Monument Preservation in Lafayette, CA

Lafayette’s hillside neighborhoods sit largely on the Orinda Formation, the same weak sedimentary rock that produces slow-moving landslides across the Lamorinda area, and its wooded large lots are threaded with creek corridors along Lafayette Creek and Las Trampas Creek. Both conditions generate exactly the kind of construction that destroys survey monuments: slide repairs and retaining walls on creeping slopes, bank stabilization and culvert work along the creeks, and roadway and utility projects on winding residential streets where surviving monuments are few and far between. California Business and Professions Code §8771 requires that before grading, paving, or trenching disturbs a monument, a licensed land surveyor reference it and file a Corner Record with the Contra Costa County Surveyor — and that the monument be reset and documented again after construction. When that step is skipped and a corner is lost on one of Lafayette’s long, curving hillside blocks, the retracement survey to restore it costs several times what preservation would have.

On slopes that are actively creeping, preservation records do double duty. The ground physically drags monuments off their record positions a little more each wet winter, so a corner’s value as evidence depends on someone having documented where it was before the movement — or before a wall footing or debris bench excavated it entirely. Our pre-construction ties and filed Corner Records create that dated baseline. Where a work zone is crowded — an oak-canopied lot under Lafayette’s residential design review, or a constrained frontage along the Mt. Diablo Boulevard downtown corridor — our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner records each monument and its complete surroundings at survey-grade density in a single visit, with no return trips and no traffic-control repeats, and the point cloud becomes part of the permanent preservation record.

We handle the full §8771 scope for contractors, utility districts, and public agencies in Lafayette: monument search and referencing, pre-construction Corner Record filings with the Contra Costa County Surveyor, post-construction resets and closing filings, and coordination with project topographic surveys where hillside permits require them.