California Surveyors Forums

Everything related to land surveyors being reclassified from professionals to laborers and mechanics can be found in one place:

https://www.nsps.us.com/page/DavisBacon

I was invited to speak on topic at MAPPS conference in 2013.  At the time, I had a few conversations with the folks at MAPPS and NSPS.  I thought they had it handled. I think they thought they had it handled.  Curt Sumner of NSPS eloquently testified before the United States Congress.  

Orange County CLSA, although abreast of the issue in 2013-14, had their hands tied at the time trying to keep one of their members in CLSA and keep the chapter charter with the state.   

It was especially galling in that this reclassification to laborers came from southern California and is not based on the facts in California.  For instance,  Caltrans, the single biggest land surveying employer in California,  required a license to be a party chief 25+ years prior to the 2013 reclassification letter - recall, the letter said all that is required to be a party chief is a GED.  Peculiar Local 12 didn't mention the Caltrans licensing requirement in their letter.  Again, every public agency in southern California requires an LSIT, the first half of the PLS exam, to be a party chief.  In the early 1990s the Orange County Surveyor's office had 180 employees with the LSIT standard dating back into the 80s.  Funny, that didn't make the reclassification to laborer letter.

The law, testing and ultimately,  licensure does not distinguish "field surveyor" from an "office surveyor" and yet, the Local 12 letter presents the distinction and states only "office surveyors" are licensed.  Moreover, the law in California requires a minimum of one year of "responsible charge" in the field. According to the letter, nobody in the field is responsible for anything. As posted earlier, their position is field surveyors are numbskulls, not professionals, semiprofessionals or subprofessionals, simply card carrying GED folks. It is offensive to the professional community, but consider it may be true of their membership. Presumably, they would know their own members.

Please read the correspondence in the link.  One thing to note, the latest letter, circa 2018, was signed by ACEC, ASCE, NSPS (the big national organizations) and several others and yet, land surveyors remain laborers with barely a GED requirement.   Anyone that believes land surveyors cannot be deregulated by these same folks might want to reconsider that position.  

Be clear, this is not a union or nonunion discussion.  It is a discussion about the professional community regarding and regaining their stature to move further away from being deregulated.  Deregulation means becoming a trade with no license requirements.  It is reasonable to expect licensees to retain writing legal descriptions, creating subdivisions and lose topography, construction, 8726 (a), (b) etc. It is unrealistic to think this could not happen to land surveying in a similar fashion as to how they became laborers.

These same, land surveyors are GED laborers, folks rewrote PLSA 8726 - deregulating most of land surveying by legal definition - last year and didn't bother checking with CLSA, ACEC or CELSA - all organizations that represent land surveying in California. Fortunately, for licensed professionals, the bill was pulled at the last minute by the author.  Professional land surveyors will simply get a memo "your services are no longer needed".

As stated previously,  most licensed land surveyors will be fortunate to get a job in an Amazon warehouse making $15/hr if land surveying dries up - unless I am missing the transferable skills worthy of a $100k annually. Visualize the master cabinet maker, extremely skilled at the craft, the day they built an IKEA. Besides, there is not enough room at Amazon for all of you.

DWoolley

Interesting.
For clarity, does deregulation mean no license requirement at all?
Are general contractors being deregulated as well?
And all other licenses?

In my practice, I find engineers (and surveyors) routinely that should not be licensed as dog bathers. It is alarming. Seems many firms are too big to fail, have their own full time document production damage control staff, and scatter like cockroaches when you turn on the light when the time comes to make a decision. I don't know. I've seen situations where the field surveyors see and know that the engineers screwed up the job, lay it out per plan, and walk away. Perhaps a cultural "who is John Galt" thing. I don't know.

Like the Reaper making his house call, nobody can say with certainty when or how he captures a soul. (Clark, being that you are a music man, queue up O'Death by Ralph Stanley and read on - even though he skips several verses, I highly recommend the live version available on YouTube).

Deregulation is all the rage nationally. I believe nationally there are only 60-ish licenses common to a majority of states and yet, some states have hundreds of licenses. The licenses are viewed as a protectionist measure by the haves to keep out the have-nots. Frankly, I can see that perspective. In recent years, Florida tried to pass a bill that deregulated a majority of their occupational licenses. I do not recall specifically if it included land surveying, but I believe there has been two other states that have attempted to deregulate land surveying.

Google "occupational licenses deregulation" and it should turn up plenty of good reading. I recall congressional reports.

I have attached a paper that made my files. At some point I thought it was worth keeping.

I cannot foresee general contractors losing their license because of the public protections like bonding, liens and worker's compensation tied to their licensing board. Many, if not most, large contractors are self performing their own land surveying as described in Bus. & Prof. 8726 (a) and (b). The land surveying community accommodates the contractors by giving them CAD files, survey control and signing off on their work.

As for land surveying, I see land surveyors losing everything except subdivisions, legal descriptions (which is already marginal), geodetic control and boundary establishment. The balance of the work being lost to the trades. Being classified as mechanics and laborers is one foot in that grave. No minimum licensing standards for hiring in the private sector is the banana peel under the other foot.

DWoolley

Edit: The file I wanted to attach is to large. I will resize and attach later. I have attached a substitute paper in the meantime.

Due to technical issues, I cannot resize the file this morning. The better read can be found at this link:

https://goldwaterinstitute.org/wp-conte ... ure_PP.pdf

If I were to prognosticate, as stated earlier, the professional license will be relegated to subdivisions, legal descriptions, geodetic control and boundary establishment. What that looks like in Orange County is we currently have approximately 325 licensees of all stripes i.e. retirees, public employees, private practice, etc. Of those 325 licensees less than 20 of them file over 90% of the maps. Restated, if limited to mapping, 90% of the crowd will be scrambling for less than 10% of the work. Although rough numbers, the outcome is entirely predicable. The bottom will drop out of the market as individuals scramble to survive.

Complicating matters is the fact Local 12 will dispatch their unlicensed "surveyors" to the contractors in Operating Engineers (for less cost than charged to a land surveying firm for the same person). This means the contractor can get a fully burdened "surveyor" dispatched from the hall for approximately $75 an hour and the licensed surveyor has to charge $180 for the same person to cover costs i.e. insurance, equipment, business overhead and profit. To their credit, CELSA (a signatory owners group) has negotiated with Local 3 to contractually prohibit this practice. In a deregulated land surveying world, this would be entirely legal and the land surveying companies would forever lose this work.

Free technology is available to eliminate the need for land surveyors to provide design level topography. Awhile back, several years ago now, I was reviewing 1.5 miles of a centerline profile and it did not look plausible. On a short timeline I needed a check on the data. It turns out there is software available to create a DTM from stock Google Earth. In the 1.5 miles the largest delta was 0.4' from the ground measurements to the Google Earth model. The vast majority of design engineers would find this acceptable and not engage a land surveyor. As a licensee I know this cannot be trusted without ground truthing, but most people that use the data want to believe and will not be asking me for my opinion. Factor in the mobile scanning, UAVs and the high quality terrain models needed to support self driving automobiles (already being created in Mountain View, CA and in Japan) and the writing is on the wall for the end of most topographic mapping by a land surveyor, especially the field collection aspects.

Ref:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thever ... e-ces-2020

Again, whether hiring or contracting, demand credentials i.e. PLS or minimally, an LSIT - and thank a public agency for maintaining their minimum hiring standards over the last 35 years. Help as many over the wall as willing to commit to the credential and prepare to cut the balance loose - enjoy reminiscing about the good ol' days with the unlicensed when they drop a package off on your front porch, change the oil in your car or price check an item at Costco for you.

Please tell me facts I do not know or understand. I genuinely welcome any perspective.

DWoolley