Bobcat and mini excavator work in Valley Center costs $150 per hour with a 4-hour minimum, operator, fuel and delivery included throughout 92082 with no travel charge. Valley Center is acreage, groves, dirt roads and fire country, so pad grading, grove removal, defensible space, road grading and long trenches are most of what we do here.
Valley Center is the most rural place we work and the one most like Fallbrook was thirty years ago: big parcels, avocado and citrus groves, horse properties, private dirt roads, well water and a fire history everyone remembers. It is twenty-five minutes from our yard by way of Highway 76 and Lilac Road or Valley Center Road, and it is in our no-travel-charge zone because we are there so often.
The work is dirt work in the old sense. Pads for barns, workshops and the ADUs the county is now approving on agricultural parcels. Grove removal where the avocados have died or the water bill has won. Roads that wash every winter and need grading every spring. Trenches that run hundreds of feet from a well to a house to a barn. Fire clearance on parcels where the chaparral comes right up to the back door.
Valley Center's parcels run from two acres in the Woods Valley and Cole Grade areas to forty and more on the ridges toward Palomar and Pauma Valley. We are set up for both: the T300 and the excavator fit the small lots, and for a big clearing or a long road we bring both machines and stay as many days as it takes.
The ground in Valley Center
Valley Center ground is decomposed granite over granite bedrock, with the big rounded boulders the area is known for sitting on the surface and just under it. Boulders are the Valley Center problem: a trench runs into one, a pad has one in the middle, a road bends around one. The excavator's thumb lifts the ones that can be lifted and the breaker handles the ones that cannot, and we plan for both when we quote.
The valley floors along Valley Center Road and Woods Valley Road are deeper soil and flatter ground, where the groves and the horse properties are. The ridges, Lilac Road, Cole Grade Road and the roads up toward Palomar, are steep, rocky and brushy, and they are where the fire clearance and the road grading happen. The Paradise Fire in 2003 came through here and the Lilac Fire in 2017 started a few miles west; North County Fire and CAL FIRE both inspect.
What we do most in Valley Center
Pads for barns, workshops and ag-parcel ADUs
Rough grading to the plan on the larger parcels, cut and fill on the ridge lots, boulders pulled or broken out of the pad.
Grove removal and ag land prep
Dead avocado and citrus groves cut and stumped with the excavator, then graded for pasture, a new planting or a pad. Valley Center has more of this work than anywhere we go.
Defensible space and fire breaks
The 100-foot zone around homes and outbuildings cut with the brush cutter, plus fire breaks along the ridge roads where the chaparral meets the parcel.
Dirt road and long driveway grading
The private roads off Lilac Road, Cole Grade Road and Woods Valley Road, regraded, crowned and water-barred every spring, often for several parcels at once.
Long trenches to wells, pumps and barns
Runs of several hundred feet across pasture and grove, through DG and around boulders, to the depth your plumber or electrician specifies.
Drainage and washout repair
Culverts, rip-rap, swales and roadbed rebuilds after the winter storms that run off the ridges and down the roads.
Roads and places we know
If your property is on or near one of these, we have probably been on it.
- Valley Center Road
- Lilac Road
- Cole Grade Road
- Woods Valley Road
- Old Castle Road
- Lake Wohlford Road
- Paradise Mountain Road
- Mac Tan Road
- Miller Road
- Highway 76
- Bates Nut Farm
- Harrah's Resort and the Rincon reservation
- Hellhole Canyon Preserve
- Lake Wohlford
- Valley Center High School
- Woods Valley
- Pauma Valley to the north
- Palomar Mountain to the east
Permits in Valley Center
Valley Center is unincorporated San Diego County, so permits come from County Planning and Development Services. Agricultural grading on a working grove and the usual residential jobs, pads, driveways, trenches, drainage and small demolition, need no permit. Larger cut and fill, work near a mapped creek or in the San Luis Rey watershed, and anything the Valley Center Community Plan flags as a resource area can need County review. Fire clearance is required, not permitted: North County Fire and CAL FIRE inspect to the PRC 4291 standard.