Land Surveying in College Park, GA

College Park Sits in Two Counties

College Park is one of the few cities in this part of metro Atlanta that sits in two counties at once. Of its 11.1 square miles of land, roughly a quarter lies in Clayton County, on the east-southeast side of the city, and the rest lies in Fulton. A deed and a plat are recorded in the county where the land is, not the county the mailing address suggests, so on a College Park parcel the recording county is the first thing to establish, and it is established from the land.

The Fulton side of the city files downtown, north-northeast of College Park, with the Clerk of Superior and Magistrate Courts Real Estate Division, whose Deeds and Records Room is on the ground floor of the Lewis R. Slaton Courthouse at 136 Pryor Street SW. The Clayton side files southeast of town, with the Clerk of Superior Court at 9151 Tara Boulevard in Jonesboro. Two courthouses, two indexes, two sets of plat books.

The assessors split the same way. Fulton parcel and assessment data is published through qPublic, and so is Clayton's, but they are separate applications with separate search screens. The Clayton County Board of Assessors is at 121 S. McDonough Street, Annex 3, in Jonesboro. Fulton's Board of Assessors is at 235 Peachtree Street NE in Atlanta, and the county's South Service Center is at 5600 Stonewall Tell Road. Pull the wrong one and the acreage, the owner of record and the deed reference all come back for a parcel that is not yours.

Locally, the College Park Planning Commission hears and acts on applications under procedures and standards established by the City Council, and it reviews, holds public hearings and makes recommendations to the Mayor and City Council. City Hall is at 3667 Main Street. Whatever the commission approves still has to be recorded afterward, and it has to be recorded in the correct county.

Two features of the land shape the work here. The first is the historic core. The city center is the fourth largest urban historic district in Georgia, with 867 structures on the historic register, on land traced back to a land grant awarded in 1846. Old platting and a century of encroachments make retracement the normal starting point downtown. The second is drainage. Camp Creek, Sullivan Creek and Morning Creek run through the city, which puts stream buffers and mapped flood hazard areas in play on parcels that look flat and unremarkable from the street.

College Park was incorporated in 1895 and sits near Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, with I-85, I-285, the CSX railroad and MARTA all crossing it, so a large share of the city is commercial and industrial rather than residential. That work runs to ALTA/NSPS surveys, site plans, topographic surveys and as-builts. The Fulton County Board of Health also keeps its College Park Regional Health Center at 1920 John Wesley Avenue, which is where on-site sewage review lands for parcels that are not on public sewer.

Field and drafting work is run from 549 West Ave in Cedartown. The seal on the plat belongs to William "Bart" Sims, the firm's licensed Georgia land surveyor. S&S holds a Georgia license and no other.