Monument Preservation in Pleasant Hill, CA

Pleasant Hill was built largely in one era, and its survey fabric shows it: block after block of postwar tracts whose boundaries hang on monuments set in the streets when the subdivisions were recorded. Sixty-plus years later, those same streets carry the city’s water, sewer, and storm systems — and the rehabilitation cycle for both pavement and utilities is in full swing. Every slurry seal, grind-and-overlay, main replacement, and storm drain upgrade passes directly over monument wells at intersections and centerline points. Business and Professions Code §8771 requires that before such construction disturbs a monument, a licensed land surveyor reference it and file a Corner Record with the county surveyor, and that the monument be reset and documented after the work. We provide exactly that service to contractors and agencies working in Pleasant Hill, filing with the Contra Costa County Surveyor in Martinez.

The city’s creek corridors and flood-control channels add a second category of risk: bank stabilization, culvert replacement, and channel maintenance can disturb monuments and property-corner evidence along rear lot lines where tracts back up to the waterways. And because Pleasant Hill has an active infill and ADU market, the monuments that survive today are in constant demand — a homeowner’s topographic survey or lot line verification is fast and economical when the tract monuments are intact, and slow and expensive when they are gone. The liability math is simple: referencing and resetting a monument costs a small, predictable amount, while a destroyed monument taxes every future survey in the neighborhood with retracement costs, and can expose the responsible party to claims.

Our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner lets us document an entire intersection or channel reach in a single setup, preserving each monument’s position inside a survey-grade point cloud of the surrounding curbs, pavement, and improvements. That density of evidence makes post-construction resets defensible and gives agencies a clean, auditable record of §8771 compliance.