Monument Preservation - Includes control points?!

[Elias French]

Good morning,

An 8771 question/poll for the group.

Does 8771b which states "When monuments exist that... provide horizontal or vertical survey control, the monuments shall be located and referenced...", intended to apply to various and sundry traverse and job control points not of record? As opposed to monuments at property corners, official benchmarks and the like.

In my experience 8771b has not been considered as applicable to general control/traverse points not of record of private or public surveyors. I'm curious as to the original intent of this legislation, and your opinions on how it is and/or should be applied. Are we required to tie out and reset all control points? Was this the intent of this legislation?

Thanks and have a great Friday all.

[Peter Ehlert]

hmmm....

two Separate issues:

locate yes. If you find something tie it out and show it on your pre-construction corner record.

Reset: where is that required? I feel that Homeowner needed monuments (lot corners) should be reset and documented on the post-construction corner record. other stuff? nope.

[Warren Smith]

If there is sufficient provenance, say, shown on a record of survey with SPCs, sure - they provide horizontal control.

[Elias French]

Thanks for the input gentlemen,

To clarify, the points under discussion are:

Private and public agency survey internal use control/traverse points
Not published/no provenance/not shown on any map
Not tied to any boundary lines

[Warren Smith]

Certainly under those conditions, they are essentially not more than a PK set as a traverse point.

[Ric7308]

Elias, we at the Board have the opinion that if the horizontal and vertical control marks are published marks, then those qualify for inclusion for the purposes of 8771(b) and (c). These could include NGS marks, city published benchmarks, county published benchmarks, agency published control points, control points published on an RS map on file with the county, etc.

[DWoolley]

By contract, I have local jurisdiction over certain corner records. We do not pay to tie out or preserve random survey remnants.

Here’s a scenario: a land surveyor is paid a fixed cost per unit/monument. No monuments, no paycheck. Some surveyors—channeling their inner carnival hustler—will tie out concrete nails, mag nails, bottle caps, or anything else visible at the surface and most always, avoid any digging. It wasn’t uncommon to end up with four tagged ties and a 6-inch spike with a tagged washer, all to preserve a concrete nail that was likely just an old aerial target from a decade ago. Worse still, the original monument—possibly located 0.3 feet below the surface—had been destroyed during a grind-and-overlay. The nail, wrongly assumed to mark the corner, was the easy paycheck and preserved in the wrong location.

Sometimes these surveyors get lucky and find two nails in the same intersection. They’ll tie out both and bill for two monuments using the same four ties. If I’m lying, I’m dying.

Notably, not a single map from any local agency documents concrete nails, mag nails, or PK nails as official cadastral monuments set per the underlying subdivision.

Our policy is simple: if it’s untagged, undocumented, and unreferenced, it must be proven to represent a legitimate corner—or we won’t pay to preserve it.

Other common scams include:
• Charging per unit (e.g., $500 per monument) but invoicing $2,500 for one monument and four ties—counting each tie as a separate unit.
• Including footnotes like “Costs are based on monuments being flush with the existing surface,” then tacking on extra charges for excavation.
• Underestimating monument counts in the proposal—claiming 10 monuments when there are 17—to appear as the low bidder. After being awarded the job, they “discover” the other seven and issue change orders at inflated rates. Example: a legitimate quote of 17 monuments at $800 = $13,600. The scammer bids 10 at $1,200 = $12,000—appearing 13% cheaper—then bills $1200 for the remaining 7 monuments for a total of $20,400 (a 1.5x [$20.4k/$13.6k] scam).

The more monuments involved, the easier it is to manipulate the numbers—and hide the grift. The scammers actually perform the majority of the local work because the construction management and/or engineering management doesn't understand the grift.

As for my “local jurisdiction”: while the County holds official jurisdiction over corner records, our contracts require the contractor’s surveyor to submit corner records to us first for review and approval before submitting them to the County.

DWoolley