27 Counties Responded- Parcel Mapping Discrepancies

27 Counties Responded- Parcel Mapping Discrepancies

Last Updated (Wednesday, 13 January 2010 13:22) Written by Gloria Stevenson Wednesday, 30 December 2009 07:45

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Summary of responses

(Request for information sent to MN counties- 27 counties responded)

Question sent:

To: MN County GIS Managers /Directors
Seeking information from the MN County GIS Contacts pertaining to the process your county follows when GIS or other staff identifies discrepancies in acres or other issues on the deeds when drawing the parcel boundary. Anomalies that may prompt follow up: significant acreage difference, overlaps, gaps, description does not match location of buildings etc.  We have held discussions here about current process /policy, which is partly written and partly not. It is our goal to develop a more complete written policy and standardized notification letter for the landowner.

Our Land Team is interested in learning more about how other counties handle this, is there a standard?  Two main issues of concern are minimizing county liability and  ...

county responsibility for notifying the landowner/taxpayer.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Responses:

1. We don’t have a policy.  We would work with our Recorder and Assessor to fix the problem.  By the time we get a deed it’s been reviewed by both of those offices more than once to ensure everything is correct.

What we do in our office does not change the official record of a parcel. Often if we question a deed or description we contact the individual or the attorney with our concerns and let them deal with it.

2. ---- County has come across this issue many times. We have been told by our County Attorney's office that we are not responsible for correcting incorrect legal descriptions. If a property owner questions a parcel boundary in the GIS map, I research the deeds of record to the best of my ability, verify the parcel drawing, and inform the property owner what I have found. (Usually our County Planner or County Assessor is the contact person with the taxpayer.) If there is something wrong I usually suggest the property owner may wish to hire a research company or surveyor to check into it - I may have missed something. Our County Attorney's office has given us instructions that we do not need to go further than that. In addition, if staff happens to find a discrepancy we are not responsible to report it to the property owner. This leaves the liability to the title companies, the owners of record, etc. and keeps us out of it. Hopefully this answer is helpful.

3. In ----- County I refer people to the disclaimer that states that the GIS is not necessarily accurate.  I explain that the map has to fit together like a puzzle and it is a work of art not a survey.  If they wish to have an accurate drawing they will need to hire a surveyor.

4. Although we have not begun our high accuracy parcel mapping, I have met with our County Surveyor regarding some of the questions you mentioned.  We will soon begin our parcel mapping.

Our County Surveyor takes the position that GIS is a “map” or an “interpretation”.  The recorded document is what is legal.  I agree with that baseline of understanding.  With that said, we will map our parcels with our interpretation of intent.

When 2 neighboring parcels are described by 1320’ but there is only 2620’ available in that ¼, we will not show an overlap of 20’.  Instead we will map based on our interpretation of intent.  Most likely each of the neighboring parcels will be mapped to the ¼ ¼ line.  Our high resolution aerials will also be used to verify intent.

as you compile the responses, I would be interested to get a copy.

5. Here at ---- County we have not set up a standard for resolving acreage discrepancies, but I would be very interested in the information you collect on the issue so we too can come up with some type of process to handle those issues.  Thanks

6. Most of our "problems" come from a non-surveyed parcel. We work with our Recorder, who in turn, sends it back to the one who wrote the legal description and try to get it straight.  It would be nice to get it in writing what has to be done.  As we tell everyone, that the parcel layer is a layer in constant flux.  We have the splits etc. happening throughout the year.  I hope this has helped a little.

7. We have the same issues and I am going to have the staff member who does this respond to you. I would appreciate it much if you would forward me the responses you get to aid us as well.

8. Thank you for sending the inquiry. We often find issues while drawing the parcel lines onto our GIS map. We have nice air photos flown in April of 2007 which are rectified to the County coordinate system as well as 1 foot contour maps for the entire county. As we overlay these on our maps which were drawn between 2000 and 2005, we find many roads, rivers and other meandering features which we can now depict much more accurately than in the past. We are working closely with the Auditor and Assessor offices to fine tune parcel areas. We have received several phone calls and visits from residents questioning the revised property areas. We try to explain that with the information we now have we are able to show more accurate figures for assessment purposes. Some people understand, others don't.

We do not have standardized methods for dealing with the issues we discover. When it involves County property, we work with the Attorney to resolve our county interests. When the issues are strictly between residents, we evaluate the circumstances and deal with them as we feel is appropriate.

We would like to know what you hear from other counties. If there is a best way to deal with issues, we would like to evaluate using it.

9.

COUNTY SURVEY/GIS

GIS PARCEL MAPPING GUIDELINES FOR PARCEL DISCREPANCIES

It is the intent of the ----- County GIS Parcel Mapping to accurately identify the areas of land parcels to be valued and taxed

1.      Discrepancies in areas

  • The Auditor/Assessor (tax) acreage areas started with the original US General Land Office (GLO) township plat maps created from the Public Land Survey (PLS).  The recovery of the PLS corners and the accurate location of these corners with GPS obtained coordinates has allowed for accurate section subdivisions, which results in accurate areas for parcels based on legal descriptions, which may be significantly different than the original areas.
  • Any parcel bordering a meandered lake and/or a water boundary will likely have a disparity of area between the Auditor/Assessor acreages and the GIS acreages because of the inaccuracy of the original GLO meander lines from which the original areas were determined. Water lines are not able to be drafted to the same accuracy as the normal parcel lines. The water lines are usually just sketched on a survey and their dimensions are not generally given on a land record.  The water boundaries of our GIS parcels are located from aerial photography. This is a subjective determination based on the interpretation by the Survey/GIS technician of what is water. Some lakes fluctuate significantly and the areas of all parcels bordering water are subject to constant change. In these cases the ordinary high water line (OHW) is attempted to be identified. Use of 2-foot contours will be made, if available.
  • Some land records do not accurately report the area described in the land description and the description area is ignored.
  • The parcel mapping has made every attempt to map the parcels based on available survey information as surveyed and located on the ground. This may conflict with some record legal descriptions.

Solutions

  • If an actual survey by a licensed Land Surveyor is available, it will be utilized for the tax acreage.
  • If the Auditor/Assessor finds a discrepancy between the tax and GIS areas, they will request a review by the County Survey/GIS department.
  • As a starting guideline, the County Survey/GIS department will identify all parcels that differ in tax area versus GIS parcel area of 10 % or more and a difference of at least 5 acres. (This could be expanded later after the initial review.)
  • Each of these identified parcels will be reviewed individually by the County Survey/GIS department to determine the reason for the discrepancy and a recommendation will be made by the County Survey/GIS department to the Auditor/Assessor if the change should be made or not.
  • If a change is to be made to the tax area, a letter will be sent to the taxpayer informing them that their area will be changed during the next tax cycle, which could affect their property valuation. This letter will originate from the Auditor/Assessor with explanation from the County Survey/GIS department.

2.      Gaps and Overlaps

  • Land descriptions for adjoining parcels sometimes overlap or leave a gap between them.
    • In these instances the Survey/GIS technician has to make a decision where to place this boundary.  A number of circumstances are reviewed to facilitate this decision as these dilemmas are usually decided on a case by case basis. All effort will be made to not leave a gap, but sometimes this is not possible and the gap will be shown with “unknown” ownership. (Note: The County does not have the authority to change boundaries!)
    • Some of the circumstances reviewed are:
      • Which parcel had the initial legal description?
      • Does the physical occupation of the parcel line as shown on the air photo more closely fit one of the described parcels?
      • Interpretation of the intent of the legal description.
      • Is the legal description surveyable?

Note: These overlaps will be shown on the GIS map with a dashed “survey line” and accompanying text for the line not used for the parcel boundary.

3.      Parcel lines that do not match location of buildings

  • Structures on parcels do not always lie within the boundaries of the parcel. This may be a circumstance of building without the benefit of a survey or of misinterpreting these boundaries. The parcel lines should be shown accurately as surveyed and/or described regardless of the location of structures on the ground.

NOTE: The GIS mapping is not a survey, but is an interpretation of parcel boundaries predicated upon resources available to the County Survey/GIS department.

10. I am very interested in the results.

Sadly, we have no GIS yet, but are working on it.

11. Referenced MN State Statute 272 and Auditor’s responsibility to maintain parcels. Examines assessment acreage on a per case basis. All new splits require a survey, which eliminates the acreage issue.

I have the luxury of letting the survey group create all of the parcel geometry in CAD for me and then we just serve it out in our GIS applications.  We basically just copy and paste the CAD line work into our ArcSDE database, so I don’t see a lot of the land quirks that you are probably seeing.

12. We have no formal process (i.e written policy) on how to handle the idiocracies of our parcel mapping system.  Pro-West did our original parcel mapping back in 2000 and I have been maintaining it since.  They provided township-based discrepancy list to us after the mapping was done.  I spent a few months trying to iron out the issues the best that I could but we still have tons of issues such as unidentified properties, gap, overlaps and the like.  We've pretty much resigned ourselves to let these issues iron themselves out with property transfers and quiet title actions but we know this will take decades or longer.

Generally, big discrepancies in acreages and building/parcel mismatches are pointed out to our Assessor's Office and in most cases, they take action to correct the issue.

Hope some of this might be of interest or help to you.  If you manage to pull some things together, I'd sure be interested in having a peek at it.

13. Sounds like we’re stuck in a similar predicament. There had been some flawed workflows here whereby changes to the area of a parcel weren’t getting passed along to all departments, thus we were left with acreage discrepancies between offices (Assessors, Auditors, and GIS). Of course this wasn’t well received and we needed to fix it. We started with a very simple “Acreage Change Form” (see attached) that we would circulate any time we came across a discrepancy. There got to be a lot of these and they became very time consuming little fixes. Oftentimes the discrepancies weren’t significant enough to impact assessed value and so in the interest of time, we’ve sort of moved into correcting those that are brought to our attention by a taxpayer, realtor, or appraiser, etc. We’ve also moved away from the paper form and are currently using a slowly evolving MS Access database to track the changes like we do for splits and combinations, with fill-able forms and links to maps, etc.

Up here in the sticks we have very poor PLSS control data but we do our best to create parcels using COGO when we’re not interpreting descriptions disguised as pastoral poems that seem to have been copied forward from the Romantic Era. When it comes to assigning acreage values to a parcel we consider the source. Seldom do we see a survey, but when we do that’s what we’ll use. Other times, an area value is listed on the deed itself and because it is the legal recorded document we’ll use that. Beyond that, it’s like I said we have to rely on our mapping. We’re also working to build this ranking system into the parcel layer as a coded domain perhaps and to use symbol classes to differentiate the various sources on tax parcel maps.

To back up a second…we formed a Land Records Committee back in 2006 and have been working on drafting some policy as well. Seems every time we get close to getting something down in writing, something comes by one of our desks that scraps the whole works. I’m certain there is an answer and I’ll keeping looking. I missed the MCGISA meeting at GIS/LIS but perhaps this is the body that can assist in establishing some standards. Any idea of a state statute that gets at any of this? We continually wonder what our legal obligation is as local government in determining marketable property for one. More and more it seems we’re expected to function like a title company!

Hope some of this helps – feel free to give me a call, and please share if you learn from other responses.

14. We supply calculated acreages based on COGO parcel lines for all parcels to taxation.  They use those numbers for any tax calculations.

15. In----- County, the Surveyors Office maintains the parcel database and we do not have a process or policy when we run into these issues. We do not notify the landowners that I am aware of if we run into any of these issues. It sounds like you may do that.

We may notify our Taxation department if we run across some significant acreage discrepancies, but at this time, the Taxation dept. does not have acreage information for most of the parcels anyway.

I am interested in what kind of liability the county may have or what the county’s responsibility is for notifying the landowner regarding these issues if you can share that information.

Thanks!

16. We have largely stayed away from this issue as there seems to be no good answer.  Deeded acres always prevail.  new splits get GIS calculated acres unless a survey is present.

Eventually, it is my hope, that as the information becomes public more surveys will be done.  for instance, in most cases if someone is being taxed for less then reality, then someone else is being taxed for more then reality...Therefore that will prompt them to get a survey.

In conclusion, that is the general thought among those involved here in ----- County, our GIS is relatively new being a year and a half old.

I request that you follow up with me when you come to a conclusion in hopes of developing a policy ourselves.

17. Anomalies like gaps and overlaps did arise when we were developing our parcel database.

Back in 1990 when our parcel database was initially being developed, staff from our department held a meeting to address some of these issues that you are inquiring about.  In that meeting several decisions were made and are still being used today.  Listed below are some of those decisions.

A:            Gaps and/or overlaps within the 2 – 3 foot range will be “merged”.   Gaps larger than 3 feet will be labeled as APPARENT GAP or AREA NOT GEOCODED.  Overlaps larger than 3 feet will be labeled as AREA OF DISCREPANCY.  A label of AMBIGUOUS DESCRIPTION will be used for descriptions that are too vague to locate the correct position of the parcel.  Line labels are to be used to help clarify the boundary lines of a specific parcel.  (Example: South line of N1/2 of SW1/4).    In all cases, a supervisor is to be notified of such problems before these labels are used on the map.

B:            The definition of “merged”:

1. Following an analysis of the deeds, use professional judgment to determine if one line can be held over the other.  (Look at surrounding circumstances; ambiguous deeds, government corner problems, etc.)

2. Determine the mean of the two lines which overlap or create a gap.  (Split the difference)

C:            Junior – Senior rights between property owners will not be determined by the Surveyor’s Office.

D:            If a question arises during computations due to ambiguity in the assessor’s records, only the current deed of record should be reviewed in the recorder’s office.  Research time should be limited.

E:            When a gap and/or overlap occurs that is triangular in shape, with the size being from 0 feet at one end to 6 feet at the other end, it should also be merged.  The reasoning for this decision being that the average of the discrepancy is within the 3 foot range.

We do not notify the landowner in any way other than what is shown on our parcel data.  We do have disclaimers on all of our maps and GIS.  We also use license agreements (which include a disclaimer) for digital datasets that have been delivered from our office.

When your project is finished, I would be interested in receiving a copy of your written policy and standardized notification letter for the landowners.

18. ---- County does not have a procedure in place.  We just had a deed come in that overlapped a sublot.  We had a survey map (because it was a split) and emailed it to the Vendor who did a drawing and confirmed that yes it did overlap the sublots.  We rejected it because you can't subdivide a sublot but the attorney was not happy.  Had it not overlapped the Sublot plat but just another surveyed piece I would not have been able to reject. The surveyor fixed the survey and we recorded the document at that time.  I think it would be great if the county had the software to be able to draw out the legals before we recorded the documents.  I understand we can get close with the software we have but not close enough for the accuracy that I need.

19. We have and continue to struggle with this problem each and every day...poorly written legal description of records that are based on a perfect world (40 acres) with very little survey information.  And even if you have a survey of the area doesn't mean that it is correct, we have even run into a number of problems where we have conflicting surveys of the point of beginning.  We are fortunate enough to have a county surveyor that will go out and re-survey the problem areas so we can fix the parcel mapping.  Our parcel mapping is dynamic and as the County Surveyor continues to collect new section corner information and we receive more accurate survey information the parcel mapping will be updated.  In most circumstances we do not notify the landowner of any acreage changes unless the initiated the review.  The acreages are printed on the following mailed notices: TNT's, Notice of assessment and Tax Statements. 

We have discussed the matter with the Assessor, Auditor, Surveyor and GIS and have come up with a procedure.  At the request of the Assessor's office they want to be notified of any acreage change.  This requires our Auditor's office to code it as a REV(revised) on our MCIS tax rolls which then causes the printing of a new label for the field card(we are currently in the process of migrating from paper to digital).  In addition, we will be soon implementing a workflow software that will allow departments to notify other departments of any changes (i.e, parcel related).

In regards to landowner notification, I believe based on state statue the county is only supposed to notify the landowner when a parcel number will be changed (not sure the exact statute).  The Auditor's office is responsible to review legal description prior to transfer, it is here that we will send out letters to the affected landowner to make them aware of any discrepancies or inconsistencies we find with the legal descriptions.  The Auditor's office/GIS/ and Surveyor's office work closely together to discuss these discrepancies so we can try and resolve them if possible.

Looking into the future we have tried to eliminate these same problems by 1) establishing a monumentation program (County Surveyor), 2) requiring a certificate of survey for all minor subdivisions (P & Z ordinance) and 3)creating a county ordinance that requires local surveyors to file all surveys with County Surveyor.

I would be interested to hear what your findings are and ultimately what policy decisions to implement.  If you have any other questions please feel free to contact me.

20. ---- County has been building a coordinate controlled GIS parcel data base for over 20 years.  Like many counties we began with GPS positions on many of our control points and then built large adjustment areas using least squares adjustment methods.  We have used some internal general procedures when developing our parcel base but we never developed a written policy or standardized notification for this work.  Generally, we have an internal policy of the following:

1) When computing plats or other land documents we allow a tenth (0.10) of a foot for an allowable closure tolerance.

2) If we discover an error in closure or difficulty/anomaly in spatial conformance with other documents we try to determine if there is incorrect information portrayed.  If so, we attempt to institute a plat correction for public notice.

3) Of course, in all cases, we consult our County Surveyor for all land related anomalies.

4) Gaps and or Overlaps, if significant and unresolved, are shown on the GIS base map.  We label such polygons as “GAP” or “OVERLAP” within our system.  These do not commonly occur in our system.

5) We use a license agreement with all data dissemination.  The license agreement contains a disclaimer and a limit on liability:

DISCLAIMER EXCEPT AS EXPRESSLY STATED HEREIN, THIS DATA IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, WARRANTIES OF  MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. LICENSEE BEARS ALL RISK RELATING TO QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE DATABASE.

LIMIT ON LIABILITY The DATABASE is not a legally recorded map or a survey and should not be used for such purposes. The DATABASE is a compilation of records and information from various state, county, and city offices, and other sources, and should be used only as a reference.

In no event will the COUNTY be liable for direct, indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages arising out of the use of, or inability to use the DATABASE even if advised of the possibility of such damages. Specifically, the COUNTY is not responsible for any costs including, but not limited to, those incurred as a result of lost profits or revenue, loss of use of data, the costs of recovering such programs or data, the costs of any substitute programs or data, claims by third parties, or for other similar costs.

The sole responsibility of the COUNTY and the Licensee’s exclusive remedy for any substantial defect which impairs the Licensee’s use of the data for the purposes stated herein shall be the right of termination of this license and a refund of any fee paid.

6) We also use a disclaimer on our maps.  It states:

The information on this map is a compilation of Ramsey County Records.  THE COUNTY DOES NOT WARRANT OR GUARANTEE THE ACCURACY OF THIS DATA.  The County disclaims any liability for any injuries, time delays or expenses that you may suffer if you rely in any manner on the accuracy of this data.

This is a very general synopsis of our process.   Please contact me if you have any comments or questions.

21. I have passed this on to others to respond to you.

22. In ---- County, most of our acre differences were around lakes. We were told by the GIS staff, not to change any acres when discrepancies occur, as GIS is an estimate and not survey accurate, we should go by what is on recorded documents & surveys. Our County Assessor does feel we need to look at these discrepancies more closely and make changes as lakes change over time, and some of our acres discrepancies are significant. We plan on reviewing these and making a decision on how to handle them once our GIS project is complete.

When we have overlaps, gaps, buildings that are located outside the parcel boundaries, or we have also had some with errors on the survey and deeds, we have written the homeowners and stated that “It appears that there is a discrepancy in the legal description/survey/deed of their property” and we suggest they contact their attorney as this could affect ownership of their property. We include an explanation of the problem, copy of survey, deeds and picture of their parcel from GIS. We put it back on them to get this corrected. We just make them aware that there could be a problem with their property. We have had a good response with the ones we have sent out and they are already working on getting them corrected.

I hope this helps, and if you have any further questions, let me know.

23. Regarding your inquiry into anomalies that pop up in the parcel mapping process, we in ----County generally follow the following guidelines. Regarding acreage, we stay away from describing parcels in terms of area. Bearings and distances are entered, the software determines the acreage and as far as we're concerned, that is the best value there is for the area of a parcel of land. Our Surveyors compute parcels from legal descriptions on tax statements and usually do not have a need to check the deed. However, if problems do arise, they will look at existing surveys as well as the deed. We do run into some problems when tax statements are sent out because our Auditor is reluctant to update the parcel acreage on tax statements with the values in the GIS. Therefore, there can be a significant discrepancy between the acreage determined by GIS (which is readily available on our web site) and the number that appears on tax statements. We field many questions over this issue. With respect to gaps and overlaps, we have a code that identifies these polygons in our parcel layer so that our users can be alerted to the problem. We make no attempt to resolve these problems; we simply acknowledge that they exist. With respect to building locations, we do not presently have building footprints. The only way that we learn of problems is when people alert us to a parcel line that is running through a building on an aerial photograph. We generally encourage the people involved to check with our Surveyor's office to see if a survey exists and if not, to think about acquiring one. Finally, we do not have a written policy here, but that sounds like a very good idea. When we started parcel mapping in the fall of 2000, we held routine meetings to discuss problems that would arise and used the results of those meetings to establish protocol. If you have further questions or my responses have been incomplete, don't hesitate to get back to us. Good luck.

24.

We don’t have a written policy on this.  Generally…..we have a program called FARMS that calculates the amount of tillable, nontillable, conservation easement, flood plain, etc.  This program will measure parcel acres and compare it to the recorded acres of a parcel.  If it is within a certain tolerance (on a graduated scale dependant on the size of the parcel) it will proportion the difference to force the outcome to total the recorded acres.  If it is not within tolerance, it kicks it out so we can look at it in more detail.  For the tolerance errors, we do as much research as we need to in order to determine the accuracy of our acreage figures…..usually, it is a matter of the river moving, or accreted lake shore.  If we still can’t determine the problem, we can use the FARMS program to force the acreage to the recorded acres and keep a list for future research.  The base for our parcel maps is a photo layer that we flew in 2005.  We had it checked for accuracy by MNDOT.  It is very good.  I try to key in legals using COGO, but when there are definite occupation lines on the photo, I may force the parcel lines to match those.  The appraiser will sometimes go out and field check something for me.  We have placed a lot of attention on informing the public and professional offices of the fact that our parcel maps are not legal documents and are intended for general information purposes.  If a taxpayer disagrees with what we have done, it is their responsibility to bring us the documentation necessary to make any changes as we simply don’t have the staff to do all that research.  For the most part, we haven’t had many problems.  If you develop some policies for your county, I would be very interested to see what you come up with.

25.

About 10 years ago the ---- County Surveyor started in earnest to compute, from the deed, all property boundaries using coordinate geometry and introduced the new line work into the GIS. We started with survey accurate coordinates on section corners as a basis for the PLS grid; then using

descriptions from metes and bounds properties and plat boundaries we moved across the county one township at a time. The result, when coupled with

rectified orthophotos, has significantly improved the coincidence of aerial photography and parcel boundaries. It has also significantly reduced errors in area computations.

However, the square footage of the Auditor's tax parcel (used by the tax department) sometimes differs from that which is displayed in the GIS (area

of the polygon). In most cases, if the reason for the discrepancy is evident, the assessor and tax manager will amend their records to conform to

the information provided by the county surveyor. Other times, when there are gross differences as a result of changing lake or river levels,

overlapping (or gaps) descriptions etc., we will defer to the taxpayer - if they submit a valid boundary survey that shows the true area of the property.

On the Interactive Property Map the county disclaims any liability for accuracy of the GIS data. The user must acknowledge the notice before viewing the GIS data.

One last thing. Since water boundaries account for at least 2/3's of the questions we put together the following document (attached) to help our

taxpayers understand the issues. I hope this helps.

(See attached file: Tax_Parcel_Boundaries(1).pdf)

To add to what ---- has pointed out, I believe there are really a couple of different issues here (at least two, but I will identify two): 1) Identified discrepancies with legal documents and what's actually occurring on earth's surface, and 2) how to best represent the descriptions of the legal documents in a GIS.

The first is a matter very familiar to Surveyors, Recorders, and Attorneys - - - - which is why I will leave that to their expertise. Regarding GIS, as ---- mentioned, we make it clear in our disclaimer for any published maps of these GIS boundaries that it is our best "Representation" of our records.

26. I forwarded this email onto our Property Records Dept. They would be the ones to make these types of corrections/notifications.

27. At ---- County at this time we do not have any formal policy or standardized notification letter to the landowner about a discrepancy.

At this time, unless the landowner has a certified survey we do not make changes.

I would like to see the results of your survey or examples of what other Counties may have in place for this type of policy.