"You think an engineer's license makes you smarter than everybody else?"
Pat glanced at the half-set tripod. "Ma'am, I'm trying to measure elevations. Arguments have no effect on the instrument."
Brenda looked at him as though she couldn't decide whether to be offended or confused. She took photographs of our trucks, promised that the board would hear about this, and drove away. Cora waited until the Tahoe was out of sight before lowering her eyes to the field book and quietly asking whether every job came with an audience. Pat told her only the memorable ones.
The preliminary survey confirmed the trench was not shown on the recorded subdivision plans and that a substantial portion of the drainage alteration crossed association property. It also showed the pipe's visible outlet close to the boundary of a county-managed stormwater easement. Pat cautioned that a subsurface trace and county records would be needed to establish the exact connection, but the observed grading was sufficient to warrant a formal inspection.
Around the same time, my public records request began producing documents. I collected construction approvals, inspection notes, early maintenance correspondence, and the planning commission minutes from March 2011. The archive clerk placed a heavy folder on the counter and apologized for its condition. Several sheets had been copied so often that the stamps were barely legible, and one approval appeared to refer to a drawing revision I could not find in the file.
I drove home without opening the folder in the truck. I had learned that a hasty reading creates the kind of assumption an opponent can exploit later. At the kitchen table I laid out every sheet in date order and made an index, leaving blank spaces for missing attachments. Emma helped by placing numbered tabs in the corners, an activity she took so seriously that she insisted on checking my numbering twice.
The plans showed a fourteen-inch line in one location where the runoff calculations appeared to call for considerably more capacity under the design assumptions stated elsewhere. A later summary table referred to a twenty-four-inch trunk line, but I could not find a signed revision explaining the change. The detention pond's design volume was based on a smaller contributing area than the developed neighborhood now occupied, and its high-water overflow route did not match the as-built records.
I checked the applicable requirements from the approval period with the county rather than assuming that today's standards applied retroactively. Some calculations were unambiguous. Others required the historical design criteria and the actual drainage area to be reconstructed. What I could already say was that the documents did not adequately explain how the finished subdivision met the performance represented to the county.
Then I reached the title sheet. It carried the company name Prior Grading and Earthworks, a contractor's signature, and a business stamp. I searched the package for the professional engineer's certification that would ordinarily accompany the engineered portions of this work. There was no legible PE seal on the sheets in my copy, and no engineer's name in the approval index.