Marco is an island, and that is not a decorative fact about the job. Every truck, every water heater and every length of pipe we bring over arrives on one of two bridges. It shapes how we schedule the island and how we load a van before we leave the shop. Marco also runs its own building department and its own water and sewer utility, so very little about a job here routes through Collier County the way it would a few miles inland.
The Jolley Bridge carries Collier Boulevard over the Marco River and has done since 1969, with a second span added alongside it in 2011. The Goodland Bridge on San Marco Road, which dates back to 1938, is the other way in. That is the entire list.
We plan island work around it. A return trip for a forgotten part is not a ten minute errand, so we stage materials and confirm scope before the van leaves, particularly on water heater swaps and repipes where the wrong fitting costs an afternoon.
The City of Marco Island Building Services Division on Bald Eagle Drive handles permits for the island and has its own plumbing permit application. Collier County does the permitting for most of the county, but not for Marco, and not for the City of Naples either.
Contractor licensing is the one piece that does run through Collier. The county licensing board covers unincorporated Collier, the City of Naples and Marco Island under a shared agreement, so the license travels even though the permit does not.
Coastal air carries chloride, and how much of it lands on a building drops off sharply with distance from the water. The international standard for rating atmospheric corrosivity puts the most aggressive category within a mile or two of the shore. On a barrier island, nearly all the housing sits inside that band.
That is a claim about metal exposed to the open air, and it is worth being straight about the difference. Salt air is hard on what it can reach. It is not the reason a copper line inside a wall fails. Anyone telling you the sea breeze is eating the pipe in your ceiling is selling something.
Marco bought its water and sewer system in 2003 and has run it as a city utility since. The south plant polishes raw water through a bank of filters and then pushes it through dual stage reverse osmosis membranes, with lime softening in the process as well.
Water that has been through that much treatment behaves differently at the fixture than well water out east. It is one reason a filtration or softener question gets a different answer on Marco than it does in Golden Gate, and why we ask where you are before recommending anything.
A large share of Marco homes stand empty for a good part of the year. A supply line that lets go in an occupied house is a bad afternoon and a wet floor. The same failure in a house nobody has opened since April is a different category of problem entirely.
A proper shutoff before you leave and a proper start up when you come back is the cheapest insurance on the island. We do both, and we work with property managers and rental owners around guest turnovers rather than against them.
Hurricane Irma came ashore at Marco Island on the afternoon of 10 September 2017 as a category three storm with 115 mile per hour sustained winds, and island police recorded a gust at 130. No other community we serve can say the eye passed directly over it.
Storm preparation is not an abstract conversation for anyone who was here for that. Ahead of a storm we check shutoffs, secure water heaters and inspect exterior gas connections, which are the components most exposed when the wind arrives.
My neighbor in Tall Oaks recommended A-1 Plumbing, I had some serious leaking issues and needed a repipe. From speaking with the owner (Jordan), his secretary Yocelyn and especially the fine work that Thomas, Caden, Walter and Ismael all performed was exemplary. They were all professional, punctual and very respectful. These gentlemen should be considered an asset to the business! I am very thankful for the work done and highly recommend this company!
Mike Walsh Jr., Tall Oaks