Monument Preservation in Vallejo, CA

Vallejo’s boundary framework rests on nineteenth-century street grids: the downtown blocks and the St. Vincent’s Hill Victorian district were laid out generations ago, and the monuments perpetuating those grids control thousands of narrow city lots. Street rehabilitation, sewer and water main replacement, and sidewalk reconstruction in these districts run directly over that evidence. Business and Professions Code §8771 requires that before any construction disturbs a monument, a licensed land surveyor reference it and file a Corner Record or Record of Survey, then reset and re-document the monument after the work is done. Vallejo sits in Solano County, so those filings go to the Solano County Surveyor and Recorder in Fairfield — a detail that surprises some contractors used to working across the strait in Contra Costa — and we handle the Fairfield filings on every engagement.

Mare Island is the larger challenge. The West Coast’s first naval shipyard is now a major adaptive-reuse district, and rebuilding its aged infrastructure — utilities serving the dry docks, machine shops, and officers’ quarters, plus new roadways and site work — means years of excavation across ground where the original engineering drawings are famously lost or incomplete. That makes surviving physical survey evidence on the island doubly precious: monuments and control points are often the most reliable spatial framework left. Preserving them under §8771 before trenching is not bureaucratic box-checking; it protects the geometric backbone that every future parcel conveyance and as-built survey on Mare Island will depend on. Waterfront work also crosses filled ground with mapped liquefaction zones under the Seismic Hazards Mapping Act, where geotechnical trenching widens the true zone of disturbance beyond the plan limits.

Our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner is built for exactly this environment: one visit captures monuments, pavements, rails, and structures as millions of survey-grade points, creating a durable pre-construction record on ground where paper records failed long ago. Referencing and resetting a monument costs a fraction of retracing a destroyed one across a former shipyard — that is the liability equation every project owner should run before excavation starts.