City limits or Lee County: check first
The City of Fort Myers runs its own Community Development Department, with a building, permitting and inspections division for work inside city limits. A Fort Myers mailing address does not prove you are in the city, though. Many Fort Myers addresses sit in unincorporated Lee County, and those jobs go to Lee County Development Services and Lee DOT instead.
The quick way to settle it is the parcel record on the Lee County Property Appraiser site, or a call to the city. Getting it wrong costs time: a permit pulled at the wrong office gets bounced, and a culvert set to the wrong standard may have to come back out.
On the county side, the standards we build to are clear: a 15-inch minimum driveway culvert in county right-of-way, a fill grading plan when final grade sits more than 18 inches above the road crown or a developed neighbor, and a concrete or asphalt apron to the right-of-way line. Inside the city, we build to what the city's plan reviewers and inspectors put on your approved plans.
Teardowns and infill lots
Demolition in an established neighborhood is tight work. There are neighbors close on both sides, mature trees you may want to keep, overhead lines, and buried utilities that need marking. Florida law requires a Sunshine 811 notice at least two full business days before any excavation or demolition, and we confirm the electric, gas and water are cut and capped before the machine touches the house.
After the structure comes down, the slab and footers come out, the debris is sorted and hauled, and the holes are filled and compacted. What you should see when we leave is a clean, level lot with the old driveway gone and the swale open, ready for your surveyor to stake the new house.
Flood rebuilds along the river
Fort Myers took catastrophic damage from Hurricane Ian on September 28, 2022, and a lot of the rebuilding since has been on low lots near the river and creeks. Those lots often have to come up to meet the flood elevation on the new plans. In an A zone the building code puts the lowest floor at base flood elevation plus one foot, or the design flood elevation if that is higher.
That height comes from a stem wall filled inside or a compacted fill pad. We bring the fill, place it in lifts, compact it for the density test, and leave final grade sloping away from the house. On storm-hit lots we also take on the storm cleanup and hauling that county curbside pickup leaves to the owner, since crews will not enter private property.
