Zoning in Baldwin County, Alabama: How the District System Actually Works

The current scale: roughly 30% zoned, 24 of 37 districts

As of recent reporting, unincorporated Baldwin County is divided into 37 numbered Planning Districts, and 24 of them have voted themselves under county zoning -- leaving 13 districts unzoned. That works out to roughly 30% of unincorporated Baldwin County actually being zoned at any given time, a figure that can shift as new districts petition and vote. Districts reported as zoned in recent coverage include Districts 10, 14, 15, 20, 22, 23, 29, and 33, though that's a partial list drawn from search-indexed reporting rather than a complete, current roster -- the Baldwin County Planning & Zoning Department is the only source for a full, up-to-date district-by-district table, and that table changes whenever a new district vote happens.

The practical upshot for a land buyer: don't assume either answer. A parcel a few miles from a zoned district can sit in a completely unzoned one, and vice versa. Get the specific Planning District number for your parcel from the county, then ask specifically whether that numbered district is one of the 24 (or whatever the current count is) that has actually voted itself under zoning.

How a district actually gets zoned: the petition-and-referendum process

Zoning doesn't arrive in a Baldwin County Planning District by county-commission decree -- it's a resident-initiated process created by the same 1991 local act (Act 91-719) that set up the district system. Based on the county's own legislative text and code citations, the process runs roughly as follows: a resident or group first files a written Notice of Intent with the County Commission, describing the proposed Planning District's boundaries. Once the Commission accepts that notice, the group can begin collecting signatures -- Alabama law sets that threshold at 10% of the registered voters within the proposed district's boundaries. Petitioners then have 120 days to gather the required signatures and file the completed petition; the County Commission and the Probate Judge then have 45 days to verify the petition's accuracy and certify it. If the signature count comes up short, the petitioners get an additional 60 days to make up the difference before a final certification decision. Once a petition is certified, the Commission directs the Probate Judge to schedule an actual election within the district, to be held within 90 days of certification -- and the district only becomes zoned if a majority of the district's voters, in that election, vote yes.

This is a real, working civic mechanism, not a formality -- it means a currently-unzoned Baldwin County Planning District can become zoned within a matter of months if enough residents organize, and it puts real agency in the hands of a specific district's electors rather than the county government. It also means the reverse is true: a district that wants to stay unzoned doesn't have to do anything at all, since zoning never arrives without an affirmative vote.

Stockton's 2026 fight against a 4,500-acre solar project: what the tool can and can't do

The clearest illustration of how this system plays out in practice is a live, recent case: in early 2026, residents of the Stockton community in north Baldwin County (Planning District 3) began organizing against a proposed utility-scale solar project from Silicon Ranch, a Nashville-based renewable energy developer, who had lined up rights to a roughly 4,500-acre parcel with plans to place solar panels across about 2,000 of those acres -- land that, at the time, carried no zoning at all. Facing a signature threshold of 124 registered voters, the Stockton petition drive gathered more than 170 signatures, comfortably clearing the bar, and the Baldwin County Commission certified a special referendum to establish zoning in Planning District 3. Voters went to the polls, and results were reported as a yes vote for zoning -- meaning District 3 shifted from unzoned to zoned territory within the space of a few months in 2026, following exactly the notice-petition-referendum sequence described above.

But the case also shows the real limit of this tool: reporting on the outcome indicated that Silicon Ranch had already submitted the permit applications needed to proceed before the relevant deadline, meaning the company had met the county's requirements to move forward under the prior, unzoned status even after the district voted itself zoned. County zoning officials indicated the project could still begin once the Alabama Department of Environmental Management and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers -- both of which have independent jurisdiction over land-disturbing and wetland-adjacent work near Baldwin County's estuary and river-delta terrain -- sign off. In other words, winning a zoning referendum changes the rules going forward for a district, but it is not automatically retroactive against a project whose paperwork was already filed; a yes vote does trigger an automatic 180-day moratorium on new development in the newly zoned district, which is real leverage, but it did not by itself stop the specific project that prompted the vote.

For anyone evaluating land in a currently-unzoned Baldwin County Planning District -- whether because you want to prevent an unwanted large-scale project nearby, or because you're the one hoping to develop something there -- the Stockton case is the concrete example to understand: the petition-and-referendum process is real, achievable within months, and can shift a whole district's regulatory status, but its practical bite depends heavily on timing relative to any project's own permitting sequence, and on separate state (ADEM) and federal (Army Corps) approvals that operate independently of county zoning entirely.

One rule that already applies everywhere: no utility-scale wind, zoned or not

Separately from the district-by-district zoning question, Baldwin County's zoning ordinance (as amended May 20, 2025) contains a flat, countywide prohibition: wind energy conversion systems with a generating capacity of 50 kilowatts or greater are not permitted in any zoning district in Baldwin County, full stop. That's a meaningfully different posture than the county's approach to solar (which, as the Stockton case shows, runs through the district zoning-or-not question rather than an outright ban) or than neighboring Cherokee and DeKalb Counties, which regulate utility-scale wind turbines through their own specific setback and noise standards rather than banning them outright. If you're a Baldwin County landowner approached about a utility-scale wind lease, the countywide ban is the first and most important fact to know -- it applies regardless of which Planning District your land sits in or whether that district has ever voted itself under zoning.