Administrator
03-08-2004, 08:08 AM
In a case styled "Landworks, Inc., et al v. John Leslie Vick" (No. E2001-00615-COA-R3-CV) in the Court of Appeals of Tennessee at Knoxville from a Chancery Court in Cocke County. This case is available on the web but I don't know exactly how I tracked it down and printed it. Essentially it started a precedent by the courts in Tennessee to use tax maps to determine specific areas on which taxes are paid. The exact boundary as shown on the tax map is held to be the exact land on which taxes were paid without regard to the deminsions or configuration shown on a plat of survey of the title boundary. Why is payment of taxes an issue? Tennessee has a pair of statutes that there is a presumption of ownership by simply paying taxes on property for 20 years (TCA 28-2-109), and a person is forever barred from recovery of property on which he has not payed the taxes for 20 years (TCA 28-2-110). The statutes are not bad per se but the courts using the tax maps as prima facie evidence of percisely what land is involved is the problem. None of the tax maps have the property mapped correctly and this creates gaps and gores that could modify every parcel boundary in the state after 20 years of tax payments based upon this ruling. The surveyor should just check the tax records and if the owner has 20 years of payment of taxes just chuck the deed and scale the coordinates from a tax map. Recently, this very thing happened in the Chancery Court of Benton County, Tennessee. I surveyed a 1500 acre tract of timberland as Special Master of the Court. The tract had only been sold 3 times from the original grant. I was able to retrace the boundaries with satisfaction that I had "walked in the footsteps of the original surveyor." This tract was held by heirs that probably could not locate the property if they were required to. It was known to the locals as "the old survey" and had been encroached upon for decades by surveyors, garbage dumping, firewood cutting and such. A claim was made for a 60 acre tract right in the middle of this large tract based upon where the tax assessor had drawn it. The tract was a rectangle with dimensions and called for different adjoiners on all 4 sides. None of the adjoiners were in the chain of title for the tract in which it was contained. I was not able to locate any of the adjoiners in the chain of title for any of the tracts abutting this grant. I was not able to find where this tract was supposed to be located and the chain of title went back a couple of deeds and ended. I was able to testify that the tract was not sold from the grant and was never a part of it. I was able to testify that the description did not place the 60 acre tract within the grant. When the tax maps were drawn, i'm sure the low bid mappers could not locate the proper location of the tract either. So they found a big clean place in the middle of this big 1500 acrea tract and drew it in. The tax assessor testified that the taxes were paid on the rectangle of land and that the owners of the big tract paid taxes around it and not on the rectangle. The Chancellor ordered me to scale the coordinates of the rectangle and monument it on the ground as the property of the parties making the claim based on the Landworks case.
This has grave implications of misuse of informational documents by courts as GIS systems are proliferated. In the cases cited, it appears that survey plats are being trumped by tax maps that were never intended to represent exact location or precise boundaries. My stamped and certified plat and expert testimony was trumped by the temporary help used to put parcels on maps for a bid price of around $5 a parcel. There needs to be a well crafted law put into place to make sure that this does not continue. Every client has to been the the tax assessors office and if asked if he has a plat of his property he will pull out a photocopy of the property from the assessor's office. The assessor's know the parcels are not correct but continue to hand them out with pride and confidence to the public. Imagine what will happen when GIS techicians start to hand then out with bearings to the second and distances to the hundredth. However, it will make our job easier. We can download directly to our data collector and go stake....no more clumsy scaling!!
Max Billingsley
This has grave implications of misuse of informational documents by courts as GIS systems are proliferated. In the cases cited, it appears that survey plats are being trumped by tax maps that were never intended to represent exact location or precise boundaries. My stamped and certified plat and expert testimony was trumped by the temporary help used to put parcels on maps for a bid price of around $5 a parcel. There needs to be a well crafted law put into place to make sure that this does not continue. Every client has to been the the tax assessors office and if asked if he has a plat of his property he will pull out a photocopy of the property from the assessor's office. The assessor's know the parcels are not correct but continue to hand them out with pride and confidence to the public. Imagine what will happen when GIS techicians start to hand then out with bearings to the second and distances to the hundredth. However, it will make our job easier. We can download directly to our data collector and go stake....no more clumsy scaling!!
Max Billingsley