Buying Land in Montgomery County, Missouri

Zoning: an exception to Missouri’s usual pattern

Missouri's county zoning authority under RSMo Chapter 64 is opt-in, and most rural counties have never adopted it -- but Montgomery County has. The county maintains an active Planning & Zoning Commission with a published Master Plan intended, in the county's own words, to bring about "orderly growth and development in the county in accordance with present and future needs." That means unincorporated Montgomery County land is classified into zoning districts and administered through a real planning department, not left to a general county-commission-and-health-department arrangement the way it is in a non-zoned Missouri county.

What that means in practice for a land buyer: before assuming a specific use is allowed on a parcel -- a second dwelling, a commercial operation, a large-scale agricultural building, or a solar or wind lease -- check the parcel's zoning district and whether the use is permitted outright or requires a conditional-use permit or variance. We were not able to independently verify the county's specific district names, minimum lot sizes, or setback tables from public sources during this research pass (a network restriction blocked direct access to both the county's own site and the regional planning commission's hosted zoning-resolution document), so treat any assumption about bulk standards as unconfirmed until you've called the Planning & Zoning office (211 E. Third St., Montgomery City, MO 63361; 573-564-3357) or pulled the current resolution yourself.

Incorporated cities inside the county -- Montgomery City itself, plus Bellflower, Jonesburg, High Hill, Wellsville, and New Florence -- may layer their own municipal codes on top of or instead of the county code depending on location, so a parcel near a city line should be checked against both.

Septic, wells, and floodplain

Onsite wastewater systems in unincorporated Montgomery County are permitted through the Montgomery County Health Department under a locally adopted Sewer Ordinance rather than a straight pass-through of the state's default onsite-wastewater rules -- the department reviews septic permit applications, charges a $165 permit fee, and follows up on sewage complaints. A soil evaluation typically comes before the construction permit issues; call the Health Department (573-564-2495) early in a purchase if the parcel doesn't already have a functioning system, since not every rural Montgomery County site will perc the same way.

Private wells fall under the Missouri Department of Natural Resources' statewide well-construction rules and certified-contractor program rather than a county permit process, which is the standard arrangement across Missouri regardless of a county's zoning status. Floodplain administration for the county runs through the Emergency Management Director (Michael Roesner, 211 E. Third St.; 573-564-2283), who also serves as the county's floodplain administrator -- worth a call before building near the Missouri River on the county's south side or the Loutre River, which crosses the county on its way to meeting the Missouri opposite Hermann.

Solar development: real projects, and a zoning code built to handle them

Solar is the clearest example of what having zoning changes about a county's relationship to a specific land use. Montgomery County's zoning resolution defines a "solar farm" as 20 or more contiguous acres of interconnected photovoltaic panels and requires a permit before one can be built -- a definition and process that simply doesn't exist in a Missouri county without zoning. Two real projects illustrate the range: Ameren Missouri's Community Solar Center near New Florence, where permitting began back in 2014 and roughly 30 acres and 6.5 MW are already built, with a third facility of about 7 MW approved by the Missouri Public Service Commission in October 2024 and construction expected to start in spring 2025; and Apex Clean Energy's Wolf Creek Solar project outside Montgomery City, a 100 MW facility (reported acreage ranges from about 882 to 1,920 acres depending on the source and project phase) that had construction reportedly underway on a substation near Elkhorn Creek and Vandiver roads as of late September 2025.

This isn't uncontested: a February 2021 NPR/WAMU story, "Farm Or Solar Farm? A Fight Over Land Use Roils Montgomery County," documented real tension between landowners drawn to lease income and neighbors and farmers worried about losing productive cropland and the character of the area, which is part of why the county's Planning & Zoning Commission brought in a University of Missouri Extension agronomist to help develop siting and soil-management guidance for the industry rather than simply processing permits ad hoc. See our dedicated wind and solar leasing page for this county for lease-evaluation specifics, since the zoning permit process here is a genuinely different starting point than the no-zoning counties covered elsewhere in this project.

Agriculture and the broader land-use picture

Montgomery County's farmland is squarely in Missouri's corn-and-soybean belt, and that's exactly the base the solar-siting conversation above is about -- productive row-crop and hay ground is what's being weighed against lease income from a 20-plus-acre solar array. The county's population (about 11,300 as of the 2020 census, spread across roughly 540 square miles) is concentrated enough around Montgomery City and along the U.S. 40/61 corridor that most of the county outside those pockets remains working farmland, which is the backdrop for the Planning & Zoning Commission's active interest in managing where and how solar gets sited rather than leaving it unaddressed.