Monument Preservation in Alameda, CA

Alameda is a flat island city laid out in a tight Victorian-era grid, and that grid is full of original monuments — many set when the streets were, more than a century ago. Flat terrain makes for easy trenching, which means paving cycles, sewer and water main replacements, and utility undergrounding move quickly through intersections where those monuments live. Business & Professions Code §8771 requires that before any of that work disturbs a monument, a licensed surveyor reference it and file a Corner Record with the county surveyor — for Alameda, the Alameda County Surveyor — and that the monument be reset with a post-construction Corner Record afterward. On narrow older lots where the original subdivision maps are thin on dimensions, a destroyed centerline monument can force a retracement across multiple blocks to rebuild what one brass disk used to prove.

We run monument preservation for agencies, utility districts, and contractors across the island: records research, field search of the work corridor, pre-construction referencing and filings, and post-construction resets. Alameda Point deserves special mention — the former Naval Air Station reuse area mixes military-era survey control with new subdivision monumentation, and the ongoing infrastructure buildout there disturbs ground constantly. Preserving and perpetuating that control as roads and utilities are rebuilt is cheaper by an order of magnitude than reestablishing boundaries from fragmentary Navy-era records later.

Our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner lets us document the entire work corridor in the same visit that references the monuments: every monument captured in context with curbs, rails, pavement, and adjacent improvements at survey-grade density. The point cloud backs up each reset with hard evidence and doubles as pre-construction surface documentation the project can reuse — one mobilization instead of several.