CIVIL PLANS,
REVIEWED & SEALED.
Grading, drainage, stormwater and site utilities — the most jurisdiction-specific discipline in the set, reviewed by a civil PE against the standards of the AHJ that will actually approve it.
Civil review and sealing means a professional engineer licensed in the project jurisdiction checks your grading, drainage, stormwater management and site utility design against the local jurisdiction's standards — the city, county or district criteria that govern civil work far more than any national code. Packages that meet those standards are signed and sealed by the responsible PE; others return with written corrections tied to the specific local criteria.
What a civil review actually covers
Civil engineering is local law wearing a hard hat. The reviewer works from the authority having jurisdiction's own standards outward: grading and earthwork limits, pavement and access (including fire apparatus access and ADA routes), wet and dry utility layouts, and above all drainage — the hydrology and hydraulics that decide whether the site floods, whether the downstream neighbor floods, and whether the stormwater facility the jurisdiction required is the one actually drawn.
Stormwater is where civil packages live or die, and it is entirely jurisdictional: detention versus retention, water-quality treatment volumes, LID/green-infrastructure mandates, floodplain and floodway constraints, and the local drainage manual's specific methods (rational method limits, approved hydrograph models, IDF curves). The reviewer checks your hydrology against the AHJ's adopted method, your stormwater report against your drawings, and your drawings against the survey — because a civil set whose contours, easements and right-of-way lines disagree with the plat is a set that comes back.
On the checklist
- Grading, earthwork and ADA/access routes
- Hydrology method vs. the AHJ's adopted standard
- Stormwater detention/retention and water-quality sizing
- Storm drain hydraulics and outfall conditions
- Site water, sewer and utility layouts and separations
- Floodplain, floodway and finished-floor elevations
- Erosion and sediment control (SWPPP support documents)
- Survey, easement and right-of-way consistency
Who sends us civil plans
Land developers and site-work contractors moving into a new county, civil firms at capacity whose sealing engineer is the bottleneck, and out-of-state designers whose national prototype meets a local drainage manual for the first time. Civil work punishes distance: the standards are published, but the review culture — what a given county engineer will and won't accept — is local knowledge, and the correction list we write reflects the criteria your AHJ will actually apply.
The sealing civil PE takes responsibility for the design under their license in that state. Expect the drainage math to be recomputed, the stormwater report to be read against the drawings line by line, and the floodplain questions to be asked before the county asks them.
Corrections we see most
Hydrology run with a neighboring county's rainfall data or an unapproved method. Detention sized for the wrong storm event set. Finished-floor elevations that ignore the floodplain on the survey. Utility separations that meet state minimums but not the city's standard details. Stormwater reports describing a facility the plans don't show. Local criteria problems, every one — which is why local criteria are what the review is built on.
Cost & timeline
Civil review is scoped per project because civil scope is never generic: acreage and impervious area, stormwater facility count, floodplain involvement, off-site improvements and the AHJ's submittal checklist all move the effort. The quote is written, itemized by the review actually required, and returned before the review is scheduled.
Every engagement is quoted in writing with its own timeline before work starts — an estimate built from your package's actual scope, stated per engagement rather than promised by slogan. A complete, review-ready set moves first; incomplete sets get a completeness note, so nobody pays to review half a package.