Greg Bunce: Welcome to another episode of the Utah Geospatial Podcast. This is Greg Bunce.
Matt Peters: And I’m Matt Peters.
Greg Bunce: And we’re from the Utah Geospatial Resource Center. This podcast will be bringing you Geospatial news from across Utah.
Today we’re starting a new segment on the show called the Survey Corner. In this segment, we’ll hear regularly from the State Surveyor on what’s happening in the world of surveying. Really there are many reasons for doing this, with a couple being: one, the surveyors do GIS. In fact, without a lot of the work that they do, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, for us to maintain some of the core layers such as the boundaries, the municipalities, the parcels, and many other ones. And then two, here in Utah, the State Surveyor position appropriately sits within the State GIS office. So we get to work closely with the survey team. Without further ado, we’d like to welcome the one, the only, the amazing and the outstanding State Surveyor, Sean Fernandez.
Sean Fernandez: Thank you, Greg.
Matt Peters: Welcome. Killing me.
Sean Fernandez: Good to be a part of the show today.
Matt Peters: Great. So, I think that we should jump right in. I’m sure that some folks, and maybe not all in Utah but in other states, probably wonder: why is there a State Surveyor? What’s up with that?
Sean Fernandez: Well, before I get into answering the question, I think it’s important for people to look at that title, the “State Surveyor.” It sounds pretty prestigious and important, but I was going to tell a quick story as a lead-in. My daughter plays soccer for Utah Valley University. This last weekend we were at the WAC tournament down in Phoenix, Arizona. The team is a great team. They made it to the final. They played tough. In the final, it was interesting. It was 0-0 going into the last minutes and all of a sudden we earned a PK, which meant we got a free kick at the goal. Well, it’s funny, the girl that was called on to kick that free kick had only played about five minutes in the game. But she made the free kick. It ended up being the goal that won the game. And she was later recognized as the most valuable player of the game. I thought was kind of funny because she’d only played really for five minutes.
My point being is that it’s funny how things like that work out. The same thing applies with the title of State Surveyor. It’s really just a title. It’s all the other people that make this thing happen and make it successful. We’ve got a team of Cadastral members that I work directly with that make things happen. There are people at the county level that make things happen, other people at the state level, and certainly everyone that works for our department.
So, with that said, Greg kind of led into some of the statute that created the position. But there are some key elements that we try to follow from that statute to continue this coordination that Matt spoke of. There’s a section in statute that creates the position of the surveyor. And number one, it says that it must be a licensed surveyor. So I’m licensed, been licensed for a number of years, and I think that brings a lot to the table because with the license you have some education and background that can help define some of the other responsibilities that are asked about in this legislation.
The next one is to provide technical support to the Lieutenant Governor’s office. So the Lieutenant Governor’s office deals with government boundary changes like annexations or anything that deals with a political subdivision change. A lot of times they understand a lot of what’s going on in the document, but they don’t understand the survey part of it, or the plat and description part of it. That’s where we come in is to support them by helping them understand that the description is correct, that it matches the intent of that boundary change, and we’re there for any number of questions. But that’s really our primary responsibility there.
Greg Bunce: And for what layers does that support? Like when those legal descriptions come in typically?
Sean Fernandez: Mainly our county boundaries and our municipal boundaries are impacted by that statute.
The next one is helping county surveyors out in general. If they ever have any questions or anything, we have a lot of resources at the state so we can put those resources to use and we’re there for anything that they need.
And then the next one is if there is a problem with a county boundary, and that happens once in a while. There may even be a dispute that comes up where counties don’t agree on the location of a county boundary. This position of surveyor is there to help resolve those disputes. We’ve had one instance recently where we’ve dealt with a county boundary between Grand County and San Juan County where I was pulled into the discussion to try and help coordinate those efforts and fix that boundary.
Matt Peters: So in that case are you guys out in the field? Or is this more using digital technology and computers?
Sean Fernandez: Mainly digital technology. But in that instance, I actually went down to each of the counties and sat through both of their commission meetings and did a presentation to the commissioners explaining why I felt the boundary should be in a certain location. But I didn’t actually get to get out in the field. Which is a sad thing because this time of the year it’s great to get in the field as a surveyor. But yeah, that didn’t happen. So hopefully in the future I’ll get out in the field a little bit more. But for right now it’s a lot of office work.
Greg Bunce: Thinking back real quickly though on being a licensed surveyor. How does that work out? Is that something in university? Or is that beyond that?
Sean Fernandez: So the requirements for licensure in Utah are you need at least a two-year degree in surveying. And you need a number of years of experience. I believe it’s four years of experience now working directly under a licensed surveyor. And then you need to pass three exams. So similar to an engineer’s license, but it’s specific to land surveying and it deals mainly with resolving boundaries. That’s why that is a professional license.
Maybe just two more items from the list. One is to coordinate with the county recorders and surveyors to create a statewide parcel layer. So for the longest time, the state of Utah was without a digital version, statewide version of parcels of private ownership and public ownership. And so when this statute was created, I took that on as a responsibility I felt was very important. So I’ve been working directly with counties for a number of years trying to create this statewide layer. And right now we do have a statewide layer. It still is lacking in a few areas, but it’s one of those things we’ll continue to work on and improve over the years.
And then the last one, and this may be a lead-in to your other question Greg, is to facilitate and integrate the collection efforts of the Public Land Survey System section corners. We have done a lot of work with the PLSS and I think we’re going to talk about that in the future. But I think to go back and answer Matt’s question, what is the State Surveyor, what does he do and what’s it all about? It’s all about bringing people together, building partnerships, and trying to orchestrate all of these different things so that we can improve boundaries and we can improve the data and make it accessible to the public.
Greg Bunce: Excellent. Yeah, so moving into the PLSS or the Public Land Survey System. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what that is and why you guys are working on it.
Sean Fernandez: Okay. Yeah, so a little bit of history related to the Public Land Survey System. I think a lot of people that are listening today probably know what it is, but maybe just a quick one. The PLSS is really just a survey method for subdividing and managing real property. Pretty much every state west of the Mississippi uses the Public Land Survey System to divide and convey property. So Utah being one of those states, that’s how we manage property. And over the years it has become more and more difficult to manage that property as section corners, or these corners of that system, are impacted by development or destroyed by other methods. It’s difficult to convey proper descriptions of property. And so it’s been our job to go out and to maintain this system and try and identify corners that are missing, replacing those corners, and doing everything we can to get this system up and going in Utah so that we can actually convey correct descriptions in property.
So with that said, we’ve used a lot of money from the state to build this system or help maintain the system. We’ve also gone to the federal government, we’ve had grants that have gone through our department to counties to try and help with these efforts. One of our most recent efforts has been what we call the Survey Monument Preservation Act of 2015. There was a bill that was passed that has provided ongoing state funds of about $150,000 each year that goes through our department and is given to counties to try and maintain the Public Land Survey System within a county.
Greg Bunce: And when you say Public Land System, you’re talking about the actual section corners, right? The monuments on the ground?
Sean Fernandez: Right. The section corners on the ground. So to help better explain that. There is a location in the middle of the downtown Salt Lake area. It’s actually located at the northwest corner of South Temple and Main Street, which is called the Principal Meridian and Baseline for Salt Lake City. And all property within the state or most all property is described from that point. From that point, the state is divided into townships and ranges. And within the township and range there are sections. A township is a 36 mile square and to break it down even further it’s divided into one mile by one mile sections. Each corner that outlines that section is a section corner. And all properties in the state of Utah are described from one of those corners. So it’s crucial that we know where those corners are and that they can be found on the ground so that surveyors can mark out property corners. But in a lot of cases like I mentioned, those corners have been destroyed or something else has happened. So we’re making a big effort to try and clean that up.
Matt Peters: You know Greg, something is ringing familiar there and I believe that you wrote an article about the kind of the settling of the West and the Public Land Survey System. Maybe we should get that link in the show notes.
Greg Bunce: Yeah, definitely. It kind of looks at the patterns of development in the West and like Sean is saying, it’s so tied to the PLSS and how growth really radiates from that central point and how land is subdivided and why it’s so orthogonal and square in so many cases. But yeah, I’ll drop that in the notes for sure.
Well Sean, I think that was an excellent overview of the State Surveyor, what that role does, and how it’s so critical to so many of the layers. I look at even my tax document for the house that I’m living in here, the parcel. It has that’s how it describes where I am and what I own. My in-laws as well own some property up in a rural area, small piece of land, and I know that there’s some discrepancies up there as to where those corners are and they’re kind of resolving that now and where the neighbor is. There’s a fence line that maybe is not following it, but back in the day maybe it wasn’t as accurate. So I think this is all just really still hugely critical to everything we do.
Sean Fernandez: I agree. It’s critical to the public and it’s critical to what we do at the UGRC. I mean there are hundreds of layers of data that we maintain and we’re trying to maintain those in the most accurate location as we possibly can. And the geographic component of all this data is critical. So we view the Public Land Survey System or all these section corners as really the backbone of a lot of this data. So that data is only as accurate as that PLSS data. And so we want to make sure that it’s correct. That’s what we’re really pushing for. It’s a group effort. It takes a lot of coordination, but we’re making progress. And that’s what makes it fun and exciting.
Greg Bunce: Yeah, I like the way you put it. It is the backbone. And the data is only good as it is. I know when I was in Maricopa County they did a whole project readjusting the survey corners and then when that was done, all of the data then shifted to reflect that adjustment.
Sean Fernandez: Correct. So a lot of the responsibility of the Public Land Survey System nationwide falls under the umbrella of the Bureau of Land Management, the BLM. And recently, and when I say recently probably I think it’s been four years now, we signed an agreement with the BLM that the state of Utah, UGRC, would help maintain these section corners in Utah. And since then we’ve collaborated with, like I said the counties, other state organizations, State Trust Lands has been a big part of it. Through these efforts we have a pretty good digital version of this data.
Matt Peters: Okay. Well thanks for the information. That was great. I think it’s good that we take a little time on that and kind of give people the full picture. So as we move forward and the Survey Corner becomes a regular feature in the podcast, we can have short snippets of information about the happenings in Utah.
Sean Fernandez: Sounds good. Yeah, I would like to give more details. It would be fun to show some specific problems that we’re dealing with and then expand on that. Because like you mentioned Greg, it’s not just impacting people that deal with this geographic data. It’s everyone that owns property in the state of Utah is impacted by it. It’s kind of fun that we’re all a part of this.
Greg Bunce: Excellent. Well we look forward to this segment. And thanks for taking the time today to fill us in.
Sean Fernandez: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Matt Peters: Remember: Location Matters.
Greg Bunce: We’d like to bring a new section onto the show called Location Matters. Matt and I will be bringing some information that we pick up throughout the week and bringing it here.
Matt Peters: So you know, one thing that I did find out. I’ve been thinking about this idea of people that aren’t traditional GIS users. I’d have to say that is my focus at the moment is non-traditional, what we consider non-well people that do GIS they just don’t know it, or they need to do it they just don’t know it yet. So anyway, consumer fraud and also insurance fraud I think are two things that location could really help bear out trends and things that are happening. And so I’m reaching out to those agencies to see what can be done. AGRC, I consider AGRC to have some amount of curiosity money, for lack of a better term. And this is where we can get some agency data and see what story we can tell with that data. See what questions we can elicit from the users of the data and to understand better their processes. Because they’re the subject matter experts, but we have the data and the tools. Well, we have the tools. They have the data. And they give us the data, they’re the subject matter experts, we work together to tell a story.
Greg Bunce: Yeah, I think that’s huge. I think just bridging the non-GIS folks with the GIS folks. I think that’s the next wave of all of this for all of us. Is getting in the same room and doing exactly that because we are starting to speak the same language in so many aspects.
Matt Peters: Yeah. Maybe this could be like the geospatial tide. Play on the what do they call that, the Crimson Tide? So this is the geospatial tide.
Greg Bunce: Yeah. And then another thing we have is the CCO license. I think your data is in the public domain or you because the state says it’s in the public domain, but a lot of these private industries, if you’re not specifically putting CCO on your webpage or on the data page, for a lot of them it’s just not accessible.
Matt Peters: Yes. And I do believe that that is an issue and that it just levels the playing field and gives everyone a common framework to say, “Yes, we all adhere to this standard.” And it just allows our private sector folks kind of an assurance and a commonality among states.
Greg Bunce: Right. Yeah, so I guess the whole idea here with this CCO, the Creative Commons Zero, is just going the extra mile to put the stamp on our data if we want it to be used by the private sector and the public sector. Because they’re looking for that tag and if they’re not seeing that tag, they might bypass the data because of some of the limitations that they have internally don’t allow them to use that. And that’s not a good thing for us. We want our data to be used.
Matt Peters: Yeah, and that’s the thing is you’re putting a common stamp that they can recognize across the states and go, “Yep, yep that’s fine to use. We know what that means.”
Greg Bunce: Exactly.
Greg Bunce: What’s happening around the state of Utah? I know we got UGIC that’s they’re looking for some pre-conference input for October.
Matt Peters: Yes down in Bryce Canyon. And then I believe that are you doing work in Iron County?
Greg Bunce: Yeah, we are. We started talking to them, some of the addressing folks in the engineering department and they have a need for just in Iron County having an address grid that allows them to place a point on the map and kind of suggest where that address should be as they bring in new addresses. Right now they’re using paper and pencil and rulers. So we started thinking about it and we’ve had some code floating around the office for years and kind of ad-hoc solutions for different counties. But I think it’s time to start thinking about a statewide address grid that we could build.
And this also got us thinking about, you know, this is a good idea. Well where do we put good ideas? So we came up with a good idea platform. Calling it Darwin. So we’re using GitHub for that. And that idea is out there right now in our Darwin repo. And you could vote it up, make some comments on it, and see if we can kind of gain a little traction on this. But again, just the idea being some kind of a statewide grid that allows a user to just pop onto the map, click somewhere and say, “Where what is a recommended address for this area?” And we have that for most of the areas that are populated by using the road centerlines, but the value of this one is where when we get outside of our existing road centerlines, that’s where things get fuzzy.
Matt Peters: You know I think that’s a good idea because do you know that in the month of March, UGRC had 11,884,738 requests to the API? That’s geocoding and searching. That’s a significant number.
Greg Bunce: No doubt. Yeah, and this would kind of this would boost that number as well. This essentially would be doing some reverse geocoding. But yes, definitely paints the idea that these services that we’re putting out there are getting used.
Matt Peters: Yes. Yes. And I think that’s important.
Greg Bunce: Well, I think that’s the episode for today. Unless you have anything else to add Matt?
Matt Peters: You know, I think the best thing is just to add two plus two and see that it still equals four.