Monument Preservation in Piedmont, CA

Piedmont’s winding hillside streets were monumented when the city’s estate lots were laid out, and the geometry up here is unforgiving: curvilinear rights-of-way, irregular lot lines, and long block frontages mean each monument controls more boundary than it would in a flat grid city. Monuments are sparser per mile of street, so losing one to a road rehabilitation project, a sewer lateral trench, or a retaining-wall excavation removes evidence that may have no nearby substitute. Business & Professions Code §8771 requires that before construction disturbs any monument, a licensed surveyor reference it and file a Corner Record with the Alameda County Surveyor, with a reset and second filing after construction. On Piedmont’s geometry, ignoring that requirement is especially costly — retracing a curvilinear hillside boundary from distant remaining evidence is among the most expensive routine tasks in land surveying.

We handle preservation for the city’s street programs, utility work, and private hillside construction: record research, monument search and referencing, Alameda County filings, and post-construction resets. Piedmont’s mature landscaping is a genuine field problem — hedges, specimen trees, and stone walls close off sight lines that conventional instruments need. Our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner works around that: it captures dense coverage from multiple quick setups, recording each monument and its surroundings in a millimeter-grade point cloud without the line-of-sight gymnastics a total station would require on these streets.

The same scan gives the project team pre-construction documentation of pavement, walls, and improvements along the corridor — useful for design, for design review submittals, and for condition disputes — all from the one mobilization that secured the monuments. One visit, monuments preserved, corridor documented.