P
paulaas
Guest
What is the name of your state? IA
I am digging in my back yard in order to add a garage. Digging in my area does not require a permit, while construction does. I have a permit for the construction. My neighbor believes I may have encroached upon his property line. The garage location is clearly within the setback requirements and is not contested. The paticular area in question is a 32' long x 5' wide x 2' deep hole. I will place landscape timbers along the length of this hole, at grade, and then backfill the area with dirt and grass. The purpose of this is to prevent erosion of my neighbors yard into my own, or my garage, after the excavation is complete. The reason for this method is to comply with building code requirements concerning wall height and reinforcement.
The issue is that my neighbor thinks I may have encroached, and is upset that any method other than surveying from stakes was used by me to determine property line. He has threatened to "stop" the process, to which I told him as a practical matter, the area would be restored to its previous condition and be "re-grassed", this would be done prior to him obtaining a court date, and that I was paying the expense to prevent HIS yard from eroding into mine. As an aside, I mentioned that if there was to be a survey, I would require that this be a shared cost, in order to determine whether a post placed between our yards in the middle of nowhere was in fact a relic from an earlier survey and used to mark boundary, or whether this post lie on one or the other's property. This is not a big issue, but it has served as the demarcation line for mowing and does seem to be utterly without function except to serve that purpose. (it was present when I bought the house and is not "permanent" nor does it have economic or other value)
Back to the point, I'm wondering: whether the lack of me doing a survey is a prima facie way for him to demand that I cease and desist until a survey is obtained.
I beleive my methodology is sound, and while perhaps not legally determinative, at least is sufficient to cause a reasonable person to come to the same conclusions. I used USGS mapping data from arial photographs that have been overlaid by our county assessor with the plat maps for our county and provided on their website (pretty cool - home page at assess.co.polk.ia.us - gotta do a search to see). I used a large rock and the center of a drainage ditch with small culvert, neither of which have moved by themselves over the last four years, as reference points to the property line to the adjacent neighbor. Since the proximity of the rock to the line was short, the error produced by "pixelizing" the image and converting each pixel into physical space is likely to be small. I then picked a place equidistant from the front and back boundaries of the property and used a nifty laser transit to shoot the refernce point and establish my line. I accounted for the published deviation in the transit. All be damned if this method showed the other structures EXACTLY at their setback requirements (presuming those guys had a method, too), the above-mentioned post exactly in-line, and my proposed location safely at 1' from the line. From this method, I finalized my plan and started digging.
Are their emerging cases or existing law that seek to use digital imagery, GPS data, and other new technologies as legally determinative methods to resolve boundary disputes? If the neighbor requests a survey, can I use my own results to ask the other surveyor to either validate the methodology and/or determine a result using an altnernative method - and then proceed to resolve differences, should any appear, between our two results? I suppose the theoretical question is that, at some point, if there is movement between the method of observation and the observed in a way that cannot resolve to absolute position, which is correct? When in California, if an earthquake moves the boundary stakes, does that seem that "new" real estate has been created by the emergence of the fault? (all technologies will have their quirks)
Thanks for your thoughts...
I am digging in my back yard in order to add a garage. Digging in my area does not require a permit, while construction does. I have a permit for the construction. My neighbor believes I may have encroached upon his property line. The garage location is clearly within the setback requirements and is not contested. The paticular area in question is a 32' long x 5' wide x 2' deep hole. I will place landscape timbers along the length of this hole, at grade, and then backfill the area with dirt and grass. The purpose of this is to prevent erosion of my neighbors yard into my own, or my garage, after the excavation is complete. The reason for this method is to comply with building code requirements concerning wall height and reinforcement.
The issue is that my neighbor thinks I may have encroached, and is upset that any method other than surveying from stakes was used by me to determine property line. He has threatened to "stop" the process, to which I told him as a practical matter, the area would be restored to its previous condition and be "re-grassed", this would be done prior to him obtaining a court date, and that I was paying the expense to prevent HIS yard from eroding into mine. As an aside, I mentioned that if there was to be a survey, I would require that this be a shared cost, in order to determine whether a post placed between our yards in the middle of nowhere was in fact a relic from an earlier survey and used to mark boundary, or whether this post lie on one or the other's property. This is not a big issue, but it has served as the demarcation line for mowing and does seem to be utterly without function except to serve that purpose. (it was present when I bought the house and is not "permanent" nor does it have economic or other value)
Back to the point, I'm wondering: whether the lack of me doing a survey is a prima facie way for him to demand that I cease and desist until a survey is obtained.
I beleive my methodology is sound, and while perhaps not legally determinative, at least is sufficient to cause a reasonable person to come to the same conclusions. I used USGS mapping data from arial photographs that have been overlaid by our county assessor with the plat maps for our county and provided on their website (pretty cool - home page at assess.co.polk.ia.us - gotta do a search to see). I used a large rock and the center of a drainage ditch with small culvert, neither of which have moved by themselves over the last four years, as reference points to the property line to the adjacent neighbor. Since the proximity of the rock to the line was short, the error produced by "pixelizing" the image and converting each pixel into physical space is likely to be small. I then picked a place equidistant from the front and back boundaries of the property and used a nifty laser transit to shoot the refernce point and establish my line. I accounted for the published deviation in the transit. All be damned if this method showed the other structures EXACTLY at their setback requirements (presuming those guys had a method, too), the above-mentioned post exactly in-line, and my proposed location safely at 1' from the line. From this method, I finalized my plan and started digging.
Are their emerging cases or existing law that seek to use digital imagery, GPS data, and other new technologies as legally determinative methods to resolve boundary disputes? If the neighbor requests a survey, can I use my own results to ask the other surveyor to either validate the methodology and/or determine a result using an altnernative method - and then proceed to resolve differences, should any appear, between our two results? I suppose the theoretical question is that, at some point, if there is movement between the method of observation and the observed in a way that cannot resolve to absolute position, which is correct? When in California, if an earthquake moves the boundary stakes, does that seem that "new" real estate has been created by the emergence of the fault? (all technologies will have their quirks)
Thanks for your thoughts...