The CAMA pier general permit, clause by clause

Most private docks on the Outer Banks are built under a single rule, and it is short enough to read in one sitting. Section .1200 of 15A NCAC 07H is the general permit for the construction of piers and docking facilities, and it is unusual among regulations in telling you nearly everything you need in the order you need it: what it covers, how you obtain it, what it costs, and what it then lets you build. This page walks the rule in its own sequence rather than reorganising it, because the sequence is the process.

The purpose clause is 15A NCAC 07H .1201, and it does two jobs at once. It authorises new piers and docking facilities, pile supported or floating, in estuarine and public trust waters areas of environmental concern and within coastal wetlands AECs. And it draws its own boundary, declining to reach oceanfront shorelines except where a shoreline shows estuarine characteristics. Read the purpose clause first and within a paragraph you will know whether the rest of the rule is about your lot at all.

Approval runs through a procedure rather than a form. The applicant deals with the adjacent riparian owners — a signed statement of no objection, or notice served on them — and the project then waits on a field visit. That visit is the gate: no work may begin until a Division of Coastal Management representative has met on site. General permits exist precisely because this is workable at scale; they are general permits issued on-site by DCM staff for projects judged routine enough to decide in person.

The same rule that opens the window also closes it. Once authorised, construction must be completed within 120 days. This is not a permit that sits in a drawer waiting for a convenient spring. Owners who treat an authorisation as a standing right to build and return to it a season later discover they are beginning the process again, and the rule offers no credit for the fact that nothing about the project changed in between.

The fee clause states a permit fee of two hundred dollars ($200.00), payable to the Department. It is worth knowing that the department's own published fee schedule carries no pier-specific line and instead prices all other general permits considerably higher. The two documents do not reconcile and we have not chosen between them. Ask the office that will take your payment, in writing, before you file anything.

The general conditions define who the dock is for. An authorised pier is for the exclusive use of the land owner or occupant, may not be leased, rented or used commercially, and may provide docking space for no more than two boats. That is a use restriction carrying the full force of the permit, and it is the clause that most often ambushes somebody who bought soundfront with an income plan attached.

Then come the dimensions. The rule sets piers no wider than six feet, elevated at least three feet above any coastal wetland substrate measured from the bottom of the decking, and a maximum of 400 feet waterward from the normal high water line or normal water level. Shading, individual components and the length-against-depth arithmetic appear in the same section and are worked through on our page about size limits. What matters here is that they are conditions of this permit, not guidance sitting beside it.

Read .1201 to find out whether the rule is yours, .1202 for the sequence, and .1205 before anybody draws anything. Every dispute we have watched unfold on a private pier traces back to somebody who skipped one of those three.