Signed off by who?

We're working on a survey in a particular county in Indiana that was part of a lawsuit basically involving a five-foot strip of property that was sold twice. The original surveyor did the job correctly but somebody created a property description that caused the overlap with a parcel previously sold by the same owner. I talked to the original surveyor (the only one who has worked on this project) and he said that the description was not prepared by him. Now.....in Indiana, the only two professions that can legally prepare property descriptions are professional land surveyors and lawyers. I could go on for an extended period of time about lawyers and their distinct misunderstanding of survey law but I'll save that for another post sometime. Obviously, some lawyer thought he could write a description and ended up causing a lawsuit.

What we had prepared (and spelled out in our scope of work) was a boundary survey of the five-foot strip in accordance with the state minimum standards and the creation of a description for the same. Since it did not create a new tax parcel and the previous surveys had shown the boundaries correctly, according to Indiana standards, the survey was not required to be recorded. However, one of the attorneys involved in the lawsuit decided that our survey needed to be recorded. Having worked in this county before, I tried to talk him out of recording this survey and stated that it did not need to be according to the Indiana Administrative Code. However, the recordation of this survey was apparently part of the lawsuit so it needed to be done.

Normally when we record surveys, I put my professional land surveyor's stamp on the drawing, sign it, take it to the recorder's office where they stamp it with the recording information and we're done. However, I had been warned that this particular county had some "different" ideas about what was required to record a survey so I called a local surveyor to ask him what verbage needed to go on our plat of survey to get this thing through.

I wasn't ready for what he sent me. The survey has to be certified by the surveyor (makes sense to me), by the owner (okay, I can live with this one), by the auditor (I guess since they're the one assessing taxes I can somewhat understand this one but there's no real exchange of property created by the survey), the mayor (which I don't understand at all as he probably has no idea what he's signing), the clerk-treasurer (who probably is more clueless than the mayor) and the plan commission (huh? we're not platting a new subdivision, asking for a variance or rezoning - just trying to record a stinking survey!).

This has to be the most ridiculous example of waaaaaaaaaaay too many layers of government being involved in such a simple process.

Rant over.