If anyone out there has actually bothered to follow my posting you'd notice right off I got a little inconsistent. Well lets just say that 2015 has not been a banner year for me. It started really badly. Then in May I was medevac'd to Flagstaff for an emergency surgery that basically gutted me like a fish. Spent all of July recovering and finally got to get to work in August full speed. Without going into a lot of detail; take care of your gastro-intestinal health. Long story short; I lost June and July. August picked up and September October have been the best in years. Enough catch up here is the meat of the post.
2 weeks ago an attorney here in the White Mountains called me. He was in a bind. A colleague had been hired to do an ALTA survey in a nearby town. the week of delivery he backed out. Attorney calls and says can you do it? What will charge and how much to expedite? Game on... So I do my homework and go to the field.
In this particular community there is a guy whom is not licensed but finds RLS's to seal his work. We all know him and we know the RLS numbers he uses. Well, adjacent to the property I am surveying I find yellow plastic caps with the RLS typical of the rubber stamp activity. No Record of Survey on file at the court house and no rhyme or reason to there placement. So I track down the name behind the number and contact him. When I call him he is surprised that I had found his caps. He had no record of any of the technician's work in the area. Caught way off guard he asks me to see my data and he'd get back to me. 24 hours later he does and admits he's got a real problem. Now at this point I am thinking I can serve him up to the BTR. However I decide to help him. So I meet with the landowners and explain why the monuments are no good. The RLS agrees and askes me to pull them. I let him know that the only way to make it right is to redo the survey he didn't do and correct the monuments and file a Record of Survey. He asks me if I would do the field work for him and I agreed. So I move his monuments with the consent of the land owners. He prepares a plat and records it and I finish my ALTA with no encumbrances. So here is the takeaway from all this:
1. If you are rubber stamping for a guy in a different part of the state; you have know way of knowing how many quicky surveys he's doing for cash with your caps.
2. the monuments are there and whether or not the RLS knew about them doesn't matter because he is still responsible for them.
3. Never should a registrant give his caps to somebody to use; especially when the guy the RLS is stamping for can't be trusted.
4. Collaboration between professionals can reach a consensus that benefits the landowners and fixes the erroneous survey.
This could have been really bad. So a word to the wise. Rubbers tamping for someone acting as a para-professional is a big mistake and should never happen. The offending technician will walk. However one of the parties involved was a relative and was not happy to hear that family had done him that way. Its a small world. Especially here in the Hinterlands.
