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The Palmetto Bluff tract -- at 21,000 acres a third again as big as Chapel Hill -- was the first big annexation. The developer and town took 14 months to negotiate a legal agreement detailing what could be built on the land, how it would be built and how much the developer would pay the town for providing services.

When the agreement was signed, the developer handed over a check for $250,000, which the town used to hire its first town manager and new planners. Since then, Bluffton has reaped more than $1 million in additional fees from the project, even though Palmetto Bluff is still years away from adding a significant number of residents.

For a home built in Bluffton, town and county impact fees for needs such as roads, parks and libraries total nearly $3,200. That's not enough, say town leaders, because the state doesn't allow impact fees for schools. The county, meanwhile, doesn't think voters will support bonds to pay for all the new schools that are needed.

Sandwich shop owner Lou DiMayo, 35, moved to Bluffton a year ago. His extended family has enrolled eight children in the Beaufort County school system. On a recent day, DiMayo dropped off the younger of his two sons at Bluffton Elementary. "He's in a portable [mobile home classroom], and I don't like it, but what can you do?" DiMayo said.

The odds were better than 50 percent that he would be in a trailer: There are now 30 mobile classrooms, and 26 inside the school. Next year there will probably be 38 trailers, said the principal, Kathleen Corley.

Much of Corley's time is taken up with updating enrollment projections and calculating the right class size at the start of each year so the classes can simply grow to accommodate the growth rather than multiply, which would be more disruptive.

"You adapt," she said. "It's like you're picking up this big stack of packages -- you balance this one here, and oh, OK, that one balances there."

County voters approved $44 million in school construction bonds in May, mainly for one elementary and one middle school, both to be built in the Bluffton area. But that will only slow the increase in mobile classrooms: Bluffton needs yet another elementary school, but the county didn't include it on the bond referendum for fear the voters would turn down the whole package, said Jill Weinberger, a spokeswoman for Beaufort County Schools.

Three years ago, an elementary school opened to help alleviate crowding at two others in the Bluffton area. Those two schools are still crowded, and the new one opened with 480 students in a 580-child building. It now has classes in trailers, too.

Worker shortage

The booming labor market has made good workers scarce in the Lowcountry, attracted thousands of immigrants and spread development inland where property is more affordable. The jobs, though, stay near the water, something that creates a tide of traffic that begins before dawn each day.

In the construction trades, there have been more jobs than locals to fill them, and more companies needed than home-grown entrepreneurs can provide.

"No one is really from South Carolina, even business owners," said Andrew Gregg, 38, the owner of Southeastern Engineering Solutions, an 18-month-old electrical and heating and cooling contractor in Bluffton. "It's almost like a gold rush, where the area boomed, and then has continued to boom and people are moving here and starting their own businesses."

He and his five workers are on the roads every day.

Gregg commutes to the Bluffton area from Ridgeland, about 20 miles. He and his technicians, who commute from a community near Savannah, try to reach their job sites at 7 a.m. each day to minimize driving in traffic jams. Otherwise, 15 miles can take two hours or more if there's a problem. Then they knock off at 3 p.m. for the same reason -- and still often get caught in traffic.

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