Buying Land in Greene County, Iowa

Zoning, subdivision, and floodplain: one office out of the Auditor's building

Greene County's zoning, subdivision, and floodplain functions are administered together out of the Auditor's Office at 114 N. Chestnut St. in Jefferson, rather than a freestanding planning department. The county's Code of Ordinances is organized to include a Zoning Ordinance, a Subdivision Ordinance, and a Floodplain Management Ordinance covering the unincorporated county, and the same office maintains the county's floodplain maps used both to rate flood-prone property and to guide zoning decisions. We could not independently confirm exact chapter numbers for each ordinance from search-indexed sources during this research pass -- some search results conflated Greene County, Iowa with an unrelated Greene County, Virginia code -- so confirm current chapter and section numbers, and the zoning district and any floodplain overlay for a specific parcel, directly with the office before assuming a use is permitted outright.

That combined structure is also how the county's 2022-2023 solar zoning amendment happened: rather than routing through a separate planning commission process, the Board of Supervisors and the same zoning office rewrote the ordinance's utility-scale solar provisions directly, then applied them through the Board of Adjustment's conditional-use-permit process.

Wells and septic: flat fees, plus real testing and rehab assistance

Well construction permits run $125 and septic system permits run $150, both issued by the same combined zoning/environmental health office, currently headed by sanitarian Chuck Wenthold. Beyond permitting, the office administers state Grants-to-Counties funds that provide free private well water testing, well-plugging assistance up to $500, and well-rehabilitation assistance up to $1,000 -- worthwhile programs to ask about if you're buying land with an existing private well of unknown condition. As in every Iowa county, a private sewage disposal system must be inspected before a covered property sale closes, under the state's 2009 Time of Transfer law.

Solar energy: a moratorium, a rewritten ordinance, and a still-unsettled project

Greene County's defining recent land-use story is solar. In 2021, National Grid Renewables proposed a large utility-scale solar farm south of Grand Junction; residents packed public hearings with concerns, and in March 2022 the Board of Supervisors adopted a temporary moratorium on new utility-scale solar permits so the county could rewrite its zoning ordinance to add procedures specific to large solar projects. That process concluded with the Board of Adjustment granting a conditional use permit in July 2023 for what became Grand Junction Solar: an up to 100 MW array covering roughly 950 acres, tying into the Karma substation south of Grand Junction, with an estimated $123,000 a year in replacement tax revenue to local taxing bodies and up to $20,000 a year pledged to a community charitable fund. The Iowa Utilities Board issued its own authorization in Docket No. GCU-2022-0001; the project originally included a 50 MW battery energy storage component that later reporting indicates was dropped during permitting, and Alliant Energy has since purchased the project from National Grid Renewables.

That approval hasn't translated into a confirmed build date: as of the most recent local reporting found in this research pass (April 2024), county supervisors were told the project still had no firm construction timeline. If you're evaluating land near the Grand Junction project area, or considering a lease offer from a solar or battery-storage developer elsewhere in the county, see our dedicated wind-and-solar-leasing page for what the moratorium-to-permit history means for your due diligence, and confirm current project status directly with the county rather than treating any timeline reported here as final.

The Raccoon River: real flood history, worth checking for river-adjacent parcels

Greene County sits along the Raccoon River watershed, which produced a documented, severe flood event in July 1993 -- record peak discharges across Carroll, Dallas, Greene, Guthrie, and Polk counties, per USGS's own flood report from that year. We did not find a more recent Greene County-specific flood disaster declaration in this research pass, so this is presented as real historical background rather than a live, ongoing risk; if you're evaluating a parcel with Raccoon River frontage or floodplain proximity, confirm its specific flood-zone status and any floodplain permit requirement directly with the county's combined zoning office before assuming river frontage is purely an amenity.