"miamicuse" wrote in message
...
Just purchased a property and after doing the survey, I realized my new
neighbor planted a palm on my property...The palm is about 8 feet tall and
has a terra cotta border (round about 3 feet in diameter) with mulch. I
am
planning to construct a fence which will cut right through this terra
cotta
border with the palm ending on my side completely.

How should I handle this situation? I don't think it is practical to up
root the palm and plant it on their side, nor stopping and starting the
fence and leave a gap where this palm is...

1) You put way too much faith in the surveyor.

2) Based on the experiences with surveyor accuracy, many jurisdictions
require fences to be placed not closer than five feet inside a lot line,
good side of the fence facing out.
(A couple of reasons for that besides the survey problem - that five foot
assures a ten foot access corridor -five feet from each property as a fire
break and for fire trucks, utility trucks, city trucks, and the like to get
behind houses.)

3) You have to live with the neighbor - visit with him, tell him you are
thinking about a fence and WHY (you have kids and the local alligators, you
have a cat and you want to let it roam the backyard, your pet rottweilers
killed somebody last year and you want them under control, etc.), and ask
the neighbor if he knows where the lot line actually is.
And don't be shocked when he points to a stake from his surveyor that is
two feet off from your surveyor's.


I have several pieces of property, and have done surveying for USCG.
IMHE, most surveying, even licensed, is a waste of money unless you have
a lawsuit, because most surveyors don't shoot off a major benchmark, the
only starting point that counts. They shoot in from a pipe or street that
moves in construction, unless they have to go to court and get embarrassed
by another surveyor.
An amicable agreement as to about where it is and moving back six inches
off that line makes for friendly neighbors.

I have a dozen stories and a series of surveyors who can't place their
truck, let alone a lot line- here are three personal examples of why you
shouldn't make bad neighbors for bad surveying, or bad assumptions about
whether the actual owner of that dirt put in a tree:

a) I have seen one of my properties surveyed at least six times across 40
years by the various neighbors - each licensed surveyor goes off a pipe
benchmark, no two surveyors get it right, and the lot line moves ten feet
(yes TEN) each time they survey. Only once was it shot in using a major
benchmark. And after 150 years, and 20 years with six licensed and board
certified land surveyors along that south line, somebody noticed the lot
lines overlapped in the description - by 20 feet! (quit claimed to fix it).
They all did chain and rod work, and apparently all missed adjustments
for elevation (the earth is close to flat, as are maps - so you have to
shoot and adjust for measuring on slopes to get map-flat distances.)

thus problem # 1 - surveyors cutting corners and assuming the last person
did good work, and that their survey is pro forma little value.

b) My house in a development
1) has the lot lines marked with buried rerod
2) the plat map has the common lot line listed from the centerline of a
road (road being
redone, and likely moved a foot or so over next year) and
3) the one coordinating point for the entire development is a major
benchmark two miles
away, a mile from the edge of the development.
The city (wisely) shot in the replacement utility poles and new street
lights off the major benchmark and set them at the corners - dead on. Back
then, I had asked the surveyor who was shooting in the poles "why shoot?",
when they had a ten foot wide easement, and it was the utility companies
pole anyway- "Peace among neighbors" was his answer.
You would think the locals thought those rerods were given by God and
put in by Moses rather than just shoved in the ground near the lot stakes,
stakes set by the contractor and replaced by eye after the land was scarfed,
rerod shoved in by an 18 yr old summer worker who got within five feet of
the moved stakes nearly all the time (fwiw -my 140 foot wide lot has the
rods spaced 150 feet, measured using a 100 ft tape on level ground).
The several surveyors for the properties on three sides have yet to get
close to each others marks.

thus problem # 2 - Surveyors too damn lazy/owner too cheap to shoot off a
major benchmark, assumptions about who puts in what (major benchmarks are
put in by top pros like USGS, and pipes and rods are put in as guides only
by local surveyors), and GPS that has errors: accuracy depends on
calibration AT the major mark, the quality of equipment, the type of signal
used, and the skill of the user. And it ain't all that damn good,
anyway -just cheaper.

c) My lake properties (5 lots in two adjacent additions, on a "peninsula
with island" 800 feet across) uses a 3" iron pipe to define a meandering
corner for the entire island and two plats. After the original plat, the
lake was later dammed and the pipe submerged.
Each time an adjacent landowner has bought property, it is surveyed off
one of the lesser survey points, and often surveyed in from the water.
E.g., I went up one weekend and saw the surveyor's mark for edge of the
western neighbor of addition one, saw a mark shot in from the south sitting
in the middle of a drive.
I had earlier seen a mark from a different surveyor, one who had done the
northern neighbor's property which was in additon two, and he shot southward
from the north edge - his mark sitting 90 feet to the north of the first
neighbor's mark.

Problem was, my 2 lots in the middle of the island on that north-south lot
line were 200 feet wide. The survey was obviously wrong, since 90 is not
200.
But the owner to the north and the owner to the west each "knew" their
mark was correct, because their land was "properly surveyed".
Neither surveyor had accounted for the dam making the island smaler, nor
had either shot off the 3" pipe ("can't be found" because everybody kept
looking near the shore when it actually is 60 feet out in the bay)
Satellite photo of present size overlaid on pre-dam map showed the island
had lost 110 feet N-S.
(this is the same property that had a large lot that was submerged when
the lake was dammed leaving it 12 sq ft, but still listed, and fifty years
later some newbie country assessor sees a large lot on a map and decides it
is waterfront with $2000 a year taxes instead of the $10 it had been for 30
years. County surveyor says maps are only changed there by court order as
the result of a lawsuit, etc, etc. )

Thus problem 3 - original maps often suck, many surveyors are too lazy to
find a major mark, and there are decades of poor survey records.

Most telling point about all three of the above is that the neighbors
won't rock the boat on those lines - they would rather think that their lots
go to the best-for-them lines and marks rather than have the lots properly
surveyed and maybe find out their lots are smaller than they imagine. Blind
bigger is better than smaller truth.

So my advice is don't put your surveyor whom you saw for ten minutes
above your neighbor with whom you will have to live with for years.

And don't put in a fence on a lot line, because if you are off six inches
the wrong way, you will have a bad festering neighbor forever and much
wasted money in lawsuits, as well as pulling out a fence and moving it
over - for six lousy inches.

Assume the surveyor was wrong and the line is a foot off - and I would
bet you I can find three surveyors to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt he
was and three that he was was not.

------------

"Good fences make good neighbors" was talking about the condition of the
fence, not the fences location or that it was a demarcation. Otherwise he
would have said "Good fences located by good surveyors make for good
neighbors"

-----------------

for some reason, landowners and surveyors are like lawyers and engineers -
each is expert about the other's business all the while barely knowing what
the other does..

---that was cathartic....