Monument Preservation in Novato, CA

Section 8771 of the Business and Professions Code is unambiguous: monuments controlling property lines must be located and referenced before construction that would disturb or destroy them, and a Corner Record or Record of Survey has to be filed. It applies to far more than subdivision work. In Novato the routine offenders are paving and slurry projects on Grant Avenue, Redwood Boulevard, and the residential collectors, curb ramp and sidewalk reconstruction, trenching by the Novato Sanitary District and North Marin Water District, undergrounding, and the roadway, culvert, and levee work along the bay margin near Hamilton and Bel Marin Keys. A centerline monument that has sat under a cast iron cover for fifty years is gone in one pass of a grinder, and nobody notices until a surveyor comes looking for it two decades later.

The cost of getting this right is trivial compared to the cost of the alternative. Losing a controlling monument does not just erase one point; it degrades every boundary in the block that was ever tied to it, and the retracement expense lands on private owners who had nothing to do with the project. We locate the monuments in the work area, tie them to durable references outside the limits of disturbance, file the pre-construction Corner Record, and return after the work to reset the monument in position and file the record showing what was done. Where the site is complex, we scan the corridor before demolition so the surrounding evidence — curb returns, wall faces, structures — is preserved as measured geometry, not memory.

Corner Records are checked by the Marin County Surveyor in San Rafael and filed with the Marin County Recorder. Deliverables are the referenced monument ties, the filed records, and reset monuments. See our Novato parcel map work and the background piece on monument preservation and section 8771.