BALANCE PARCELS

The Surveyor-General's Rules require all the land under survey be dealt with, except in some special cases. There will generally be no balance parcels left undefined by the survey.

The special cases are:

• marginal strip, railway or road;
  
• land that is the bed of a lake, river, stream or the sea; or
  
• the balance of land being defined for the purpose of acquisition under the Public Works Act 1981.

In Landonline, maintenance of a seamless cadastral network requires balance parcels to be generated in all cases, even if they are not part of the Cadastral Survey Dataset. This also applies to coastal, river and legalisation surveys, where previously the surveyor has not dealt with the balance parcels. For example, a road taking action will change the definition and extent of the existing road parcel. Accretion beside a river parcel will change the definition and extent of the existing river parcel.

In Landonline Stage One, these balance parcels are defined, where required, by LINZ capture staff. In Landonline Stage Two the digital cadastral dataset is created by the surveyor, therefore the surveyor must incorporate the balance parcels in your e-surveys. To do this, you use the same tools LINZ staff use for paper surveys.

Processing Balance Parcels allows existing boundaries to be imported that are required to make up a newly created parcel for the e-survey. These imported boundary lines are added to the survey without boundary dimensions where there are no authoritative boundary dimension records in Landonline.

If the imported boundaries contain observations (ie. Landonline has an authoritative boundary dimension record), adopt the existing observations from Landonline electronically.

Normally boundary dimensions for balance parcels will need to be adopted from the underlying plans, when not already captured in Landonline, except in the special cases listed above or where a Class IV survey dispensation is authorised by the Senior Advisor to the Surveyor-General (previously Chief Surveyor).

The boundaries imported may include right lines, arcs and irregular boundaries.

It is important to note that rivers, roads, lakes and the sea are not treated in Landonline as if they were voids. They are also parcels. Although rivers and roads can extend for many kilometres, Landonline splits these types of extensive areas into manageable sized parcels. Coastline parcels extend to the 12 mile limit and are also separated by splits along the coastline out to the 12 mile limit. These splits in road, river or seabed parcels, which are often arbitrary, simplify the task of including them as balance parcels affected by the e-survey.