If you’ve ever had a construction project stall because an inspection didn’t show up or a permit was missing, you know how expensive “paperwork delays” can feel. At Thomas Excavation, we’ve been in enough counties and township offices to say this with confidence: permits aren’t bureaucratic busywork; they are the schedule. The sooner you treat them that way, the fewer surprises you’ll have on the jobsite.

Here’s the simple way to think about it: every repair, septic install, new driveway, or major site change that disturbs dirt touches somebody’s review process. That might be a county sanitarian for septic work, a township or road authority for driveway culverts and entrances, or state-level sediment-and-erosion reviewers when large areas are disturbed. Those reviewers have checklists, calendars, and limited inspection windows. When we deliver a clean, complete package up front, projects move. When permit packets are half-finished, they go back and forth, and the calendar slides.

We start the project by mapping the permit players and likely paths. Who signs off on the drain field? Who needs soil borings or percolation data? Which road authority wants a driveway profile? Calling those agencies early avoids the usual “we didn’t know” surprises. And we don’t rely on guesswork: our site visits collect the photos, measurements, and test samples that make permit packages complete the first time.

Why completeness matters: inspectors are bandwidth-limited. A soil test with a missing lab result, an incomplete drawing, or an inaccurate legal description can turn a two-week county review into a month. We’ve built our process around reducing that back-and-forth. We prepare the required documentation, coordinate soil testing and borings, and handle submittals so your file lands in the reviewer’s queue ready to be checked, not returned for corrections.

Coordination is another big piece of the puzzle. We work with utility locators and call-before-you-dig services to clear underground lines before any machine pulls up dirt. We schedule MISS DIG clearances, coordinate with local water or sewer authorities if tie-ins are needed, and keep a tight chain of custody on soils and test reports so nothing disappears between the field and the county office. That coordination keeps work moving and crews productive.

Permits also shape the rhythm of the fieldwork. Some inspections must occur at specific stages: before backfill, at final grading, or when erosion controls are in place. We plan site sequences around those milestones so work isn’t waiting for paperwork, and we log inspections and approvals in our project records so there’s an audit trail if questions arise later.

Finally, planning for permits protects your budget. Emergency repairs, weekend mobilizations to catch missed inspections, or redoing work after regulator pushback are costly. When you build permit timing into the project timeline from day one, you keep crews scheduled, materials arriving on time, and contingency costs down.

If you’re starting a build, an excavation, or a septic project, let’s walk the permit map together. We’ll show you who needs to sign, what evidence they’ll want to see, and how we stack the schedule so permits help the project run, not stop it.