Topographic Surveys in Sausalito, CA

Sausalito's design review chapter is explicit about what a project has to show. The submittal requirements in SMC section 10.54.060 list, among the plans, a grading plan, sectional drawings, a geotechnical report, a current topographic and record of survey, and a story pole plan and certification, with the Community Development Director able to waive items that do not apply. The thresholds that pull a project into review are equally topographic: a change in existing grade by cutting or filling more than six feet, and terraced or multiple retaining walls or slope stabilization that retains an aggregate of six feet or more of slope within any ten-foot horizontal interval. Height compounds it, because building height is measured from the average of the highest and lowest points where the perimeter walls meet natural grade, and the code sorts lots as uphill, level, or downhill by whether the slope from the front parcel line exceeds ten degrees.

Every one of those determinations is an elevation question, and on a Sausalito lot the elevations are hard to get the old way. The ground is steep, terraced, and built up with walls, stairs, decks, and garages, and there is often no safe place to stand a rod. Our Trimble scanner captures the slope, each wall face and its top and bottom, stair treads, deck framing, tree trunks, the existing house, and the neighboring structures from stable setups, and we filter vegetation out of the cloud to produce a true bare-earth surface. Average natural grade stops being an estimate and becomes a computation from measured points.

Deliverables are a signed topographic map, contours at the interval your engineer needs, spot elevations, a DTM, and a layered DWG/DXF base map, alongside the registered point cloud. Boundary is resolved from recovered monuments and Marin County records. See Sausalito as-built surveys and our Sausalito service area page.