Parcel Maps in Mill Valley, CA

Mill Valley handles subdivisions in its subdivision title, with a simplified procedure for subdivisions of fewer than five lots. What decides feasibility, though, is usually the ground rather than the process. Minimum lot area and width requirements change for lots with more than ten percent slope, and effective lot area, the figure the city's development standards are built on, is the gross area of a lot less any portion encumbered by a trail easement or a recorded driveway or roadway easement. A split that pencils on the assessor's acreage can fail once the easements are deducted and the slope thresholds applied, which is a cheaper thing to learn from a survey than from a denied application.

Then there is the boundary itself. The town grew from an 1890s auction that laid lots and streets on paper across redwood canyons nobody had walked, and the physical evidence has had a century of slides, retaining wall reconstruction, and street widening to work on it. Original monuments are frequently buried, displaced, or gone. Adjoining parcels are threaded with public stairways and unimproved paper streets that hold record rights across what looks like private ground. Resolving a line here is retracement: recovering surviving evidence, weighing it against the record maps and deeds, and documenting the conclusion, with a Record of Survey filed where the resolution warrants it.

Our laser scanner supports the map work by capturing the terrain, retaining walls, driveways, trees, and existing structures in a single visit, so the tentative map, the topography, and the constraint analysis all come from the same dataset. Maps are checked by the Marin County Surveyor at the Department of Public Works in San Rafael and recorded by the Marin County Recorder. See our Mill Valley topographic surveys and parcel map vs tract map in California.