I have taken Evan Page's quote to begin a new conversation.
E_Page wrote:Thanks for a very informative newsletter. The story that jumped out most to me was that from the Orange County Register titled Too Many Earning a License When they Could Be Earning a Living.
That sentiment is one that is popping up all over the country. While I agree that too many vocations are over-regulated, I do not believe that deregulating surveying would serve the public well in any regard. There are a good many unlicensed people working in the surveying profession as unlicensed technicians and/or as para-professionals on their way to attaining a license to practice who are making a very good living.
The biggest danger which might contribute to the deregulation of surveying is, IMO, the low bar for entry set by the LS exam, and the fact that in this State, there is very little which adequately describes appropriate standards of care. As a result, there are many in some areas of practice who do not even understand what it is they are supposed to be doing - that is, the purpose of the service provided. Equally disconcerting, or possibly of even greater concern is that this lack of readily identifiable standards has and continues to cause inconsistent enforcement of "standards of practice" by BPELSG.
This is an issue that CLSA will need to keep close tabs on and be ready to get in front of very quickly if necessary. I suggest bringing this story to the attention of the Cal Surveyor Editor for inclusion in the next upcoming issue.
I hope everyone had an opportunity to read the OC Register article referenced in the OC Newsletter.
The land surveying community has lost market share in construction. The contractors self perform the land surveying functions. This is a form of deregulation.
A technology firm, absent any licensees, recently was awarded a 14 story building interior and exterior scanning project - beating out a team consisting of licensed architects and land surveyors. This is a form of deregulation.
The BPELSG enforcement unit recently closed three ALTA Land Title survey complaints - with clear violations of law and/or the ALTA standards - stating the surveys meet the standard of care. This is a form of deregulation.
Who sees deregulation of land surveying as a real threat? Why or why not?
The eventual reality to this question relies on the strength and cohesiveness of the California Land Surveyors' Association. We all feel the same way about the possible outcomes. This is an opportunity to set aside differences and make a difference.
Jeff Lucas nailed this topic in a Curt Sumner radio interview a few years ago about the relevance of the land surveyor in the present day and future.
A haunting point he made was about the courtroom, the crappy boundary dispute cases that go to court (surveyor caused) and the inability of some experts in the courtroom to make a consistent and right call in applying the laws (I am reminded of a recent case in Santa Cruz County). He pointed out something to the effect that "why not just put everything on a GIS, hand everything over to the attorneys, and let the attorneys litigate it all in the courts..."
It was a doozy of a discussion. The light came on. Yeah, we will probably face some effort to deregulate the profession, based on the poor condition of the profession in applying the legal principals and keeping boundary disputes out of the courts.
Education is a good thing. But, I am not personally pleased with the curriculums offered by the universities and colleges in California. Mentoring is necessary and complimentary, and at times better than the formal education options available.
I personally see the opposite of "Deregulation"
Today's surveyors seem to be at war with themselves. Trust is placed heavily on one's own
"Magic Yellow box" and the supposed answers it spews out, rather than proper research and survey diligence.
"Follow the footsteps" has been replaced by "knock it out and send the invoice"
Believe it or not kids, the general population still has respect for Land Surveyors.
They rely on us doing our job properly with respect to boundary lines ( true intent)
And topographies ( best data collection possible) etc, etc, [add your own task here]
I believe we are over-regulated but only insofar as having our hands tied (by ourselves) when it comes to service.
Some believe we can't even meet at a job site without "filing a record of survey" as if such survey can be done with the snap of a
finger or a client can afford a few thousand dollars extra to repair his $500 fence line ???
This attitude, takes professional surveyors OUT OF THE EQUATION for many situations.
People, more often than not, simply walk away and measure things themselves, or hire some unlicensed person
to do the minor task job.
Deregulation of California Land Surveying will come from the self regulations within. As land owners
petition for reasonably priced service, laws may come into effect (by our states liberal policies), to create
a special "private surveyor" title. This may be similar to the "unlicensed architect" or the Old time "Building designer".
We, as Professional Land Surveyors must be careful to keep ourselves "in the game" [its NO game]
Remember Kids, If your answer to the issue of letting people "do their own survey" is (well, its on them) you've
omitted the fact of intent. Try mixing "intent" with unrecorded Lot Line Adjustment, with original lot or parcel corners and two
"yellow box" surveyors looking at each other and lawyers with their arms folded across their chests. May as well add a couple
fighting dogs in there. What a mess.
Lets pull together and KEEP ourselves in the game !!! Affordable, Professional, Reliable.
Ok time for the slaughter I'll be your lightning rod of hate, so long as we can come together for a better solution.
The results of the poll, as of about a minute ago was 13 (Yes, it's a concern) to 2 (No, it's not a concern).
I don't think that we are likely to see a push to deregulate surveying within the next 5 years, but it wouldn't shock me if we do see at least one such effort. That's talking legislatively deregulate, not the informal deregulation of the encroachments on our licensed areas of practice that Dave described in the OP.
I agree 100% with Clark's post.
Goodgps said that he sees overregulation as presently being the bigger problem. The way I read it, you're both recognizing different aspects of the same problem. The way I see it, those problems will eventually lead to a serious threat of deregulation. As I said, probably not within the next 5 years or so, but there will be at least one serious push for it in CA by the time I retire. (I'll reach retirement age in about 10 years but will probably work until I die on the job or am forced out due to old age dementia)
The problem of over-regulation is that, like the gun control argument, the laws only affect the already law abiding. The unlicensed never have to be concerned with whether or not the law requires a RS or a CR. They didn't bother to get the education or training under a knowledgeable surveyor for at least the minimal requisite amount of time, or if they did, they never applied themselves to learning any more than enough technical knowhow to really screw things up. As long as they keep their business to the small work of staking a boundary line here & there or flagging up irons without much consideration as to whether the iron means something or simply had served as a place to tie the dog to, they are unlikely to ever be bothered by the Board.
If they work on a handshake rather than by a written contract, if they do not produce maps, or produce maps without name or signature, if they work for cash and never produce an invoice with their name along with any mention of surveying or without company name they could be associated with, they can expect to make a career out of doing such work. Even if they do get caught, they have no license that will suffer a blemish and the consequences will typically be a disconnected phone and a nominal fine. Those things can be worked into the cost of doing business for these people. How difficult is it to get a new phone? And if they decide to ignore the fine, what will BPELSG do about it?
If they have a licensed relative or can find another licensee who has so little respect for their license and profession that they will rubber stamp drawings and documents for a nominal fee, then the unlicensed can operate relatively openly and without fear of Board sanction. There are three such openly practicing businesses within about a 45 minute drive of my home in foothill communities that I am aware of. The Board has been notified of these businesses multiple times. None of the three have received any meaningful discipline that I am aware of.
When the law abiding obtain and maintain the proper licenses that purport to be evidence of competency, include costs to comply with laws, take the necessary time to perform all the proper research, fieldwork, analysis, and reporting of their results while there are many in the same geographic area who do a few or none of those things, the law abiding have a difficult time competing. There are limited market segments where the clients/consumers look to much else but price as the primary deciding factor.
It's not just the unlicensed, but the licensed who work in the same manner as their unlicensed local competition. No written contracts, inadequate work to reasonably ensure correct results, no maps, etc.
BPELSG has gone after a few cases of unlicensed activity that many of us have heard about, and many we may not have. The ones we hear of are those where the practitioners had gotten greedy. Not being satisfied with getting by poaching minor jobs from the edges of the pool of licensed work, these folks forge a license or misappropriate a valid license or license number, lending the appearance of legitimacy to their services through identity fraud. Those people can and often do some big damage that becomes visible sooner because of the scope of the enterprise. I'm appreciative that BPELSG eventually gets those people out of the marketplace. The success at that level often comes because the scope of the fraudulent and harmful activity has reached a level to interest the local DA's office.
In those cases where the unlicensed offer services that appear to consumers to be equivalent or comparable to those that a licensed person following the law offers, and the would be client goes with the unlicensed because they can't tell the difference and decide on price, it is a form of unofficial deregulation which occurred at least partially because of the regulations one person tried to follow.
I'm not sure how extensive the problem is in the more urban areas, but for a surveyor who wants to make a good portion of his living performing rural boundary related work, it is practically the case that obtaining and working with a license puts one at a disadvantage in that it puts them on BPELSG radar, under their authority, and subject to all the regulations so many fail to even try to follow.
For the most part, as the laws regarding survey practice goes, I do not believe we are over regulated. There are some statutes which might be interpreted overly strictly, which is a matter of over-regulation in practice rather than in law. An example might be the interpretation of when a RS is required due to material discrepancy. In a high-cost urban area with a pretty continuous and complete history of survey records, a difference of less than half a tenth in a distance might be material, while in mountainous timber land with very sparse records since the original GLO township survey in the 1860s or 1870s, it might be a fairly uncommon thing to match distances within 5 feet.
A surveyor might want to file a RS just to update the record, but if all pertinent original monumentation was found and substantially was as described, and all the distances were found to be within 5 feet or so, then a RS isn't really required unless someone in a position of authority improperly imposes a standard which may be appropriate for urban or even more populated rural areas, but does not meet the definition applicable to a remote site in these conditions. Perhaps the job was to stake line between a section corner and quarter corner. The surveyor tries to file a CR since he found and rehabilitated the original monuments and there was only 3.3' (5 links) difference from GLO record. The CS, who spent the formative years of his experience in the urban and suburban areas of the East Bay and graduated from fresno argues that 3.3' is way beyond a material discrepancy and insists that the surveyor file a RS. Maybe the review fee in that county is $750.
By the time all is said & done, the job by the LS is at least 50% more than what the unlicensed guy would do it for. The RS won't provide any more info than would a CR. Neither the landowner nor the public are any better served with the RS than the CR. That would be an instance, which I'm certain happens quite often, where "practical" over-regulation rather than "legislative" over regulation needlessly adds to costs and time and in turn causes many seeking survey services to turn to the unlicensed.
Jon Wheat said: "The eventual reality to this question relies on the strength and cohesiveness of the California Land Surveyors' Association. We all feel the same way about the possible outcomes. This is an opportunity to set aside differences and make a difference."
I agree that if the CLSA is fractured, it will not be able to effectively meet this challenge when it arises. Although the CLSA was severely fractured and seemingly on the verge of falling apart a couple years ago and has made great strides to get past that, I sense a lot of people in membership and in leadership positions who would be satisfied to just settle into a sense of comfortable equilibrium, "like it used to be".
The challenges that are going to challenge not just the CLSA but the continued existence of surveying as a licensed profession are going to make the issues that came close to tearing the CLSA apart look like petty squabbling in comparison. Some of the challenges will be years away. If we wait until then to begin not only addressing, but recognizing them, the CLSA cannot survive and that would be a serious blow to any efforts to save the profession from a combination of degraded knowledge within the ranks of licensees and growing anti-regulatory backlash.
As was the case where the CLSA lacked the fortitude to make a clear and single recommendation to the Governor's office regarding a LS Board member, if we are so consumed with a fight to either fully address or to ignore issues that we can't come to a cohesive decision to provide government and the public with comprehensible advice, we will be ignored and an entirely different solution will be implemented.
Right now, and for several years prior, things have been happening to degrade the profession or to misdirect it that I believe are far more likely to lead to surveying's demise as a profession than is or was any lack of enthusiasm to embrace certain new technologies and claim them as our rightful domain.
The future of the surveying profession doesn't lie with the skills to run the equipment and computer programs to collect and manipulate data. Don't get me wrong, we need such people in surveying, but those are technical functions. Like it or not, the technology has been and will continue to change at an ever faster rate. For all of us, no matter how hard we try, our technical skills will become largely obsolete long before we're ready to call it a career.
The real value in surveying as a profession has always been and should always be the knowledge of which data is important, the direction of (rather than the technical) management of data, recognizing valid uses of the data, recognizing and directing methods for the quality collection and maintenance of data, and possibly most important, the ability to tell others what the data means.
For years, I've heard complaints that the colleges and universities aren't focusing enough on the topics graduates will need to really prepare them to become good surveyors. Yet few actually take or look for opportunities to influence degree content. Advisory committees often tend to be made up of fairly recent graduates from large multi-discipline (engineering) companies or sometimes government.
I hear grumblings from time to time from licensees that their licensing Board isn't doing something it should be doing, or is doing something wrong. But very few want to hold them accountable. The complaints and grumblings might be about the exam - used to be only those who said it was too hard, and they were often easy to dismiss as we inwardly blew a sigh of relief that the complainer hadn't yet become licensed. More recently, and I readily admit being one of the most vocal about it, complaints that the exam might be inadequate are getting to be just as common as complaints of it being too difficult. Yet, how many have called for some manner of independent review of exam content or sought to participate in the exam process? In fact, how many are aware that the opportunities to be involved at different levels are far less since going to CBT than there were before the all multiple-guess format?
I used to hear complaints and grumblings about particular enforcement actions (or non-actions) and I typically dismissed them thinking that the complainer was one of those who passed the exam on luck, had been practicing at or beyond the fringe of good practice for years and finally got caught. In recent years, I've had occasion to pay closer attention and have seen the good the bad, and the downright ugly of enforcement.
Some of you wouldn't believe the resistance within CLSA at even considering that the Board might not be handling enforcement as well as they should, much less be willing to even let strong evidence of serious and in some instances, intentional mismanagement be shown to the general membership. To be sure, the enforcement function is necessary and in many cases has caused some to stop poor practices and removed chronic offenders from our licensed ranks. But we can't ignore the bad and ugly and only acknowledge the good.
For one of the ALTA's mentioned by Dave in the OP (both were examples of cut-corner exercises in geometry rather than surveying, IMO), the Board stated that their expert determined there was no violation because the ALTA complied with the State's Subdivision Map Act. Yes, you read that right. Such is the expertise (or more correctly, the glaring lack of expertise) of some of the experts the Board relies on.
The inconsistencies ingrained in the system as presently managed are going to be one of the primary forces leading to potential deregulation of surveying. When it publicly comes out that even the regulatory watchdog cannot be consistent when identifying what licensees should or should not do and that the primary professional societies did nothing to correct it, anti-regulatory forces will have been given a very strong argument in their favor.
(some of you might want to start an office pool to see how long this post, or the last 4 or 5 paragraphs are permitted to remain up)
We have to look beyond what is likely to happen this year or next as a result of or actions or non-actions. Many of us need to look even beyond the probable extent of our own careers. First, because we owe it to the public, those coming up behind us, and those who gave of themselves in past generations to preserve and improve the surveying profession, the effort to leave the profession better than it was when we stumbled into it. Second, because the speed of change in society is ever increasing, the things we imagine won't happen until we're retired, will happen long before then.
Lack of or inconsistent enforcement by the board is a big issue. I looked into filing a complaint once, but after receiving what that board wanted me to do and reading how many serious violations were reduced to a hand slap or less and the ever present cloud that if the board ruled with the other party I could be sued for defamation of character I dropped the whole thing.
As I stated in a previous thread, and Mike constantly pounds on it, is the fact that many of our laws are due to govt agencies blatantly ignoring the rules and why should they obey them when they are, to the best of my knowledge, NEVER held accountable. In cases where the govt agency is found at fault the taxpayers foot the bill not the govt employees that did the wrong.
Another issue I have is the surveyor being required to file a RS, with substantial govt fees, no matter whether he will be compensated for his time and money or not and the govt agencies telling us how to do the survey and write our legal descriptions but their name never appears on any recorded document.
