Land Surveying in Union City, GA

One County, Three Desks: Surveying Union City

Union City covers 19.7 square miles in south Fulton County and was incorporated in 1908. Unlike most of the cities under this hub, no county line touches its boundary anywhere, so there is no question about which index a Union City deed or plat belongs in. It belongs in Fulton.

Those records are held by the Fulton County Clerk of Superior and Magistrate Courts Real Estate Division, which records and indexes deeds, lien filings, plats, surveys and condominium floor plans. The Deeds and Records Room is on the ground floor of the Lewis R. Slaton Courthouse at 136 Pryor Street SW, northeast of Union City in downtown Atlanta, and the county's South Service Center is at 5600 Stonewall Tell Road.

That single-county situation is not the norm around here, and it is worth appreciating. College Park, inside the same county, straddles the Fulton and Clayton line, and eight of the ten cities under this hub touch a county boundary somewhere. In Union City the deed, the plat, the tax record and the assessor's parcel all sit in one office, which removes the most common cause of a rejected filing before the work even starts. City Hall is at 5047 Union Street.

Locally, Union City's subdivision regulations put the final plat in front of three desks at once. After the final plat is submitted, the City Engineer, the Public Services Department and the Planning Department each express approval, or state their objections in writing, and the Community Development Department retains a copy. The city also has a Planning and Zoning Commission that hears applications on a published meeting schedule. A plat that has not been through that review is not going to record cleanly.

The development pattern in Union City is different from the north Fulton cities, and it changes the mix of work. The city sits on Interstate 85, where Exit 64 meets State Route 138, Jonesboro Road, and South Fulton Parkway runs west from that area as an at-grade expressway. That corridor has drawn large warehouse and distribution buildings, and the former Shannon Mall site was cleared and redeveloped into film and television studio space. Large-tract work of that kind runs to ALTA/NSPS surveys, topographic surveys for grading and detention design, construction staking, and as-builts for the lender and the city.

The residential side is more conventional and more common. An older lot gets retraced before a fence or an addition goes in near a line. A tract at the edge of town gets divided, which starts with establishing the parent boundary before anything can be split off it. A closing or a refinance calls for a property survey.

Drainage is worth checking early. Deep Creek, Pea Creek, Morning Creek, Wolf Creek, Line Creek and Whitewater Creek all run inside the city limits, which means a number of small channels rather than one obvious river. Small streams still carry state buffers, and a channel that is easy to miss on a site walk is expensive to miss on a plat.

S&S Land Surveying is headquartered at 549 West Ave in Cedartown. Plats are signed and sealed by William "Bart" Sims, the licensed Georgia land surveyor. The firm's license is Georgia only.