He built his first dock at nineteen, for an uncle, on a tidal creek off Wadmalaw Island — eighty feet of walkway, a pierhead, and a float his uncle insisted be wide enough for two rocking chairs. That was 1994. The company he runs now has eleven people and two barges, and it puts in forty to fifty private docks a year on the Wando, the Stono, Rantowles Creek, and the marsh edges behind Johns Island. The building is not the hard part.
A crew that knows the bottom can jet pilings and frame a walkway in nine working days. The hard part is the paper that has to exist before the barge leaves the yard on Clements Ferry Road. A private dock in the critical area needs a permit from the state's Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management. Depending on where it lands it may also need an Army Corps verification, a water-quality sign-off, county or town zoning approval, and an HOA architectural review.
The application wants a stamped plat, a location map, a cross-section, photographs from four angles, the distance to the nearest dock on either side, the creek width at mean low water, and the name and mailing address of every adjoining property owner — each of whom gets a notice and a window to object. Miss one neighbor and the clock starts over. He had been doing all of it himself, after the crews went home. Fourteen hours of assembly per dock, most of it hunting parcel records in two counties.
Thirty-one percent of his applications came back with a deficiency letter — a missing signature, a wrong setback, a neighbor listed at an address the county had updated in 2019. Each letter cost six to ten weeks. From signed contract to permit in hand averaged 197 days, and he carried thirty open applications at any given time with no way to see which one was closest to moving. The AI Permit Coordinator does the assembly.
It reads the surveyor's PDF and pulls the setbacks, the extension lines and the elevations off the drawing. It queries Charleston and Berkeley county parcel records for the adjoining owners, checks the mailing addresses against the current tax roll rather than the deed, and flags the ones held by an LLC or a trust where notice has to go to a registered agent instead. It measures creek width at mean low water against the survey and the NOAA chart and tells him, before he has quoted the job, whether the dock he sketched will clear the one-third rule. It writes the project narrative.
It builds the packet in the order the reviewers read it. Then it keeps the file. Every open application, every deadline, every comment period, in one view sorted by what moves next. It reads the state's public notice bulletin every morning — including the notices filed by his clients' neighbors, so a competing alignment two lots down surfaces as a conflict while it is still a drawing and not a denial.
When something changes it writes the client a plain update, because the question he used to field twice a week was simply whether anything had happened. The first thing it changed was what he bids. Twice in the spring it looked at a lot on a narrow creek off Church Creek and told him the alignment would not survive review — the water was too tight at mean low water and the neighbor's existing pierhead already took the geometry. He walked away from both before spending a dollar on a survey.
In a normal year he ate the cost of two or three of those. Assembly went from fourteen hours to about forty minutes of reading. Deficiency letters fell from 31 percent to 4 percent, and three of those four were the surveyor's error rather than his. Contract to permit is down to 118 days.
He took on eleven more docks this year with the same eleven people, and for the first time the barge schedule is built from the permit calendar instead of from whoever called last. "I'm a builder. I spent twenty years being a filing clerk at night. Now I look at one screen in the morning and I know which dock we're building in April."