Questions about that GPS ‘survey’

As a land surveyor with a GPS [Global Positioning System] crew, I read “Sizing Up the Land” by Robert Smaus (April 6) with great interest.

When land surveyors set tagged monuments on property lines, we are required by state law to file a record of survey with the county surveyor of that particular county. Did your civil engineer-surveyor do that?

It is difficult at best to determine complex property boundaries without surveying the entire parcel for possible conflicts with “senior” parcels, finding other survey control monuments, possession lines, etc. It is very interesting that your surveyor only surveyed a “couple of lines” for you, and yet you say and apparently believe that you had your property “surveyed.”

We utilize GPS equipment for one of our survey crews. The equipment runs in the $50,000 range, yet you refer to it as a “TV cable box with a bent coat hanger on top.”

Glen L. Aalbers

Oxnard Shores

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For the benefit of your readers and my fellow land surveyors, who will now be expected to survey 40-acre parcels for only $800, I’d like to clarify some aspects of surveying. Of course I don’t have all the details of the “survey,” but as described in the article the activities of the civil engineer-land surveyor may not constitute a property survey as a surveyor understands the process or indeed an activity that is legal in the state of California.

Tony Pratt

Temple City

Editor’s note: Robert Smaus was only interested in knowing where his property lines crossed the road in the canyon bottom, so he opted for a bare-bones $800 job to identify points instead of a comprehensive survey, which probably would have cost closer to $5,000. He said, “We did this in escrow, to get a better idea of what we were buying. We found two corners of the property almost by accident and were required to file a ‘corner record’ with the county surveyor, which cost an extra $100.”