re-newal of boundry lines

[keppoch]

what would be the going rate to charge to re-new a klm. of boundry line or a mile which ever is used more often

[SwampDonkey]

Retrace? or flag, repaint and brush old evidence? You do know only a registered surveyor can retrace lines eh? We had a discussion with NB land surveyors a few years ago about that. They were prepared to string anyone up by the boot laces if someone tried a retrace that wasn't registered.  Anyway to fresh'n up an existing line and brush it out 2 meters wide it's around $0.50 a linear meter and just following old evidence with flagging is around $0.25 a meter. Most property lines are in sorry shape, so it's best to see what shape the line is in with the understanding this is a service call for $75 like any repair man would charge to show up. If it don't need retracing then go ahead. Brushing is a lot easier if you use a brush saw in the spring before green-up. I've had retracement done here on the farm for $750 for 2 miles by a surveyor with GPS and his axe man. Of course I am assuming your not a registered NB land surveyor.

[sprucebunny]

Where are you, keppoch

Would a Forester please comment on American rules about boundary renewal ?

[SwampDonkey]

I believe he is from NB, as he is a student of the "Ranger School" as eluded to in another post. But, he'll let us know some day. 

http://www.forestryforum.com/board/index.php/topic,36669.msg530084.html#msg530084


Hasn't been answering back much yet. He was on right after your post sprucebunney.

[BaldBob]

Would a Forester please comment on American rules about boundary renewal ?

The rules vary by state, but most require that all "official" retracements be done by a licensed surveyor. I am unaware of any specific requirements for who is allowed to simply freshen up an existing boundary line.

[Rick Alger]

I'm not a forester, but I  have refreshed existing boundary lines here in NH without being strung up.

[Texas Ranger]

In Texas you can redo old lines, but not create new ones, or "modify" old ones.  Done a few over the years.  Also hired surveyors for the real bad ones.

[SwampDonkey]

Retracing means marking out by a survey , with survey grade instruments, because there is no existing evidence or not enough evidence to follow with certainty.

[Ron Scott]

Using Michigan law, only a professional surveyor can do anything with establishing or reestablishing a corner or boundary line. There is no basic problem in foresters locating and refreshing property lines for the purpose of their forestry in logging work, however, when foresters express comment that they can provide boundary or corner establishement, they have violated Michigan law.

[Clark]

I don't know what the going rate for putting a line back in or "refreshing" one, but...

With today's GIS and GPS technology most anyone can possibly make a reasonably accurate line.  Many county's now have the lat and long coordinates for every known corner.  Plug those into your GPS, find one and then do a "Go To" the other corner and put up ribbon in between.  Should give you a line that is reasonably close.  If this is for forestry work and the timber isn't real valuable it would probably be good enough.   

Clark

[keppoch]

Hello Guys,sorry for not getting back, I`am from nova scotia and a forest technician, the reason I am wondering about the price of boundry line renewal is I was asked to flag out a excisting line  for a person  so he could cut it.

[SwampDonkey]

Be careful man, there's been a number of lads in your position technicians/foresters that got hauled to court for trespass because the loggers cut to the line and it was over on the neighbor. Sometimes the logger influenced the location of that flagged line to. Make sure the guy next door knows about your activities.

[SwampDonkey]

I don't know what the going rate for putting a line back in or "refreshing" one, but...

With today's GIS and GPS technology most anyone can possibly make a reasonably accurate line.  Many county's now have the lat and long coordinates for every known corner.  Plug those into your GPS, find one and then do a "Go To" the other corner and put up ribbon in between.  Should give you a line that is reasonably close.  If this is for forestry work and the timber isn't real valuable it would probably be good enough.   

Clark

Yeah and you'll also find that there is a legal notice that their maps are not regarded as legal evidence. Mostly what you will find is a GIS map on paper or in digital form.  The evidence on the ground, especially a baseline that a 100 or more woodlots but up against is "the" line. I've seen those maps off the baseline by 100 meters in some areas.

Here is such an example.



The yellow line is the surveyed and painted line maintained by the government, which is also the baseline and the pink line is what you get from the land registration office, off by 75 meters. The landowner also owns one more lot to the NE, that's why his road goes over that pink line. So much for those who maintain the GIS.

[Stephen Alford]

As others have said, alot of people can run a straight line using a compass most of the time but it is just not in the right place. The error then gets compounded as successive lines will be run using lines that are already wrong. The best plan is to have a surveyor and work with them ,very educational. Some early settlers here piled rocks on the line to form dykes that delinate property lines. The size of some of the rocks and dykes are amazing. 

[SwampDonkey]

Rock lines and cedar rail lines were very popular around here to where the Scottish settlers took up land grants. Those fence rows go down through the woods to. And a surveyor will most generally go by historical evidence and monuments on the ground, not a line drawn on a map.

[stonebroke]

In NYS Rocks walls are considered absolute. They just don't move.

Stonebroke

[Clark]

As you'll notice, I said lat and long coordinates of every known corner.  Once you find the monument, running the line should be relatively easy, especially if you are going to another known corner.  Common sense must prevail in these situations:  putting in your own corner based on lat and long coordinates would be fool hardy as would following information which is 75-100 meters off.

Clark

[SwampDonkey]

Consumer GPS devices also have drift in their positions. So, lat/long this morning at 9:30 am could be 25 meters away tomorrow afternoon at 3:00 pm. I've seen it. A piece of thinning was measured with a Garmin, same shape and almost identical in area as with a higher accuracy Trimble. The GPS maps where brought into a GIS and the Garmin shape was 25 meters over the property line on the neighbor's lot, where as the Trimble was right on the mapped line. In the field both GPS traverses came to a blazed property line on one side and a public road out front. As stated, same shape and area, just not same place on the GIS. If it ain't survey grade, your putting yourself into a precarious position if what you believe is the lat/long, but the GPS puts you off the mark. 

[Ron Scott]

Yes, a survey grade GPS such as the expensive Tremble models is necessary for professional survey work.

We can often relocate an reestablish an existing survey line depending upon the amount of reliable evidence that we have such as the original survey notes, certificate of survey, documented registered corner locations, etc.

If we can't retrace the original or previous registered surveys and corner locations  with certainty, then it is a job for the professional surveyor.

Always manage to your property line, but always know where it "legally" is.

[Black_Bear]

Clark is correct when he wrote that it is fairly simple to ribbon a line between monuments using navigation grade GPS. It may take 1 or 2 passes up and down the line to straighten out the kinks, especially on longer lines, but most foresters or loggers I know can adequately ribbon a line between two points.

But, this same attitude has also created a fair amount of work for the local surveyors. If you haven't performed the legal research how can you be certain the monuments you use are the correct monuments? I've seen inexperienced party chiefs use the wrong monument (in both cases it was an old pipe) because they assumed that the first monument they came to was marking the deeded corner. Unfortunately, he didn't see the nice rebar with a land surveyors cap that was at ground level and only 30' from the old pipe that some kid probably stuck in the ground while he was playing cowboys and indians. Not sure how the coordinates were generated (survey, tax mapping, landowner submission??), but I never instantly accept the first monument I find. Take a look around the area and see if anything looks suspicious, or if you can find other evidence. Ultimately, the monument found in the field will be described in detail in the creating deed.

The presence of stonewalls and fences can also confuse the issue, especially here in New England and upstate New York. In many cases the fences and stonewalls are considered monuments and serve as the best evidence to the original line run by the original surveyor. Other times the fences are there to simply keep the cows in the pasture and they hold no weight when analyzing the boundary issue. I've also found barbed wire with a metal detector that was 8" under the surface in Maine, and this wire turned out to be the best (and only) evidence to a line that had no other physical evidence. The deed bearings and distances from a known monument led us to the general area, and a 1950s era survey showed a fence meandering along the line, so we began to look for barbed wire.

Also, judges may not give much weight to a blazed line, especially if it hasn't been relied upon by the landowners and/or the blazes are not mentioned in the creating deed, or if other evidence (monuments) suggest that the original line is different than the blazed line. The weight that a judge gives a blazed line may vary from locale to locale, and may depend on local common practices, both past and present.

I work for a forest management company. We recently had to send a cease and desist order to a neighboring forestry company that had granted an easement for a substantial powerline project. The powerline company hired a surveyor to establish a straight line, running essentially north-south, between monuments that were miles apart. We own the land to the west. The cutters ignored the lead based painted trees that were anywhere from 5-40' easterly of the straight line and cut them down. But, they were doing what they were told to do. I'm not sure how this situation will play out, but I know tensions ran pretty high when we found out they were cutting the blazed trees that had been there for 40+ years. And, the kicker is, the adjoining forestry company agreed that the blazes marked the possession line that had been honored by both current owners AND the prior owners. IMO, that's poor communication and project management.   

I guess my long winded message would be that the landowners are essentially responsible for what happens on their land and around their boundaries. But, if you act in a professional, or not so professional, capacity and cause harm to an adjoining landowner, then the client will more than likely come after you for damages. I'm not saying that you have to hire a surveyor for every job associated with working around or on a boundary line, but be careful, because what seems certain can become uncertain rather quickly if you don't weigh all the evidence, including written evidence. And when the neighbor has to hire a land surveyor to clean up the mess, the professional service fee is not cheap.

Ed 

 

[stonebroke]

I agree with black bear, You have to make sure you have the right rock walls. Internal rock walls  were just to keep cows in. Boundary rock walls are considered the property line though.

Stonebroke

[SwampDonkey]

It's also fun to find one line marked and painted, then walk 40 feet away from that line and find another parallel line. Then real interesting to follow one line in from a corner, then it runs out. Start searching and find another line 30 feet in and follow it to the other corner. Then, the real kicker is to follow Joe landowner the surveyor's line and it curves with the hillside, all nice and blazed and painted.

[Samuel]

That must be why I have not seen painted lines in Alberta or BC.  Not only does it seem like a waste of tax payer dollars, I have witnessed  some of the line crews in NB, and thinking back, my goodness, how inaccurate a lot of those lines must have been .  Do yourself a favour, hire a legal surveyor especially when dealing with private lands.

[Black_Bear]

I guess I should have read a little closer. Keppoch is in Nova Scotia and my earlier rant is probably comparing apples and oranges: Canadian boundary law vs. American boundary law. Both are probably rooted in English Common Law (U.S. boundary law is anyway), but I'd guess that there are many differences, especially when you start dealing with U.S. case law, which is very important to assess when determining boundary issues.

Samuel mentioned that painting lines is a waste of taxpayer dollars. That wouldn't be the case in the U.S. as most land surveying is a private, and not a governmental, job. The willingness to paint lines varies from locale to locale and state to state. We painted a lot of lines in Maine, not so many in VT. It depends on what the landowner wants, and many do not want to pay for the additional costs of blazing and painting lines.

Ed

[Paschale]

Yeah and you'll also find that there is a legal notice that their maps are not regarded as legal evidence. Mostly what you will find is a GIS map on paper or in digital form.  The evidence on the ground, especially a baseline that a 100 or more woodlots but up against is "the" line. I've seen those maps off the baseline by 100 meters in some areas.

Here is such an example.

(Image hidden from quote, click to view.)

The yellow line is the surveyed and painted line maintained by the government, which is also the baseline and the pink line is what you get from the land registration office, off by 75 meters. The landowner also owns one more lot to the NE, that's why his road goes over that pink line. So much for those who maintain the GIS.

We had this same problem up in the U.P. of Michigan, and have yet to resolve it.  A man who bought a lot across the road from land that's been in our family for 100 years had his new purchase resurveyed by a licensed surveyor.  They used GIS, or GPS, or whatever, to mark the new line, and suddenly he owns a swath of land on the opposite side of the road, which was always, and always has been the historic boundary for land purchases in the area.  Conveniently, for him, he also now "owns" our historic ice house, built by my great grandfather, with hand hewn beams, from trees felled by my ancestors.  That has made mine and my whole family's blood boil, as you can imagine, and it's still a huge battle.   

[SwampDonkey]

In this example Pascale, the government owns the land to the NW of the yellow line. But I do know that yellow line carried through and crosses the back of many woodlots that but up to it from the SE. I have seen Industrial Freehold lines change. Freehold seems to have a chance of adjusting lines a bit in a land sale. I see it all the time. But, government and Native Reservation lines are always maintained and not left to disintegrate.

There was some trouble created during the issuing of land grants. The old Indian agents sold off parcels as land grants, illegally. There has been a recent settlement on the claims of a local reservation and the government has to award land as compensation. Trouble is, whose land ? Federal of Provincial? All Federal land in NB is parks and Camp Gagetown and only add up to 2% of the land base. The Fed's are responsible for looking after the Natives, not the provincial government. Interesting.

[jrdwyer]

Paschale,

Has your new neighbor shown you the plat from the surveyor? I am not a licensed surveyor, but I have worked in the field and I do know that the interpretation of deeds can vary, thoroughness of historical research and retracement can vary, and of course throw in adverse possession which tends to also vary by state. It sounds like you need your own survey done by another licensed professional in the area.

In Indiana and many other PLSS states, the county recorder's office has corner record monuments on file. These serve as official documentation to the section corners and 1/4 corners. This is a good place to start, but be aware that section corner documents are often incomplete and additional original monuments may exist that are not recorded and/or monuments recorded may have since been destroyed. Updating these records is part of the duty of our elected county Surveyor and staff. If you happen to be in an incorporated area, then subdivision plats are also typically recorded at the county office and may even be available online for download. Finally, information about road ROW can often be obtained from the level of government responsible for that road (assuming that your road has a ROW). 

Best of luck. I hope you get your ice house back.

BTW, the Land Surveyor probably used RTK GPS on the neighbor's property. It's fast and very precise (1-2 cm horizontal) as long as there is a good view of the sky.

[Paschale]

Paschale,

Has your new neighbor shown you the plat from the surveyor? I am not a licensed surveyor, but I have worked in the field and I do know that the interpretation of deeds can vary, thoroughness of historical research and retracement can vary, and of course throw in adverse possession which tends to also vary by state. It sounds like you need your own survey done by another licensed professional in the area.

Thanks for the comment jr...this is our plan this summer, to get our own survey done by a surveyor from another county.  We found out that there are only two surveyors in the entire county where our land is--one is the county's, and the other is a free lancer, and they're both very cozy with each other.  They back each other up, and so we need to get someone from another part of the state, and fear that we may need to get a real estate lawyer involved.

That's all going to happen this summer sometime.  We'll see what happens.   

[Black_Bear]

"It is far more important to have faulty measurements on the place where the line truly exists, than an accurate measurement where the line does not exist at all."

This is a quote from an early 20th century surveyor named A.C. Mulford.

In other words, it doesn't matter if the surveyor used a $40,000 RTK system or a 1920s compass and chain to mark the line. If he/she did not perform the proper research, recover the necessary evidence, etc., then the line may not be in the correct location and the precision of the survey is irrelevant. The survey measurements may have been precise (repeatable), but the line location may not be accurate (proximity to the true location). Think about shooting a gun at a target. Your gun can consistently hit a quarter, but that quarter is 8 inches from the bulls-eye.

To simplify boundary surveying: there are 3 boundaries to recognize: the record or deed boundary, the occupation boundary, and the legal boundary. When the record line and occupation line agree then the legal boundary is often unambiguous. The problems often begin when the occupation line differs from the record line.

It sounds as though the surveyors who marked the line in question did not honor the fact that your family has occupied the land for 100 years. Did the surveyor even contact your family and discuss why your ice house is in that location? It is so hard to discuss boundary surveying on the internet because we do not have all of the information, and many laypeople simply do not understand the time and effort that goes into a legal survey. I notice you have taken action, but I would second Mr. Dwyer's suggestion and hire an independent surveyor, ASAP. And I wouldn't necessarily go with the cheapest surveyor either. Hire a professional with a good reputation. The Michigan Society of Pro. Surveyors may be able to help.

If it was my land, I'd say the lawyer can wait for now. The surveyor, after collecting the evidence (written and physical), will analyze the boundary situation and, if needed, will advise you to hire a lawyer.

Good luck, and if you can, keep us posted on the proceedings.

Ed     

[cheyenne]

Paschale...I would think even if it's proved your neighbors surveyor is right they can't touch it. It's what they call latches. If you maintain and use a piece of property for ten years and no one challenges it you own it. And there is pressident law to back it up. I would check your state property law for this. I have the same problem with a Utility Co. & their tree butchers.......Good luck to you.....Cheyenne

[olyman]

paschale. i would go to a surveyor within the state, but  a few countys away. why?? because of the "coziness" problem, cause you dont know whats going on behind closed doors, or the relationship of these survyors to the new land owner. nd it happens quite regularly anymore. been there.

[WMcGinn]

This thread has been a good read.   I've been doing some do it myself boundary identification too.  I've found some definate corners, but also found some corners that are somewhat questionable.  I've been considering getting them officially marked, and putting up a boundary fence line.   A lot of the old fences I've found don't seem to be right according to where I'm pretty sure my property lines are.
I have some official survey points I can start from.  Question, do typical North/south section line follow magnetic or true north? 

[Ron Scott]

Correct magnetic north to true north with the declination for your area.
Get a copy of the original survey notes for your property area from the county clerk's office for the original survey information.