Parcel Maps in Napa, CA

Napa is a city with a hard edge drawn around it. The city's Rural Urban Limit line defines the land planned for urban development, which means most division work inside the line is infill: splitting a deep older lot in the neighborhoods off Jefferson Street or Soscol Avenue, adjusting a boundary between two commercial parcels downtown, merging remnant lots that were platted a century ago and never built as drawn, or an SB 9 urban lot split on a single-family parcel. Each one is a Subdivision Map Act transaction: four or fewer resulting parcels take a parcel map, five or more take a tract map, and a shift of a line between existing owners takes a lot line adjustment.

Outside the line, the picture inverts. Napa County's Agricultural Preserve, adopted in 1968 and the first of its kind in the country, deliberately keeps agricultural parcels large, with the minimum size raised to 40 acres in 1979, and voter-approved measures in 1990 and 2008 require an electorate vote to redesignate protected agricultural land. Vineyard and ranch parcels around Coombsville and up the valley therefore see far more boundary retracement, easement mapping, and Record of Survey work than actual division. Those boundaries descend from Mexican-era ranchos and old ranch subdivisions, with metes-and-bounds calls tied to fences, creeks, and trees that have moved or died, so the work is evidence recovery before it is anything else.

Either way, the map is only as good as the boundary underneath it, and we resolve that first: deed and map research at the Napa County Recorder, monument recovery in the field, and perpetuation of every monument affected by construction under Business & Professions Code §8771. Maps are examined by the Napa County Surveyor and recorded in the city of Napa. Our scanner speeds the topographic and improvement base a map often needs alongside the boundary. See our Napa monument preservation work and the parcel map versus tract map explainer.