California Surveyors Forums

Hello.

Can someone give me a good contact person in the Subdivision and Mapping section of Public Works to discuss boundary surveys and record of survey submittals there? Thanks.

Marilyn Lopes, PLS would be a good contact. Sorry I don't have her contact info handy.

thanks Tom.

I'll look her up.

I'm doing a boundary there now and I've noticed that some record of surveys I've seen routinely show the row houses (that have been there for maybe 100 years) encroaching. The Monument Maps seem to be the way people determine boundaries out there. What is the local custom in this area? I'd love to hear comments from others that work there.
Thanks.

Mike,

Dane Ince can give you some insight and some other contacts that probably don't lurk here.

Let me know if you need contact info.

Hi Tom.

I couldn't find Marilyn on the Board listing. Does she go by a different name?

thanks.

San Francisco is a sufficiently different animal that I've never wanted to work there under my own license. In years past I did some field work for an old-line SF firm (I was on loan from my employer of the time), and there were enough twists and turns to the local practices that I concluded you need to work there a lot in order to stay out of trouble.

Yes, Mike, I see she is listing herself now as a former "chief of land surveys" for SF.

Well, there is always Bruce Storrs, the City/County surveyor. However, I would recommend Robert Hanley first.

BTW, SF is a strange place to survey.

From my perspective, the boundary stuff is basically a block by block situation with a lot of history in the records and surveying..

Jim Frame is right on target.

Mike, your timing is excellent, because there is a big meeting this Friday on matters that pertain to the City's policy with regards to surveying.

Took me quite awhile to "understand" SF work, and in a nutshell Jim is correct that it is a different animal out there. To make the animal even more ferocious, the City appears to be taking a new angle on things that may have enough of an impact on me that I will stop working there altogether.

Personally, I am very skeptical about calling old row houses off property lines unless there is some damn good reason. In general, you can find blocks that all work quite well overall, and others, you can find things work in clusters depending on which end of the block you are coming from.

The deeds in general will call a specific distance from a block corner. Of course, the question then becomes where is the block corner in those areas where the City has plus/minus calls from their monument lines to the right of way lines.

The fun thing on some surveys is to look at as many record of surveys as you can on one side of a block, and look at both sides of the street and look at what they "resolve" for the distance from a monument line to the right of way. They can all be different, up to a few tenths even, and rarely do you see the discrepancies even addressed, and there are very few monuments tied in at all, and no occupation lines shown other than the property in question.

Thanks for all your comments.

Bryan, I knew about that meeting on the 19th. I'm curious about what comes out of that. I agree that the +/- dimensions to the monument line are strange. Also, they actually show some of the city monuments off the "monument line" by a few hundredths (here and there). Curiously, they don't show actual distances between some of the monuments.

I would be interested to hear from someone who knows the clear history of that, but my assumption is that the stone monuments were laid out in the early 1900s or so and they were set at specific distances from "original/first" centerline intersection monuments.

My other assumption is that some point soon thereafter the City established monument lines across a series of blocks and did some kind of "best fit" so there are not a series of small jogs or angle points. The offsets in some cases to the few thousandths is a little overzealous.

From there, to get to the right of way, from my experience, is to use old "L" cuts and check with old occupation and see how your block conforms. I doubt a right of way is going to work perfectly to record and you can offset from one side to the other and make things work.

Every time I survey there I am humored by the weird discrepancies you will find - things like how you notice the block at some point will not work from one side to the other and every ROS you have fails to point this out. Or, my most recent one, I was looking for a benchmark, and the City list said "stone monument" near my lot, and the City monument map did not show it. I go over to the area and lo and behold, there was a stone monument in a casing in the sidewalk. No idea why this was not related to the monument map. I did find it referenced on a block diagram from the 1930s-era, and it was quite helpful.

I would be interested to hear from someone who knows the clear history of that, but my assumption is that the stone monuments were laid out in the early 1900s or so and they were set at specific distances from "original/first" centerline intersection monuments.

The way I remember it being told to me 30-some years ago is that following the 1906 earthquake the city got state legislation passed authorizing an authoritative resurvey of the city, the results of which were binding upon all title holders. The city surveyors went block-by-block, making each block work within itself and ignoring street widths. They established monuments as they went, but I no longer recall much about the monumentation lines.

It seems that most of the ties I made when I was doing boundary field work in the city were L-cuts and T-cuts, and that you had to be careful that the the cut you were using was set in a curbstone that was still in its original location (sometimes sections of the granite curbs got R&R'd without regard to the cuts).