Land Surveying in Chatsworth, GA

Land Surveying in Chatsworth, Georgia

Chatsworth is the seat of Murray County, and the two offices a survey has to pass through stand one block apart in the middle of town. The Clerk of Superior Court is at 121 North Third Avenue. That office files, records and indexes deeds, plats, liens and Uniform Commercial Code filings for the entire county, so a plat drawn on a tract anywhere in Murray County finishes on Third Avenue no matter where the field work happened.

One block west, at 121 North Fourth Avenue, the Murray County Land Use and Development office handles building permits, disturbance activity permits, stormwater, soil erosion, rezonings, conditional uses and variances for the unincorporated county, and maintains the county's digital mapping system. Inside the city limits a different desk takes over. The City of Chatsworth Planning and Zoning Administrator carries out plat approval along with plan review for subdivisions, multifamily and commercial development, and the same position serves as the city's floodplain administrator.

A Chatsworth owner can look up a parcel without calling anybody. The Murray County Board of Assessors publishes record cards, sales history and mapped parcel lines on qPublic at qpublic.net/ga/murray. Read the acreage there with care. Assessor acreage comes from the county's mapping and exists to allocate tax, and on older Murray County tracts it can differ from what the deed calls for. Where the two disagree, a boundary retracement is the thing that settles it, not the tax card.

Flood questions here run off Flood Insurance Rate Map panels that took effect on September 29, 2010. FEMA's mapping near downtown Chatsworth follows Town Branch, Holly Creek and Lick Branch, with Zone AE and a mapped regulatory floodway along the studied reaches and Zone A on other stretches. The distinction is practical rather than academic. Zone AE carries a published base flood elevation, Zone A does not, and a lender asking for an elevation certificate on a Zone A parcel needs surveyed ground and structure elevations rather than a figure lifted off the panel.

Terrain shapes the rest of the work. Fort Mountain rises just east of town, where Fort Mountain State Park covers 4,058 acres at the southwestern end of the Cohutta Mountains near the Cohutta Wilderness, with the summit around 2,850 feet. US 411, US 76, State Route 2, State Route 52 and State Route 61 all pass through Chatsworth, and the ground changes quickly between the highway corridor and the slopes above it. On the mountain side, slope and tree cover shorten sight lines, control has to be carried further, and retracing an old description takes longer than the same acreage on the valley floor.

Murray County records also feed the statewide real estate, plat and lien indexes maintained by the Georgia Superior Court Clerks' Cooperative Authority, which usually makes it possible to locate an older Chatsworth plat before anyone drives to the property. S&S Land Surveying works out of 549 West Ave in Cedartown, and William "Bart" Sims, its licensed Georgia surveyor, signs and seals what it files in Murray County. Estimates are free.