Public Surveyor Wayne Callwood retired Friday during a second misconduct investigation after his professional license was suspended in January, Lt. Gov. Tregenza Roach said in a written statement.
Roach said his office had launched its own investigation into Callwood’s actions after the Virgin Islands Board of Architects, Engineers, and Land Surveyors suspended him for six months.
For many years, Callwood had performed private surveys under another man’s name to avoid detection and the appearance of conflict of interest, he said, according to hearing transcripts.
Callwood had been allowed to keep his $72,000 government job because it did not require he have a surveyor’s license.
Allegations mounted, however, that Callwood had prioritized making and recording his own surveys, and neglected or purposefully delayed the work of others submitting records to the cadastral office. Transactions that should take less than 30 minutes were delayed weeks or months, they said.
Surveyor Larry Best, who first made allegations against Callwood, said the public surveyor had frequently put his surveys “at the back of the line” in part because of a long-standing personal grievance. Best had complained about Callwood for years before officially notifying the board of Callwood using engineer Francisco Nadal’s seal on documents in May 2023. It would take 31 months for the board to issue the suspension.
Others claimed an infuriatingly glacial pace at the cadastral office was because it was interjecting far beyond its scope or expertise.
The public surveyor should be a record keeper, not someone offering opinions on legal proceedings, said St. Thomas real estate and estate planning attorney Jessica Tully.
The cadastral office should not be validating surveys, assessing the legality of documents, or anything else beyond ensuring surveys are formatted correctly before being recorded, Tully said.
“Their job is to record maps and attest property descriptions in deeds. If there are legal problems in the documents, that’s on me as the lawyer and we can hash it out later. Because, again, unauthorized practice of law plays a role in this. I’m having government workers that don’t have any background in the law trying to tell me whether a document is legally effective, when all they need to tell me is whether the property description I provided to them matches the official map and meets modern property description requirements so we can standardize their record keeping,” she said.
There was no need for Callwood’s subterfuge so long as everyone’s records were recorded without favoritism, Tully said. Instead, business at the office relied on personal favors and frustrated pleas for attention. She suspected Callwood was spending more time surveying than recording them, as the public surveyor was required.
Title insurance companies in the territory came to know Callwood as a quick and reliable surveyor. He was able to perform and get his surveys recorded quickly, even if his work lacked the detail of other surveyor assessments, they said. Best claimed Callwood’s work was sloppy and sometimes off by as much as 30 feet.
Perhaps worse, the cadastral office’s foundational mandate and the rules it operated by were unclear, Tully said.
“I repeatedly call for that office to be transparent so the public and legal practitioners know the standards, policies, procedures and methodologies Cadastral uses to attest a deed. Right now, requirements are not known. It’s something new and different every time, which is fundamentally a disservice to the public,” she said.
More than a hassle, delays in recording documents can disrupt estate transfers. Someone with a very short time to live can’t wait weeks or months for deeds to be recorded. A slowdown could doom an estate into costly and lengthy probate, Tully said.
Callwood has sought a pause of his license suspension until after a judicial review.
Attorney General Gordon Rhea wrote to the Virgin Islands Superior Court Tuesday saying neither a stay of the suspension nor a review was appropriate. An unrepentant Callwood had readily admitted to using another man’s credentials to avoid detection and a judicial review was unlikely to reverse the board’s decision.
“A stay would substantially injure other parties at least inasmuch as Callwood persists in believing it is lawful and ethical for him to use the professional seal of others as a falsehood, to prevent disclosure of a conflict of interest with his public office. At this point, if Callwood’s license is not suspended, it is uncertain whether he would again use another’s professional seal as part of another falsehood. After completion of his suspension and the ethics course the Board also mandated, this will hopefully be less of a concern,” Rhea wrote to the court.
“Professional seals are invested with a public trust sufficiently profound that it is ‘unlawful for an architect, engineer, or land surveyor to affix, or permit his seal to be affixed, to … surveys, or other documents after expiration of a license or for the purpose of aiding or abetting any other person to evade or attempt to evade’ the provisions governing them,” the attorney general wrote, citing Virgin Islands law. “Callwood’s continuing insistence of the propriety of using another’s professional seal to mask his identity is inconsistent with that public trust.”
In Callwood’s absence, the Office of the Tax Assessor was assigned to collaborate with the Geospatial Information Systems Division of the Office of the Lieutenant Governor to complete the public surveyor’s work until a replacement is found, Roach said.
