that could distinguish him from us. If you're under 45, I suggest you file away his contact information. He might be able to offer you a job someday when nobody else has a place for you.

I did not lose his message in the bravado. His train is right on time. His message was not lost on me.

Unlike our community, I suspect he is prepared to fight like a wildcat, but he will not have to, if we tried to wade into his pool.

DWoolley

[CBarrett]

Oh, I'm sure he is for real.
Licensed people should have been doing this and fighting for it, at professional level pay.

You know, how we love to talk about "doctors and lawyers" are doing this and that.
Surveying community has no clue what they do, even when it comes to basic business.

With big companies, we cant offer them 'a licensed person's to do the same thing, there's no incentive to hire one, since the penalty for surveying without a license is, I forgot what I saw, $5000? They are saving $400,000 a year just on one person, not having to pay our fees and doing it in house.

But when I say surveyors need business and leadership education... people glaze over....

How have we become so dumb and limited?

We need penalties at the level which actually make a difference. If average profit in this business ranges 10 to 20%, make the penalties for companies high enough to make dent in their profit.

We are stuck in a mindset that the penalty has to be a specific number... make the penalty a percentage of something. Attorneys are doing it, realestaye people are foing it with commissions.

We're sitting here crying over extra $2000 to check an RS. Living in 1975 financial landscape. I loved what Lynn Kovach said about RS fees, It's no the money, people in pebble beach, 12 milion dollar mansions dont want to pay for extra surveying. We see the same in OC, wealthy areas. They take us all for granted, and pick up on our collective "I'm not worthy" attitudes.

[DWoolley]

Five thousand dollars is the maximum fine by law. Kiewit received two maximum fines, $10,000 on a project with the extra charges was $400M. The fine wouldn't have covered their copier lease.

Please take a minute to read any number of recent posts. These fines would apply equally to land surveyors - did you miss the freedom, anti-regulation, free markets theme? Fines/increased fines, no way in heck.

Relax, enjoy the ride to the bottom and be grateful you do not need this thing to last much more than 10 years.

DWoolley

[CBarrett]

We need to change the law.

Do you happen to know off the top of your head the article number?

[CBarrett]

I looked up kiewitt fines, briefly. This should be them, unless there are others.

Screenshot_20230731-213729_Drive.jpg

Who are bigger players in this battle, unions or construction companies?

[DWoolley]

The unions and construction companies are one and the same.

We cannot change laws or make distinctions between us and them, remember? We have to be able to run "businesses" without, ah, interference from the law. 'Merica. It's a free market thing. Let the market work itself out.

I believe the fine is in the Regulations (Board rules).

DWoolley

[CBarrett]

Well, Crownholm did make much more money than an average surveyor does. Maybe we are on the wrong side of things.

[DWoolley]

California Board Rule 472.1:

"In no event shall the administrative fine be less than $50 or exceed $5,000 for each violation".

I became a land surveyor because I really, really liked the work. It has always been my understanding that when I chose to be a land surveyor I would not be wealthy. Although not necessarily a choice, I have always been okay with that. Looking forward to working each day was the annual bonus.

Caltrans has been the standard bearer in land surveyor wages for the last 20 years and has been my frame of reference. I accept I may be clueless based on the numbers thrown around on this thread.

As for Crownholm, I think you're right, he was charging $99 up to $150 per site plan. He had offshore folks that compiled the information - he was a broker of sorts. Based on the information related to the case, I calculated his annual gross income was approximately $400k - before paying his subcontractors, overhead and taxes.

DWoolley

[CBarrett]

Wages being low in our business, compared to other professionals, is a part of the reason we have so many people opening tiny companies long before they are ready to run a healthy business.

In order to accept this treatment, employee pool needs to be kept somewhat uninformed.

My business model for surveying was my grandfather, before the WWII he ran a very succesful survey company, of some 25 people on the surveying side. Unfortunately it was all lost in WWII and the ensuing communist revolution which reappropeiated and/or closed most of pre war businesses. The bad bourgeoisie. After that he took a chief of cadastral office position. Most of his former employees went there too.

Surveyors would get paid more than civil engineers or architects, their work was considered equally as demanding, plus the added difficulty of field work, especially if you were qualified to be a geodetic engineer. This was basically a 4 year degree, plus competency exams.

We also had a technician class, or 'geometers', ranging from basic labor assistance, to instrument operators, to calcs, on site data reduction if needed etc. Some people stayed in this category their entire careers. Not everyone in business was on path to licensure or company ownership.

I am not in favor of diluting the licensing, however, I strongly believe that one size fits all is hurting us too. Surveying is large enough discipline that we need to recognize different paths, and embrace them.

Right now, we have been on one path in surveying for decades, and it is causing other businesses to pivot to market conditions faster, and pull the market shares out from under us left and right, and are left walking a tiny perilous tight rope.

We need the ability, and latitude to make similar, perhaps smarter market adjustments.

Looking at the board rule... it's tailored to regulate small survey shops. 5k right now is not even 2 days of field crew work, or two days of my billing rate.
Errors of that magnitude are made on projects a number of times each year.

I keep thinking of probate court fees, which are codified in some fashion, if I remember right. We had to deal with this recently. One of the fees is $2500, us 4% of the estate value, for estates over 100K, and then there's an additional scale for higher values.

Fees should in part be a deterrent to violators.

However... we are slowly deregulating ourselves, with our behaviors. It's not the other guys, responding to market conditions doing it. We are doing it by not responding to market conditions.

Let's say we raise the board fees to $50,000 or so... I'd go to, I dont know, let's say Skanska, and say, hey, for extra 100k a year, no more fee violations if you hire me (a licensee). Everyone is happy... and small shops are not burdened by large business fines.

[CBarrett]

We need to get our heads out of the mindset that small boundary surveys aer all there is to surveying.
No wonder we have no, or very little caltrans representation, none of the bigger firms are present. No Psomas, No Guida, No Stantec (justin my area). We don't represent their interests and don't do much for them.

Dave, I love a lot of your work, but through the county and being city surveyor, county surveyor contractors, it is easy to end up focused on this - is is what we see a lot of im mapchecking.

Others ... have abandoned CLSA as irrelevant.

We're talking about fighting large construction companies... but those are also the ones who hire Guida,, and Psomas and Stantec... for example Stantec partners with AEComm on projects (I believe high speed rail segments), Psomas and Guida are caltrans contractors, we are too. There are joint ventures with many of these.

Some companies have started finding the way to service these market segments. We need to make sure there is flexibility in licensing and laws to gives us edge over this.

I am digressing here, when we talk about union pensions and their liability - when purchasing a company. I was at Keithco when Stantec purchased them. I was hired at MBI 2-3 years after they purchased RBF. Liability of unfunded pensions for 6 union guys, for a company or some 500 employees... They are not going to clober the union over that, when 50-75% of their work is tied to having good relationships with the union and these contractors. If CLSA is legislating against those interests and against their business models, they are not going to support it. They are not going to put themselves out of business - why would they do it, they have a good model and it is financially successful - it also shows in the wages they are willing to pay to retain key people.

Small boundary surveys and 1-5 people companies, a whole different business model. Both are valid, along with a number of others that exist in this profession. Much of the CLSA discussion is focused on just one.

Crownholm - if we had defined accuracy standards, could have hired a surveyor to certify those to be "F" or "unknown" class surveys. Embrace him and relegate him to what he really is, low end maps with extremely limited functionality, classify them so the public and agencies are on notice that those are at the level of caveman paintings. Keeping him outside of the system only gives him latitude to run amok, outside of our immediate oversight.

We've pigeonholed ourselves... and this is the result, the world is passing by.

[Mike Mueller]

We've pigeonholed ourselves... and this is the result, the world is passing by.

For the sake of discussion lets say I agree with everything you brought up (for the record I am mostly in agreement). Then what? Incremental change is hard and slow and fought by all who lose with each change. Look at the 8771 debate. Completely redoing a system will be fought by most of the successful businesses and systems that have set themselves up to thrive in the current environment. When it comes to changing a system, I generally bet on the side with more money/people. As a democracy we are kinda supposed to as well.

I am reminded of the debate about how wings evolved. The creationists claimed that intermediate forms would not have been beneficial, so clearly it had to spring forth as one completely developed thing. The other side pointed out that intermediate steps don't have to be beneficial, they just have to not be harmful, and even if we don't know how the intermediate forms were beneficial, that is just something to figure out.

Changing laws a little at a time will be slow since each step will need to be "not harmful" enough to get passed into legislation. Changing laws in one fell swoop is impossible in my opinion, since it would require enough trust in the positive outcome to get enough people saying yes to overcome all those who will never embrace change, as well as those that have optimized to the current legal framework, which includes all those none surveyors who outnumber use, alot. Those that have optimized correctly is strongly correlated with those that have more money. Those that have more money is strongly correlated with those that have political power.

I really don't like setting up a false dichotomy, https://www.dictionary.com/browse/false-dichotomy but I don't see what the third option is, legally speaking, aside from doing nothing. I would bet/hope there are several/many other options that I don't see, and that is the benefit of these sorts of discussions, working out the unknown unknowns.

A nonlegal option is education, training, mentoring, and waiting for the culture to change through attrition. That is where I am placing my main hope while making small incremental changes that don't force all the small practitioners out of the business while efficiently using our limited political powers countering outside interest's attempts to outfox us legislatively. It is one of the reasons I am opposed to many of the proposals that swing big or act like we have endless political capital, but strongly support addressing definition changes in the labor code for instance. Trying and failing has repercussions on our capabilities/reputation when we attempt the next change.

Small digression, but if anyone has ever heard of/played Nomic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic) the main way I have seen the game won is to create enough confusion in the rules that you can subtlety alter definitions which have cascading effects that are not foreseen by those that vote for the change. It is why I am thankful we have Dave looking out for those sorts of moves by others. I don't always agree with Dave, but I am appreciative. I think most folks are in this sort of mindset considering how much support the motion to address Land Surveyors in the labor code got compared to the changes to 8771.

Mikey Mueller, PLS 9076
Sonoma County

[CBarrett]

Mikey, awesome points as usual.

I can't see that I have a solution, I'm still doing a lot of pondering assessing how all these moving parts work and influence one another.

Big question that i don't have an answer for at the moment (and others might, so I would welcome more data), is where have we failed in being able to allow us to have more oversight on certain things.

For example, we seem to see big construction companies as threats and enemies, looking to deregulate us. If they are looking to deregulate us, there must be something they are not getting from us. Have we made friends with them to figure out what it is and how to better service them?

I can see one recent issue, surrounding machine control and technology. Lot of surveyors are still far behind, especially union folk. What I am seeing being employed by construction companies are cad people who used to staff survey offices before recessions, doing construction calcs and building 3D models. They got pulled away from the "path to licensure". I did the same for several years during the recession. I came back to surveying (where a lot of them didn't) to find things in, well, a bit of shambles. At the same time, I remember when I was at Stantec, before the recession, pushing 3D and modeling etc... as a part of adaptation, and they decided that made me the bad guy. fast forward 15 years, I had more than one come and say, Wow, you were so far ahead of times back then. Today everyone does this.

I experienced the same with GIS. OMG, that's shitty surveying, low precision, everything has to be done high precision. I used to scratch my head about that. 25% of my schooling was in small scale mapping and some cartography. It used to be a part of surveying., or "Geodesy" is what we called it. Plane surveying (what we do most of) was just one small part of it.

Dave has it right when he says he wants more college educated people in the business. Many people who came up through the ranks don't seem to understand what surveying really is.

I mean, if we want PLS to be just one thing, like it is in other states, Boundary surveying only, maybe Dave is right, let's pull the plug.
If we don't, we need to look at what markets we want to service, comprehensively.

What is a solution - I don't know yet. These are complex decisions, which - if you look outside of surveying are usually solved by doing some business planning. Step 1, that I seem to keep going back to - we need to expose more surveyors to what business planning even before we can do some business planning. We are still in Knee-jerk reactive modes. In business, those frequently don't produce the best results.

Some of us already engage in business planning, we just don't do it in an organized manner. Lot of good ideas are being floated around. No One (in surveying) seems to know how to round it up together, sift, prioritize, and organize, figure out the goals... Well, I know several people who actually do, and they are fed up with CLSA, others are not really being listened to.

[bryanmundia]

I'll just put these here for anyone that would like to read them.

https://www.ayresassociates.com/does-it ... -licensed/

https://bpelsg.ca.gov/pubs/bulletin43.pdf Read the article on Unlicensed Surveying on Page 1 & 2.