Altadena Is About to Get a Grading Plan Backlog. Here's What That Means for Architects.

We’re starting to see it in Altadena. Lots are getting fully graded, cut and filled, pads built, slopes cut, all of it without a grading plan on file. It works for a while. Then the county drives by, or a neighbor complains, or the bank asks for the permit history. Everything stops, and the homeowner suddenly needs a set of plans that should have existed before the first scoop of dirt moved.

That’s where the backlog comes from. And if you’re an architect, you’re going to be in the middle of it.

Altadena is LA County, not LA City. People mix this up all the time. Pacific Palisades is LADBS, city process. Altadena is unincorporated county, which means a different code, different reviewers, and a different way of doing things. A lot of the unpermitted grading going on right now is built on the assumption that nobody is checking. The county is checking. When they catch up, the homeowner needs an engineer who knows the county side, not someone who learned the city side and figured it was close enough.

Here’s the hard part about grading that’s already happened: you can’t ungrade a lot. We get called in after the pad is cut, after the fill is placed, after the slopes are shaped. The survey comes back and it doesn’t match what the county has on file, because there’s nothing on file. The grading was done to whatever the contractor felt like that day. Sometimes it’s close to code. Sometimes the pad is in the wrong place, or the slopes are steeper than they’re allowed to be, or the water runs where it shouldn’t. That’s when a grading plan turns into a much bigger conversation, because now we’re fixing someone else’s work, not designing fresh.

The hydrology question is part of it too. The hydrology report answers one question: does your project make drainage worse downstream? On a lot that was graded without a permit, the answer is usually yes until we fix the grading itself. That’s why the grading plan and the hydrology report have to be looked at together, not one after the other.

And the sump pump is not inevitable. We’ve gotten Altadena rebuilds approved without them, the same ones other engineers said needed a $30k to $50k pump system. The trick is showing the lot drains the same after the fire as it did before, using a hydrology report against pre-fire conditions. Every time we’ve done that, the county agreed.

Unpermitted grading always surfaces at the worst time. Lender asks. Insurance asks. Buyer asks. The fix is always more than the plan would have cost. A grading plan is cheap next to a stop work order, or redoing a pad that was cut in the wrong place.

If you’ve got a client with a lot that’s already been touched, we’re happy to take a look. Graded, filled, built on, whatever the situation, send us the survey and we’ll tell you what it’s going to take to get it right. No pressure, no jargon, just a straight answer. We’re civil engineers, been doing this since 2011, and we’re in Altadena and Pacific Palisades every day.