Land Surveying in West Point, GA

The Municipal Planning Board Is the Platting Authority

Read the West Point land subdivision ordinance and the county question answers itself. Section 18-5 names the municipal planning board as the official platting authority and says no plat of a land subdivision is entitled to record in the office of the Clerk of the Superior Court of Troup or Harris County unless the board's approval is inscribed on it. Filing one anyway is declared a misdemeanor. A city ordinance naming two clerks is not hedging. The corporate limits genuinely reach across the county line, with the bulk of the city in Troup and the southern end in Harris.

Troup County land records are kept by the Clerk of Superior and State Courts at 100 Ridley Avenue, Suite 1600, in LaGrange, sixteen road miles northeast and mostly interstate. The Harris County office is at 102 North College Street in Hamilton, closer to twenty six miles the other way by GA 103 and GA 116. Assessment data lives with two more offices on top of that, at qpublic.net/ga/troup/ and qpublic.net/ga/harris/. Even the city's published demographics list Troup and Harris figures side by side, which is a fair summary of how West Point works on paper.

The approval sequence is set out in the ordinance. A preliminary plat goes to the secretary of the municipal planning board at least fifteen days before the board's next regular meeting, and the board gives tentative approval or disapproval after that meeting. Tentative approval expires after one year. On the final plat the director of the planning department checks conformance and reports to the mayor and council, and the mayor and council approve or disapprove. The director of planning then has the approved plat recorded with the clerk of superior court of Troup or Harris County. The Planning and Zoning Department handles subdivision and site plan review from City Hall at 730 1st Avenue.

Accuracy standards are written into the ordinance rather than left to custom. A West Point final plat must show municipal, county and land lot lines accurately tied to the lines of the subdivision by distances and angles wherever those lines traverse the tract or come reasonably close to it. Distances get carried to the nearest tenth of a foot and angles to the nearest minute, off a field survey, balanced and closed to no worse than one part in five thousand. The ordinance also wants monuments and markers located, with their material described. On a parcel that crosses the Troup and Harris line, that first requirement is the whole job.

There is a reason boundary work here carries some history. Under the 1802 cession that set Georgia's western boundary, the line ran up the Chattahoochee to the great bend of the river at present day West Point, and from that point it ran in a straight line to Nickajack on the Tennessee River. The river stops being the state line at West Point. Anything a survey here touches near the west bank sits at the hinge of a boundary that changes character at this town.

Then there is the river. The Chattahoochee River runs inside the city limits below West Point Dam, which sits just upstream of the corporate boundary, and Long Cane Creek runs some six miles inside the limits as well. FEMA maps a wide range here: Zone AE with a regulatory floodway, Zone A, the shaded Zone X that marks the 0.2 percent annual chance flood, and Zone X for the ground outside all of it. A parcel in the AE floodway is regulated differently from one in the shaded X a block away, and the certificate that proves which one applies is a survey.

The city grew from 3,474 residents in 2010 to 3,719 in the 2020 Census, and the current Census gazetteer puts the corporate limits at 12.9 square miles of land. It describes itself as home to Kia Motors Manufacturing Georgia and its suppliers, on a base that began as a textile town in the late 1800s. Old mill parcels, new industrial sites and river frontage all sit inside the same set of limits. Drafting happens at 549 West Ave in Cedartown, under the seal of the firm's licensed Georgia land surveyor. S&S is licensed in Georgia only and does not survey across the river in Alabama.