Candidate Interview: Daryl Crites — LPC Surveyor

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• Transcript

  Hello, my name is Daryl Crites and I am running for the La Plata County Surveyor’s office. I have lived in La Plata County for a long time. I’ve been surveying for 53 years now, and I was appointed a year and a half ago to the County Surveyor office, and I’m doing that as a chance to give back to the community, to give back to the surveying community, the county. And it’s mostly a volunteer position. The the salary is only $7,600 a year, not a month. So most of my work is just volunteer work and assisting and kind of giving back to the profession. So the County Surveyor has by state statute, several duties to do. And in general they are to do surveying for the county government. In addition to that, it is to review new subdivision plats to assure that they comply with county and state code and a surveyor. Any private surveyor is required to file what we call a deposit plat, and it’s the duty of the County Surveyor to record those, catalog those, and have them available for the public. So those are that. Those are the main duties of county surveyor main, just mainly doing county survey work. The other thing that I’m involved a lot with is answering questions from the public. I oftentimes get questions about specifics on somebody’s survey, help them find a survey map, and just kind of give them answers to land boundary questions. I started in the first year and a half of reviewing all of the deposit plats that I talked about. There’s about 4,100 of those. And so the cataloging of them had a lot of mistakes, a lot of typos and stuff. So I have downloaded every one of those, looked at every one and updated the catalog. So now it’s very easy for the public or other private surveyors to be able to go find these old survey records. So that’s been a pretty big job, and something that I think has been very, very helpful to the survey community. The biggest challenge the County Surveyor is facing is to convince the County Commissioners to use the Office of the County Surveyor. Unfortunately, they have been contracting out the services for surveying and for reviewing plats. And so that’s my challenge, is to have the county offices and departments utilize the elected office of the county surveyor. Right now I’m working on reviewing all of the county road surveys. These date back. I was just looking at one this morning dated 1898. And so, I’m doing research on old survey maps, deeds to the county for survey rights-of-way, commissioner resolutions and cataloging those so that it’ll be much, much easier to find county road rights-of-way and see if they’re owned by the county as ownership or as easements and where they’re located. And so that’s my current goal going forward. Most interesting thing is the historic surveys and the stories that we ran across. The area in La Plata County was originally surveyed in the 1800s, 1880s and 1890s. And those surveyors set stone monuments. And so all of the surveyors enjoy going out and seeing if we can locate these 125-year-old survey monuments. We did a lot of research on the east boundary line of the county, and found out that it’s about two miles off of where they thought it was, and it’s monumented by these old stone monuments. So that was fun. That was challenging and just fun history work. Oh, lots of things. Camping, fishing, mountain biking, golfing, and just enjoying our wonderful outdoors that we have here in La Plata County.