California Surveyors Forums

I'm a surveying student. Because I don't have the experience, I don't know how a company would handle this particular issue. Can anyone shed some light, given your experience?

Is the practice problem just "please provide a response to this message"?

Here is my attempt at it:

Cassandra,

Thanks for reaching out! I believe your client is correct that it is a good time to get a survey done. Not knowing more about the specific situation, I cannot give any preliminary opinions. A great deal of variables might come into play that could affect the survey findings, and at the end of the day it will certainly require a attorney such as yourself to take on some of the legal arguments involved that my profession can only evidence. I appreciate that this may not be the information you were hoping to hear off-the-bat, but I cannot provide work in the State of California without a contract. I will put together an estimate for this work as soon as possible, and a contract thereafter if the estimated costs are acceptable to your client. If you can provide me with any and all documentation relating to the property, it will help me get this moving a little quicker.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,
Kyle Brook, PLS


Curious to hear what others think about this response!

Hey Kyle, that's a great response. To answer your question, yes, the practice problem is just "please provide a response to this message"? But I wanted to take it further and understand/learn how a surveyor would dive into this kind of inquiry. What steps would you take once you got back a signed contract?

Well your first step would be to get the client to provide an address or APN for the property... this doesn't happen anywhere in the email (probably because it is a generic example question), but clients very frequently want a survey and don't tell you where it is. If the client can provide you a deed for the property and a Title Report it helps quite a bit. Then pull all recorded maps for said property, look it over in google maps/ google earth / on-site, and start figuring out what work will be needed to do a Record of Survey.

That is all to give an estimate. To perform get the contract going I would have at least one more conversation to ensure the client has conveyed the issue correctly and you are on the same page with them as to what you will be providing.

After the contract you need to get the field survey to collect data and find boundary for the client's property and the record road location. You would need to get the travelled road location also. Then you could actually start figuring out where things actually are. For all we know the client owns to the centerline but the road is 500 feet wide and the travelled road is well within the easement...

I ran into this situation about 20 years ago in a remote rural area of my home county. The Viewers described the road centerline by bearing and distance in 1888, and the road was accepted by the county on that basis. But the viewers ran their courses through tangents, while the gravel road that had been in use and fenced for over 100 years was replete with curves. And in one area the road description deviated from the as-built tangent by 100 feet or so.

There was never any question that the road was always in its present-day location. It snaked between some very steep hills, and no one would ever consider building a road on those hillsides. I as-built the road and fences (about 1/2 mile of the road was on my client's property) and showed the as-built location as the right-of-way on the Parcel Map I filed.

The answer is, don't offer a preliminary opinion without the due diligence given to the project, especially if you already know that opinion is going to be shared.
What class is this? Boundary control, or business practices?

You do need to consider that there is a possibility of some sort of prescriptive rights existing within the area the road is located now, and if there is a chance of that, the matter would have to be adjudicated.

The location and rights within the original road from 140 years ago did not go away just because ne path may have been forged.

Fulls survey, vesting deed and title search is needed, and if new prescriptive rights are to be claimed by the city, a land attorney may be needed too.

Thanks, guys; these are all helpful responses that give me a little more insight. Here's another practice problem: an internal memo from a party chief asking for guidance. What are your thoughts on how you would respond to the party chief on this one?

Survey the entire property as originally requested, and document the differences and evidence of occupation. Document, document, document your findings.