Monument Preservation in Napa, CA

Business & Professions Code §8771 is short and unforgiving: a monument that will be disturbed by construction must be referenced by a licensed surveyor before the work, and a Corner Record or Record of Survey must be filed. In Napa the trigger is more common than owners expect, because so much of the city's ground has been rebuilt. Decades of construction on the Napa River and Napa Creek flood protection project have reshaped channels, levees, floodwalls, and bridges through the middle of town. The 2014 South Napa earthquake was followed by street, sidewalk, and buried-utility repairs across the older neighborhoods. Add ordinary paving overlays, water and sewer replacement, and utility undergrounding, and monuments set in intersections and along street centerlines take a steady beating.

The cost of losing them is not abstract. A centerline monument or a set of ties in a downtown intersection is the physical evidence that lets the next surveyor reproduce a block of property lines. When it disappears under an overlay with no reference filed, every boundary that depended on it becomes an argument, and the argument surfaces years later during a sale, a fence dispute, or a permit. Napa's older grid, laid out well before modern subdivision standards, leans especially hard on the monuments that survive.

Our work is straightforward. Before construction we research the record at the Napa County Recorder and the Napa County Surveyor, search for and recover the monuments in the field, set durable reference points clear of the work, and file the Corner Record. After construction we reset the monument in its true position from those references and file the follow-up record. Contractors and public agencies typically bring us in during preconstruction rather than after a monument is already gone, which is far cheaper. Where a corner sits inside a busy roadway or an active work zone, our scanner lets us capture the surrounding evidence quickly and keep crew exposure short. See our Napa parcel map work and the guide to §8771 during construction.