I was reading another post where it was said that among other things, Surveyors prevent arguments about who owns what.
So this brings up a question for the Surveyors here.
I am located in Ontario Canada. My neighbour several farms over is having a screaming dispute with the daughter of the farmer who owns the farm next to him after he passed away. She isn’t the typical farmers daughter. She says they own the laneway between the farms while everyone else around here says my neighbour owns it. So she hired a surveyor to stake the property line. Apparently, he was seen pulling out survey stakes and moving them. Apparently, he also destroyed a concrete monument in the process. This was witnessed by a third party neighbour. The property line stakes he put in wander all over the place as plainly evident to my own eye.
Anyway, the neighbour and I went down to the municipal office where survey drawings are kept that describe each farm in the municipality. We pulled and copied all the drawings for the entire block of land.
First off, there was no drawing for the neighbours farm. We were told it was the original farm and drawings were only made for new farms as they were severed off???
I suggested that we try to make a drawing by using all the adjacent surveys drawings. We failed miserably because the adjacent surveys don’t agree with each other. In fact, I discovered that the west boundary of my own farm as shown on my own drawing is different from the east boundary of the farm next door in terms of BOTH distances and angles! The difference puts about 3 meters of land in question at the far back. While that neighbour and I get along just fine, it’s easy to see that such a difference could easily put my other neighbours laneway into question.
To make matters worse, I have heard that it’s common place around here for farmers to move survey stakes in the moonlight. I know of at least one that mysteriously moved after I bought my own farm. This stake is on the opposite side of my farm from the side where the boundary differs on the drawings and really isn’t a problem for me (that I know of) because it is in a scrub area that is not farmable. It’s just the ethics of it all.
My questions are:
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How in the world can it happen that survey drawings for adjacent properties do not match? I would have thought that any new survey would require a comparison with drawings for adjacent properties and that any moved survey stakes would have to be reported by Surveyors staking out a property.
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What can/should be done to properly resolve any differences? If another survey only creates a new set of stakes different from the first survey, what real progress is made?