Monument Preservation in Kensington, CA

Kensington has no city hall — its steep, narrow streets are county-maintained, and road, drainage, and utility projects here run through Contra Costa County Public Works rather than a municipal engineering department. That matters for monument preservation because California Business and Professions Code §8771 places the duty squarely on whoever performs construction that will disturb a survey monument: before grading, paving, or trenching, monuments in the work zone must be referenced by a licensed land surveyor and a Corner Record filed with the Contra Costa County Surveyor, then reset and documented again after the work. On Kensington’s winding mid-century hillside grid, monuments are sparse to begin with — many blocks rely on a handful of surviving pipes and tacks set decades ago. Destroy one during a waterline replacement and the retracement survey to re-establish that corner can cost many times what preservation would have.

The Blakemont slow-moving landslide area on the El Cerrito border adds a problem most jurisdictions never face: the ground itself is dragging monuments off their record positions. A monument in creeping terrain is still evidence, but only if someone documented where it was before the movement, or before a slide-repair contractor excavated it away. Our preservation work — coordinates, ties, and filed Corner Records — creates exactly that dated evidence, so a corner disturbed by a retaining-wall or debris-removal project can be defensibly re-established rather than litigated. We pair conventional ties with our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner where it earns its keep: on narrow Kensington streets with retaining walls, hydrants, and curb hardware crowding the right-of-way, one scan captures millions of survey-grade points around each monument in a single visit, preserving the entire physical context without lane closures or return trips.

For contractors and utility districts working in Kensington, we handle the full §8771 sequence — pre-construction search and referencing, Corner Record filings with the Contra Costa County Surveyor, and post-construction resets — and can bundle it with deformation monitoring where slide-prone slopes are part of the project.