Monument Preservation in El Cerrito, CA

El Cerrito’s east side climbs steeply, and its hillside streets carry two problems at once for boundary evidence. First, monuments are sparse: postwar hillside subdivisions set fewer monuments per mile of winding street than flatland grids, so each survivor controls a lot of boundary and has no easy substitute. Second, some of the ground is moving — the Blakemont area near the Kensington border sits on a slow-moving landslide, and creeping slopes gradually carry fences, walls, and monuments with them. Both problems make preservation more valuable, not less. Business & Professions Code §8771 requires that before road rehabilitation, utility trenching, or private construction disturbs a monument, a licensed surveyor reference it and file a Corner Record — in El Cerrito, with the Contra Costa County Surveyor — and reset it with a second filing after construction. Destroy a hillside monument without that record and the retracement that follows is long, expensive, and complicated by the very slope movement the record would have documented.

We provide monument preservation for city street programs, utility districts, and hillside homeowners’ projects across El Cerrito: county records research, field search, pre-construction referencing, Contra Costa filings, and post-construction resets. Where slopes are known to creep, the referencing measurements themselves become a dated snapshot of the monument’s position — evidence future surveyors will thank you for.

Our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner is built for exactly this terrain. In one mobilization we capture each monument and its full hillside context — pavement, retaining walls, fences, slope surfaces — at millimeter density. That point cloud supports defensible resets, records surface conditions before construction, and for creeping areas pairs naturally with monitoring if the project needs to track movement over time.