Land Surveying in Powder Springs, GA

Land Surveying Services in Powder Springs, Georgia

Powder Springs sits in southwestern Cobb County, and the first thing to settle before hiring a land surveyor in Powder Springs, GA is which office has to sign the plat. S&S Land Surveying works out of 549 West Ave in Cedartown, over in Polk County. Every survey is prepared and sealed by Bart, our licensed Georgia land surveyor, and we are licensed in Georgia.

The route between the two towns is the highway the city grew on. US 278 and State Route 6 cross Powder Springs as C.H. James Parkway, and SR 6 is the road that runs east from the Alabama line past Cedartown, through Rockmart, then southeast through Dallas and into the southwestern corner of Cobb. Downtown Atlanta is roughly 22 miles east by way of US 278 and Interstate 20. The city covers 7.4 square miles and carries metro Atlanta development pressure across all of it.

Powder Springs administers its own Unified Development Code, and the community development director is the official who acts under it. Two provisions there account for a good share of the survey requests we take inside the city. An application for a letter of zoning confirmation has to come in with a boundary survey, a legal description, or both, and that gets attached to the letter the director issues. If the letter is meant to address building setbacks, buffers, or the code's other dimensional requirements, the director can require an as-built survey of the property and the improvements standing on it. Those are two different jobs. One closes the boundary, the other locates what has been built inside it.

For a subdivision, the city takes the preliminary plat package in CAD and Adobe formats, with the Notice of Intent already filed with the Environmental Protection Division and a soil and erosion control affidavit alongside it. The final plat comes back later with the as-builts and approved covenants, gets signed and recorded, and then circulates to the city departments, the Cobb County Tax Assessor and Cobb 911. One step gets overlooked on this side of Cobb: under O.C.G.A. § 32-6-151, a planning commission has to forward a proposed subdivision plat to the Georgia Department of Transportation when the subdivision includes or abuts the state highway system or needs access to it. C.H. James Parkway is state highway, and under O.C.G.A. § 32-6-153 the department bases that recommendation on the plat providing for dedication to the department in fee simple of any part of the subdivision that includes the state highway system, including land needed for future widening. Deeded outright, in other words, rather than left as an easement.

The Silver Comet Trail shapes boundary work here more than anything else on the map. It crosses Powder Springs on the abandoned Seaboard Air Line roadbed, and that corridor is rail banked rather than released, meaning track could be laid back down on it. Georgia DOT bought the roadbed in 1992 and Cobb County runs the trail on it under lease from the state. To an adjoining owner that strip is still a railroad right of way in the record, whatever it looks like underfoot, so a deed call running to it has to be retraced from the railroad record rather than the pavement. The Wildhorse Trail ties into the Silver Comet at Carter Road after following Wildhorse and Noses creeks, and the Lucille Trail runs along Lucille Creek, so creek lines and trail corridors turn up on the same Powder Springs plats often enough to check for both.

Recording happens at the county rather than the city. The Cobb County Clerk of Superior Court keeps deeds and plats through a Real Estate Division at 10 East Park Square, Building C in Marietta, separate from the Superior Court offices on Haynes Street, and O.C.G.A. § 15-6-67 now requires plats to be filed with the clerk electronically. Recorded deeds and plats can be pulled from the clerk's index by land district and land lot. Parcel and assessment records are published by the Cobb County Board of Tax Assessors at assessor.cobbcounty.gov.