11 Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon | www.plso.org The Right-of-Entry Law helps the legitimacy of your survey in two ways. First, it provides the adjoining property owners with a clear and unambiguous indication that the boundary line is being determined by a bona fide professional, as opposed to a self-angulating crazy Uncle Joe who had a forty minute survey class offered through the Future Farmers of America forty seven years ago. As a profession, we want the boundary lines we set respected and lived up to. Being able to let the neighbors know that we stake our reputation as a licensed professional on our work goes a long way in legitimizing that line. Second, if we comply with the Right-of-Entry Law, our surveys become more legitimate as an evidentiary matter if we need to defend our survey in court. Is your survey admissible evidence if it was obtained illegally because you gathered the evidence while trespassing? The answer is that if a lawyer is clever, they will get your survey tossed if you didn’t strictly adhere to the Right-of-Entry Law. If there were no Right-of-Entry Law, then it is more likely that an evidentiary hearing would accompany every boundary dispute and issues of what surveys are admissible in court would happen on a regular basis. Is this a far-fetched scenario? No. Read the article I wrote about the Snottygram. The attorney, who was brand spanking new to land law, was astute enough to raise the trespass issue for the singular purpose of getting my survey tossed out of court if a trial became inevitable. Finally, I cannot count the number (this usually means a number greater than fourteen) of new jobs I have received as a result of passing out Right-of-Entry door hangers. If you run a survey business, you probably have an advertising budget for the express purpose of getting people to give you a call with a surveying need. Should the cost of complying with the Right-of-Entry Law be balanced against the added business you get by complying with the law? Yes. If you are not giving out door hangers, you are giving the other surveying firms a competitive advantage, and being one of your competitors, I would like to thank you for that advantage. So there you have it. I love the Right-of-Entry Law because it protects me, protects the rights of property owners, adds legitimacy to my surveys, and is probably a money-maker in the long run because of the business it brings into my office. I hope they keep it the way it is forever. With that being said, I must admit I am dismayed by the number of Right-of-Entry violations brought before the Enforcement Committee of OSBEELS. To that issue I would say COMPLY WITH THE LAW. Harsh? A bit, I suppose. I will concede that the PLSO does have an obligation to look into how the Right-of-Entry Law is enforced. Is there something we can do without changing the law to deal with the regulatory processes used by OSBEELS in dealing with Right-of-Entry violations? Could a Right-of-Entry violation be treated as a civil matter as opposed to a regulatory issue or a Board matter? These are the questions that opponents of the Right-of-Entry Law should be exploring as opposed to opening ourselves up to litigation every time we try to resolve a contested boundary line. ◉
PLSO Issue 2 2015 March April
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