Buying Land in Appanoose County, Iowa

Zoning: a Zoning Commission and administrator, with a distinct Rathbun Lake district

Appanoose County's Zoning Ordinance -- most recently revised in June 2020, with an earlier 2018 revision -- is administered by a seven-member Zoning Commission appointed by the Board of Supervisors, with Beth Burgin serving as Zoning Administrator. District boundaries generally follow road, property, and section lines rather than a separate overlay system, with one significant exception: the ordinance carves out a specific zoning district for the land surrounding Rathbun Lake that isn't owned by the federal government. Rathbun Lake, built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1969 by damming the Chariton River, is Iowa's largest lake at roughly 11,000-plus surface acres, sitting mostly within the county about seven miles north of Centerville. A parcel touching the reservoir or its shoreline sits inside both the county's general zoning framework and this Rathbun-specific district, so confirm both sets of requirements -- and separately check whether shoreline construction needs a state floodplain/sovereign-lands permit or Corps approval, since the lake's water level and adjacent federal land are managed by the Corps, not the county.

Septic and wells run through a regional agency, not a county office

Appanoose County's environmental health services -- private sewage disposal and private well permitting -- are provided by ADLM Environmental Public Health, a joint agency serving Appanoose, Davis, Lucas, and Monroe Counties out of an office in Moravia, under Director Dianna Daly-Husted. The county's own Ordinance No. 43 sets the local private-sewage-disposal-system requirements ADLM administers. ADLM also maintains a certified-contractor list and offers free or low-cost well water testing kits to private well owners. Expect septic and well paperwork to route through the Moravia office rather than the Centerville courthouse.

Coal country: a real mining legacy worth checking for a specific parcel

Centerville and the surrounding area were the center of extensive underground coal mining from roughly 1850 to 1971, primarily longwall mining of the Mystic Coal Member of the Labette Shale. A 1986 Iowa Geological Survey study found that despite the scale of undermining, the Centerville area has had relatively few reported subsidence problems compared with some other Iowa mining districts -- but "relatively few" isn't zero, and Iowa's Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship Mines and Minerals Bureau still runs a statewide Abandoned Mine Land reclamation program and an emergency response program for mining-related subsidence, concentrated in southeast Iowa counties like Appanoose (the state has more than 300 documented Abandoned Mine Land sites covering upwards of 13,000 acres).

For a parcel anywhere near historic Centerville-area mining, this is a genuine, if often overlooked, due-diligence item: ask the county assessor's office and IDALS's Mines and Minerals Bureau whether the parcel falls within a mapped underground mine area or Abandoned Mine Land site, particularly before building a structure or digging a foundation, well, or pond on land with a documented mining history.