Civil Engineering Florida
Florida runs one statewide environmental resource permit rule and five different sets of design criteria underneath it. The rule that decides whether a stormwater system is approvable is the same in Pensacola and in Homestead. The numbers that system has to hit are not. Knowing which set governs a parcel, before anything is drawn, is most of what separates a permit from a resubmittal.
One Rule, Five Handbooks, and Why That Decides Your Site Plan
Almost every civil project in this state that moves water, changes grade, or adds impervious area runs through the environmental resource permit program. The Department of Environmental Protection describes what that program regulates in plain terms: activities involving the alteration of surface water flows, including upland stormwater runoff and dredging and filling in wetlands. If a project does any of those things, it is in the program.
The program is set out in Chapter 62-330 of the Florida Administrative Code, and it applies statewide. That part is genuinely uniform. What is not uniform is the document that carries the actual design and performance criteria.
Volume I is the Same Everywhere
Volume I of the environmental resource permit handbook is the general and environmental volume. It covers the background of the program, the activities that are regulated, the permit types, the application forms, and the environmental criteria that apply to wetlands and surface waters.
It is the same document whether the project sits in the panhandle or in the Keys. Read it once and it travels with you.
Volume II Is Not
Volume II carries, in its own words, the design and performance standards and criteria for water quality and water quantity for stormwater management systems, along with the standards for water flows, levels, flood protection, and regional basin criteria.
And there is a different Volume II for each water management district. The title page of the St. Johns River version says so outright: for use within the geographic limits of the St. Johns River Water Management District.
Which produces the single most useful sentence on this page. A stormwater design that was approved on one side of a district boundary is not automatically approvable on the other side of it, even for the same building, on the same soil, under the same statewide rule. The rule did not change. The volume that fills in its numbers did.
That is why the first question we ask on a new site is not what the client wants to build. It is which district the parcel sits in, and which basin inside that district, because the answer decides the treatment volume, the discharge rate the site is held to, the flood criteria, and in some basins a set of criteria that apply to that basin alone.
Two Agencies, One Application, and an Agreement Between Them
A second thing surprises people on their first Florida project. The permit application does not always go to the same place. Environmental resource permit applications are processed either by one of the six district offices of the Department of Environmental Protection or by one of the five water management districts, and which one depends on what the project is rather than where it is.
The Department handles applications involving waste facilities, mining, power plants, cables and lines, certain docking facilities and dredging, single family systems, seaports, and a set of smaller water related activities. The water management districts handle all other applications. Operating agreements between the Department and the districts specify which agency processes each type.
Why This Is Worth Settling First
- The reviewing agency sets the submittal package, the review sequence and the request for additional information cycle, and those differ.
- A project with a dock and an upland development can touch both paths at once, which is a sequencing problem rather than a technical one.
- Sending a complete application to the wrong reviewer does not fail it. It delays it, and the delay lands at the worst point in a schedule.
- A pre application conversation with the right agency is free and it is the cheapest hour on the whole project.
What the Districts Are Chartered to Protect
The Department exercises general supervisory authority over the five districts, which administer water resources at the regional level. The districts have four core mission areas, and a reviewer reads a site plan through all four of them at once:
- Water supply
- Water quality
- Flood protection and floodplain management
- Natural systems
Boundaries That Do Not Follow County Lines
Water in Florida is managed at the state level and at a regional level, and the regional level is these five. They are the reason a civil scope written for one part of the state does not transfer cleanly to another, and they are worth knowing by name because the district is the first thing a reviewer will identify about a project.
Northwest Florida
The panhandle. Different rainfall pattern, different soils and a different Volume II from anything on the peninsula.
Suwannee River
North central Florida. Karst country, where a stormwater plan has to reckon with what happens below the surface as much as on it.
St. Johns River
The northeast and east central corridor, including Jacksonville and the Orlando area. Its Volume II is the one quoted above.
Southwest Florida
Tampa Bay and the southwest coast. Its own Volume II, its own basin criteria and a long record of basin specific rules.
South Florida
From Orlando south through the Keys, including Miami. The largest district by area and the most complex flood control network in the state.
And the Line Between Them
District boundaries are drawn on water rather than on politics, so a county can sit in more than one. Confirming which district a parcel is in is a records question, not a guess from the address.
Three Reviews, Running on Three Different Clocks
The environmental resource permit is the one people know about. It is rarely the only one, and the others are not sequential. They run in parallel, on their own schedules, and a project is only as fast as the slowest of them.
State: The Environmental Resource Permit
Chapter 62-330, reviewed by the Department or the district, with the design criteria coming out of the Volume II for that district. This is where treatment volume, discharge rate, flood criteria and wetland impacts get settled.
Federal, Administered by the State
The national pollutant discharge elimination system stormwater program is administered in Florida by the Department, which develops and enforces the rules and policy for it. It covers three categories of regulated source: construction activity, industrial activity, and municipal separate storm sewer systems. Construction activity runs under a generic permit.
Local: The One That Is Easiest to Underestimate
City and county land development codes sit on top of both of the above and they are frequently stricter. Local requirements routinely govern the finished floor elevation, the treatment standard, the allowable discharge point, landscape and buffer areas that compete with retention areas for the same ground, and the paving and drainage details that get inspected.
Where a local code is stricter than the state criteria, the local number governs. We read the local code before the state criteria rather than after, because it is the one more likely to move a layout.
Civil Engineering Services Across Florida
Foundation Masters, LLC provides civil, structural, geotechnical, forensic and construction integrated services for residential, commercial, municipal and waterfront projects throughout Florida. We work for property owners and developers, general contractors and subcontractors, homeowners associations, municipal agencies and public entities, real estate investors and asset managers, and insurance carriers and legal teams.
Stormwater Management Design
Treatment and attenuation systems designed to the criteria of the district the parcel actually sits in, with the calculations that have to accompany them through review.
Drainage Engineering and Correction
Design for sites that pond, flood, erode or discharge where they should not, including drainage and waterproofing where the water is reaching a structure.
Site Development and Grading
Layout, grading and earthwork for new development and redevelopment, coordinated with the foundation design rather than handed to it.
Permitting and Agency Coordination
Environmental resource permit support, local site plan review, and the requests for additional information that decide how long a review actually takes.
Due Diligence and Feasibility
Early identification of drainage constraints, utility conflicts, flood exposure and development limits, while the deal can still be priced around them.
Utility Coordination
Water, sewer and service routing, conflict resolution against the drainage design, and the long term serviceability of what gets buried.
Geotechnical Investigation
Soil borings and geotechnical engineering, which on a stormwater project is not a separate scope: infiltration and seasonal high groundwater come out of the same holes.
Earth Retention and Shoreline Work
Seawalls and bulkheads, retaining walls and sheet piling designed, permitted and installed by our own crews.
Forensic Civil Engineering
Investigation of erosion, drainage failure, construction defect and site performance disputes, with a written opinion on cause rather than a list of observations.
Why a Site That Floods Is Four Different Problems
Standing water in the same place after every storm looks like one problem and is usually one of four. They produce the same symptom and they do not share a repair, which is why the diagnosis is worth more than the fix.
The system is undersized for what is there now. Impervious area was added, a basin was filled, or the criteria the original system was designed to have since been tightened. The system is doing what it was built to do and what it was built to do is no longer enough.
The system is the right size and has lost its capacity. A pond that has silted in, a control structure with a blocked orifice, an underdrain that has clogged, a swale that has been regraded by mowing over twenty years. This is the cheapest of the four and it is the one most often skipped, because maintenance is the line item nobody wants to fund.
The outfall is the problem, not the site. Water leaves the parcel correctly and then has nowhere to go, because the receiving ditch, pipe or canal is at capacity, is higher than it used to be, or was never as available as the original design assumed. Nothing done inside the property line will fix this, and a great deal of money gets spent inside the property line trying.
It is not stormwater at all. Seasonal high groundwater surfacing in a low spot, a leaking service line, irrigation overrun, or grading done on the parcel next door that changed where the water arrives from. These get treated as drainage failures regularly, and the repair for them costs a fraction of a new system.
How We Separate Them
- Survey of actual grades and structure elevations against what the approved plan says they should be
- The permitted design criteria for the system, and the criteria that would apply to it today
- Condition of the control structure, the orifice, the skimmer and the underdrain, physically inspected
- Sediment depth in the pond or swale against the design bottom
- Tailwater condition at the outfall during and after a storm, not on a dry afternoon
- Contributing drainage area as it exists now against the area the system was designed for
- Seasonal high groundwater from borings, because a wet spot above the water table is a different problem from one below it
- Whether the pattern follows rainfall or follows irrigation and utility schedules
What We Establish Before Design Starts
- Water management district, basin, and which Volume II criteria govern the parcel
- Reviewing agency for this project type, and whether more than one path applies
- Local code requirements where they are stricter than the state criteria, because then they are the criteria
- Flood zone and the finished floor elevation the local ordinance actually requires
- The legal outfall, its condition, and whether the capacity the design needs is genuinely available
- Existing permits on the site, because an existing system usually comes with obligations attached
And What We Establish Below Grade
- Seasonal high groundwater, which is not the level a borehole reads on the day it is drilled
- Infiltration behavior, where the design depends on the ground accepting water rather than storing it
- Depth and variability of compressible or organic material under anything that will carry load
- Fill history, because a site that was raised once behaves differently from one that never was
- Karst indicators where the geology calls for it, since a stormwater system that discharges into a solution feature is a different conversation
- Whether the soil that has to be excavated can be reused on site, which is a budget question answered by a laboratory
Drainage Review · Development Support · Florida Site Evaluation
Criteria First, Then Drawings
The civil problems we get called to look at are rarely calculation errors. They are criteria errors. A system designed to the wrong district numbers, a discharge rate taken from a neighboring basin, a finished floor set from the state minimum when the local ordinance was higher, a retention area sized before anyone established where the seasonal high groundwater sits.
So the criteria get settled before anything is drawn. District and basin. Reviewing agency. The governing local requirements. Flood zone and floor elevation. The outfall and its real capacity. The ground. Then the site gets designed.
It is also why our civil work sits next to our structural engineering and geotechnical engineering rather than being subcontracted away from them. On a Florida site the grading plan, the foundation and the water table are one problem wearing three hats, and the cheapest time to notice that is before the first submittal.
We Want Civil Engineers with Florida Experience
We are always interested in hearing from civil engineers, engineers in training, project managers and technical staff with experience in drainage, stormwater, site development, utilities and forensic problem solving.
What we value is field awareness. A plan set that cannot be built the way it is drawn is not a finished plan set, and the people who know that are the people who have stood on the site while it was being built.
Where We Are Strongest
- Stormwater and drainage design across more than one water management district
- Site development and land planning
- Permitting and agency coordination
- Utility layout and infrastructure support
- Forensic investigation of site performance failures
- Florida field experience, which is the one that cannot be taught quickly
Civil Engineering in Florida: Common Questions
What does a civil engineering firm in Florida actually do on a project?
Site planning, grading and earthwork, stormwater and drainage design, utility coordination, and the permitting that carries all of it through review. On a Florida project the drainage work is usually the part that governs, because the environmental resource permit program regulates activities that alter surface water flows, including upland stormwater runoff, and almost any development does that.
Do I need an environmental resource permit for my project?
If the work alters surface water flows, adds impervious area, changes grade, or touches wetlands or surface waters, it is very likely in the program. The Department of Environmental Protection describes the program as regulating activities involving the alteration of surface water flows, including upland stormwater runoff and dredging and filling in wetlands. Exemptions and general permits exist for smaller work, and establishing which path applies is a short piece of work at the start rather than a discovery later.
Who reviews my permit application, the state or the water management district?
It depends on the project type rather than the location. Applications are processed either by one of the six district offices of the Department of Environmental Protection or by one of the five water management districts. The Department handles categories such as waste facilities, mining, power plants, cables and lines, certain docking facilities and dredging, single family systems and seaports. The districts handle all other applications. Operating agreements between the Department and the districts specify which agency processes each type.
Why do the stormwater requirements change from one part of Florida to another?
Because the design criteria do not live in the statewide rule. Chapter 62-330 of the Florida Administrative Code applies everywhere, and Volume I of the permit handbook is the same document statewide. Volume II is the one carrying the design and performance standards for water quality and water quantity, and there is a separate Volume II for each water management district. Those volumes are incorporated by reference into the rule, so the district specific numbers are themselves rules rather than guidance.
Which water management district is my property in?
Florida has five: Northwest Florida, Suwannee River, St. Johns River, Southwest Florida and South Florida. Their boundaries follow water rather than political lines, so a single county can fall in more than one and a mailing address does not settle it. We confirm the district and the basin from the record before design starts, because that answer sets the treatment volume, the allowable discharge rate and the flood criteria the site will be held to.
Do you provide signed and sealed drawings and calculations?
Yes. Our Florida licensed engineers provide signed and sealed plans, calculations, reports and permit documents, along with the responses to requests for additional information that decide how long a review actually runs.
My site floods in the same spot every storm. Does that mean the drainage system failed?
Not necessarily, and that distinction is worth money. There are four common causes and they do not share a repair: the system is undersized for the impervious area that exists now, the system is the right size but has lost capacity to sediment or a blocked structure, the outfall is at capacity so water leaves the site correctly and then has nowhere to go, or it is not stormwater at all but seasonal high groundwater, a leaking line or a grading change next door. We establish which one it is before anyone prices a fix.
What happens when my city requirements and the state requirements disagree?
The stricter one governs, and it is often the local one. City and county land development codes sit on top of the state program and routinely set the finished floor elevation, the treatment standard, the allowable discharge point and the drainage details that get inspected. We read the local code before the state criteria rather than after it, because the local requirement is the one more likely to move a layout.
Do I need soil borings for a stormwater design?
Usually yes, and they are not a separate scope from the civil work. Seasonal high groundwater and the infiltration behavior of the soil come out of the same investigation, and both of them size the system. A retention design that assumes the ground will accept water, on ground that will not, is the most expensive assumption available on a Florida site.
Can you help with a site that was built differently from its approved plan?
Yes, and it is a large part of what we do. An existing permitted system comes with obligations attached, and a site that was graded or piped differently from the approved drawings is both an engineering problem and a compliance one. We survey what is actually there, compare it against what was permitted, and set out what it takes to reconcile the two.
Do you provide forensic civil engineering?
Yes. We investigate erosion, drainage failure, construction defect and site performance disputes, and we provide a written engineering opinion on cause rather than a list of observations. That work runs alongside our structural and geotechnical forensic practice, which matters when a water problem and a foundation problem turn out to be the same problem.
How do I start a project with Foundation Masters?
Send the address, the survey and any plans, permits or photographs you have, along with what you are trying to achieve. We will establish the district, the reviewing agency and the governing criteria for the parcel, and tell you what the project actually requires before you spend money designing to the wrong numbers.
The Rest of What We Do
Civil engineering is one of several disciplines under the same roof here, which is the reason a water problem and a foundation problem do not have to be investigated by two different companies.
Structural Engineering Florida
Structural design, evaluation and repair engineering across the state, including the market pages for each city we cover.
Structural engineeringGeotechnical Engineering Florida
Subsurface investigation, settlement analysis and the soil work that most civil designs in this state depend on.
Geotechnical engineeringSoil Borings
The investigation itself, including the groundwater and infiltration data a stormwater design is sized from.
Soil boringsDrainage and Waterproofing Florida
Where site water has reached a structure and the problem is no longer only a civil one.
Drainage and waterproofingFoundation Repair Florida
Repair engineering and installation for structures already moving, frequently for reasons that start with water.
Foundation repairFoundation Inspection Florida
Licensed evaluation for settlement, cracking and pre purchase questions, statewide.
Foundation inspectionSeawalls and Earth Retention
Shoreline structures, bulkheads and retaining systems designed, permitted and built by our own crews.
Seawall contractorSheet Piling
Driven sheet piling for retention, cofferdams and shoreline work, installed with our own equipment.
Sheet piling contractorsDeep Foundation Systems
Pile and pier systems for sites where the ground will not carry a shallow foundation.
Deep foundation systemsAgency References
The primary sources behind the regulatory sections on this page. Worth reading directly rather than taking any summary of them on trust, this one included.
- Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Water Management Districts
- Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Environmental Resource Permitting
- Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Stormwater Program
- South Florida Water Management District, Environmental Resource Permits
- Southwest Florida Water Management District, Rules and References
- Northwest Florida Water Management District
Markets We Cover for Civil Work
The city pages carry the local detail: the district that governs there, the local code layer, and the site conditions that recur in that market.
- Civil engineering in Tampa, in the Southwest Florida district
- Civil engineering in Orlando, where the St. Johns River and South Florida districts both reach
- Civil engineering in Miami, in the South Florida district
- Civil engineering in Jacksonville, in the St. Johns River district
Talk to Our Civil Engineering Team About Your Florida Project
Tell us the address and the scope. We will establish the water management district, the reviewing agency and the criteria that govern the parcel, and tell you what the project actually requires before you spend money designing to the wrong numbers.
Foundation Masters, LLC
Civil, structural and geotechnical engineering, and deep foundation installation, throughout the State of Florida.
Phone: 813-614-1718
Service area: Statewide, with market pages for Tampa, Orlando, Miami and Jacksonville.