Monument Preservation in Santa Rosa, CA

Business and Professions Code section 8771 requires that any monument which will be disturbed or destroyed by construction be referenced beforehand by or under the direction of a licensed land surveyor, and that a Corner Record or Record of Survey be filed. Monuments are the physical anchors of the boundary system. A street centerline point set eighty years ago may be the controlling evidence for every lot line on the block, and once it is gone without references, recovering those lines means retracing a large area of record at somebody's expense.

Santa Rosa has had an unusual amount of that risk in recent years. In neighborhoods rebuilt after the 2017 fires, notably in Coffey Park and across Fountaingrove, streets, utilities, curbs, and driveways were reconstructed at scale, and the above-ground boundary evidence that surveyors normally lean on, fences, walls, structures, and landscaping, was removed across whole blocks at once. That makes the surviving subdivision monuments in the street considerably more important than usual, and it puts them under exactly the kind of equipment that destroys them. The same exposure comes with ordinary work: repaving, trenching for water and sewer replacement, curb-ramp reconstruction, and new commercial driveway approaches.

Our process is to research the record with the Sonoma County Surveyor at Permit Sonoma and the Clerk-Recorder, search for and recover the monuments within the work limits, tie them to durable references well outside those limits, and file the Corner Record before the work begins. After construction we reset the monument in its original position from those references and file the follow-up. Scanning helps: one scan of the intersection preserves the surrounding physical evidence that corroborates the reset years later. Sonoma County also collects a survey monument fee under Government Code section 27585, funding remonumentation of the historical division lines later surveys depend on. See our explainer on 8771 and construction and our Santa Rosa parcel maps.