The Zoning Order Everyone Seems to Understand Except the People Who Enforce It

There is a tree-waste burning problem in Clinton County. This is not a metaphor. It is smoke, rising from open piles of woody debris on multiple properties zoned Agriculture District A under the Clinton County Zoning Order.

Agriculture District A is what zoning practitioners call a closed-list district. The permitted uses are enumerated on a specific list. Commercial waste disposal is not on that list. If a use is not on the list, it is not permitted. The order is not silent on this and it is not ambiguous. It is a plain-language document that a reasonably bright teenager could read and understand.

There is also an accessory-use provision. Uses accessory to a permitted use are allowed, within reason. This is where creative property owners sometimes claim their nonpermitted activity is really an accessory to something the ordinance does permit. The order anticipates the maneuver and forecloses it: activities producing offensive smoke are specifically excluded from the accessory-use provision. Burning commercial quantities of tree waste is, by any honest reading, an activity that produces offensive smoke.

There is not a great deal of room for reasonable disagreement here. The activity is a commercial waste disposal operation in a district that does not permit commercial waste disposal, defended by an accessory-use theory that the order itself explicitly forecloses. It is a call any competent zoning administrator could make in a coffee break.

Neighbors of one of the burning operations have been asking the Clinton County Commission to make that call for approximately a year. They have complained. They have documented. They have watched the smoke roll across their property lines and gone to their elected representatives with their concerns. The official response has been, as of this writing, essentially nothing.

This is where the story becomes structurally interesting.

Two of the vegetation-management contractors working under contract to Platte-Clinton Electric Cooperative are located in Clinton County. This is not an inference; it is a fact PCEC itself publishes in its own newsletter, which is where members of the cooperative can find out who their utility is paying to clear trees on their behalf. Both of these Clinton County PCEC contractors dispose of their tree waste by burning it. Both are doing so in the county's Agriculture District A. Both have been the subject of neighbor complaints. Neither has been the subject of enforcement action.

One of the two Clinton County PCEC vegetation contractors also holds a seat on the Clinton County Planning and Zoning Commission — the same board that oversees the zoning framework whose plain language is not being applied to his industry.

This is not, on the current record, a claim about anyone's motives. Motives are not necessary to make the observation. What is on the record is a simple pattern. Two contractors doing the same thing. Both operating in apparent tension with the same plain-language provision of the same zoning order. Both operating for a year or more without consequence. One of them sitting on the board that oversees the zoning framework in question. Neighbors asking, and asking, and asking.

Missouri law addresses this situation more directly than most citizens realize. RSMo §105.461 requires any member of a governing body of a political subdivision who has a substantial personal or private interest in a pending matter to file a written report of that interest with the clerk of the body before participating in the matter. The report is entered in the journal. It is a public record. It either exists on any given matter or it does not, and either answer is answerable through a Sunshine Law request under Chapter 610. These are not exotic legal questions. They are records questions with yes-or-no answers.

Missouri law also does not leave affected citizens without a direct remedy when a county declines to enforce its own zoning order. Section 20.E.2 of the Clinton County Zoning Order specifically authorizes affected private property owners to seek circuit court abatement of a continuing zoning violation. RSMo §529.010 provides the writ of mandamus, which compels a public officer to perform a mandatory ministerial duty. Both remedies are available. Both are used, when necessary, by citizens whose county government has decided that enforcement of the plain terms of its own ordinances is somehow beyond its capabilities.

The Clinton County Commission is not required to explain why enforcement of the zoning order stops at the boundary of a certain industry. It is not required to explain why complaints persisting for a year have produced no visible action. It is not required to comment on who sits on its appointed boards or what private business interests those members hold.

It is, however, required by the plain language of the zoning order to enforce the zoning order. Nothing in that order carves out an exception for the industry of any current or former board member. Nothing in it says the offensive-smoke exclusion does not apply on Tuesdays, or to preferred vendors, or to friends of the commission.

The order says what it says. Somebody with an actual job description and a paycheck signed by the taxpayers of Clinton County ought to be reading it.

The South (Clinton) County Squawker

July 15, 2026

Author: Charles Ford

Opinion