Monument Preservation in Richmond, CA

Richmond’s industrial waterfront and large redevelopment parcels see the kind of construction that destroys monuments wholesale: deep utility trenching, mass grading, demolition of WWII-era structures, and rebuilding of streets across big flat blocks. Business & Professions Code §8771 puts a clear duty in front of all of it — before construction disturbs a survey monument, a licensed surveyor must reference it and file a Corner Record with the county surveyor, and the monument must be reset with a post-construction Corner Record afterward. For Richmond that means the Contra Costa County Surveyor. The city’s history raises the stakes: wartime housing tracts were platted and monumented fast in the 1940s, industrial lands have been assembled and re-divided for over a century, and shoreline fill areas have settled and shifted. Where records are imperfect, the physical monument is often the best remaining evidence — and §8771 preservation is what keeps it usable through construction.

We run monument preservation at every scale Richmond presents: single-intersection utility crossings, multi-block paving programs, and perimeter sweeps for large redevelopment sites from Point Richmond to the inner harbor. The sequence is research, field search, referencing, pre-construction filings with Contra Costa County, and resets after final grading. On big flat parcels the field search matters more than teams expect — monuments are frequently buried under decades of pavement and fill rather than destroyed, and finding them before the excavators do is the entire game.

Our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner turns the preservation visit into corridor documentation: monuments captured in context with rails, pavement, structures, and shoreline improvements at millimeter density, in the same mobilization. For utility districts and developers, that point cloud doubles as pre-construction condition evidence across sites too large to photograph meaningfully — one visit, no return trips.