Monument Preservation in Concord, CA

In a city of Concord’s size, monument destruction is usually not a single dramatic event — it is the slow attrition of a large capital program. Every mile of pavement rehabilitation, every water main replacement, and every sewer trench through the broad postwar tracts crosses street centerlines and intersections where the monuments controlling entire subdivisions were set. Business and Professions Code §8771 requires that before construction disturbs those monuments, a licensed surveyor reference them and file a Corner Record or Record of Survey with the county surveyor, then reset and document them after construction. For contractors and public agencies, building that step into the project schedule is far cheaper than the alternative: when monuments vanish under new asphalt, every future survey in the tract must be retraced from scattered evidence, at a cost that dwarfs what preservation would have been.

Concord’s redevelopment pipeline raises the stakes. Infrastructure for the former Concord Naval Weapons Station — one of the largest redevelopment sites in the Bay Area — will involve years of grading, backbone utilities, and roadway construction across ground where existing monuments and federal-era survey control must be found, evaluated, and perpetuated before machines move. Downtown, BART-area transit-oriented projects and repositioning of aging commercial and industrial parcels generate the same need on a block-by-block scale. We file all Corner Records with the Contra Costa County Surveyor in Martinez and coordinate resets with the contractor’s punch list so compliance never holds up acceptance.

Our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner is particularly useful on Concord’s long corridor projects: one scan session captures every monument, curb line, and surface feature along the alignment as a survey-grade point cloud, giving us — and the city — a permanent, measurable record of pre-construction conditions. If a well or disk is lost mid-project, the reset is grounded in dense, verifiable data rather than a handful of tie distances.