California Surveyors Forums

I attended the Cal Poly Pomona Conference and there was a good discussion regarding private survey records. I would like to follow up with a poll.

Yes -particularly if they are on file with the County Surveyor, indexed, and citable as a reference.

IMO, it's even more important to cite an unfiled survey that may have some evidentiary value if it is not yet filed and indexed in the CS's records precisely because there may be no other previous public notice of that record's existence.

Even if you obtain the record, consider it but reject it as controlling for the lines you are surveying, it is important to disclose so that 1) others who later find the same evidence can see that you did consider it and discern from your map why you rejected it, and 2) it may be of more importance to another nearby parcel to be surveyed by someone else at a later date and your reference puts that surveyor on notice of its existence and location.

In many instances, unfiled records may reflect an original survey of one or more parcels and property rights will have most likely been established based upon the points set in that survey as the first actual physical establishment of the boundary.

More often, unfiled records will provide a link between original corner monuments and currently existing monuments and explain discrepancies between the existing monuments and the dimensions in a deed that were likely derived from poorly made measurements or assumed directions and/or distances.

Ideally, there would then be a mechanism to get copies of the unfiled records directly into the public record. In some counties, that mechanism exists. In others, it doesn't. In the cases where getting a record into the public record is problematic, a reference on a newly filed RS that describes the records and the private or quasi-public source it was obtained from is the next best thing. Properly documented, a reference to an unfiled record can provide a crucial link back to the original and hopefully keep the next surveyor to come along from setting a new monument in a location where the corner never existed simply because the dimensions in the deed description as projected from whatever monuments the mathemagician accepted don't land precisely on the existing monument.