Land Surveying in Ringgold, GA

Surveying Property in Ringgold, Georgia

One block of Lafayette Street decides most of what happens to a Catoosa County survey. The Clerk of Superior Court records deeds and plats at 875 Lafayette Street in Ringgold. The Catoosa County Administrative Building stands on the same block at 800 Lafayette Street, and that is where the Catoosa County Planning Commission holds its public hearing and regular meeting to take up rezonings, variances and preliminary plat reviews. Final action on a zoning request comes from the Catoosa County Board of Commissioners at their regular meetings on the first and third Tuesday of the month, in the public meeting room of the same building.

City limits change the first stop, not the last one. A parcel inside Ringgold goes through the city's own planning and zoning office at 150 Tennessee Street, a few blocks northeast of the courthouse. A parcel outside the city goes to the county planning office. The recorded plat ends up in the same drawer either way, with the Clerk of Superior Court, and the county's zoning yellow signs posted on a property are a fair warning that a neighboring tract is about to change.

Ringgold owners can pull their own parcel record before they call anyone. Catoosa County publishes assessment data, sales history and mapped parcel lines through qPublic, reached from the Board of Assessors at catoosaassessor.com. What that map shows is a tax parcel. It exists to track who pays on what, and it is drawn from deed research and aerial mapping rather than from field measurement. When a fence, a driveway or a closing is riding on the line, the mapped parcel is a starting point and the boundary survey is the answer.

Flood work is the part of Ringgold that catches people out. FEMA's detailed studies in this part of Catoosa County cover South Chickamauga Creek, Little Chickamauga Creek, East Chickamauga Creek and Cherokee Creek, and the mapping through the middle of town includes Zone AE with a regulatory floodway inside it, alongside stretches in the 0.2 percent annual chance band and areas of minimal hazard. Catoosa County's Flood Insurance Rate Map panels took effect on September 11, 2009. A lot touching the floodway is the hard case, because the floodway carries construction limits the wider flood fringe does not, and its boundary has to be located on the ground rather than eyeballed off a web map.

Ridge and valley ground shows up in the deeds. US 41, US 76, State Route 2, State Route 3 and State Route 151 all run through or past Ringgold, and Interstate 75 crosses Catoosa County alongside them. Tracts here were laid out to the terrain and to the creeks long before that highway pattern existed, so a Ringgold description can call to a creek that has shifted, a road that has been rebuilt on a new alignment, or a corner that no longer looks anything like the object named in the deed. Following those calls back to the ground is the job.

S&S Land Surveying covers Catoosa County from its office at 549 West Ave in Cedartown. William "Bart" Sims is the licensed Georgia land surveyor who signs and seals every plat that leaves the office, and estimates are free.