Webster County Order and Ordinance Enacting a Temporary Moratorium on Solar Energy Systems, Wind Energy Conversion Systems, Battery Energy Storage Systems, and Data Centers

single-reviewer ordinance enacted mo-webster-county-moratorium-2026

Record created 2026-08-21, last updated 2026-08-21. Snapshot built September 14, 2026. JSON

State

MO

Kind

ordinance

Status

enacted

Agency

Webster County Commission (Paul Ipock, Presiding Commissioner; Randy Owens, Southern District Commissioner per OCR, spelled 'Owehs' in the OCR text; Stanley D. Whitehurst, County Clerk, ATTEST)

Citation

Order and Ordinance of the County Commission of Webster County, Missouri, adopted June 16, 2026 (source PDF filename: '2026-03-Order-Data-Centers-Moratorium-2026-06-16.pdf', suggesting an internal Order/Ordinance No. 2026-03, not independently confirmed in the document's own text -- the signature page's adoption date is OCR-illegible ('this }j, day of tars , 2026'); June 16, 2026 is corroborated by the county's own press release and the file's date-stamped name). Cites county authority under Sec. 49.650 RSMo (or possibly 49.630 RSMo -- the order's own OCR'd text gives BOTH citations for what reads as the same grant of authority, an unresolved OCR ambiguity, not a drafting conflict we can confirm) and Sec. 192.300 RSMo (public health orders).

Effective

2026-06-16

Mandatory

True

Summary

OCR'd (PyMuPDF 300dpi render + pytesseract; the source PDF is image-only, no text layer) from Webster County's own order document, linked as 'Full text of the Order' from the county's June 16, 2026 press release. Title, per the order's own header: 'AN ORDER AND ORDINANCE ENACTING A TEMPORARY MORATORIUM ON SOLAR ENERGY SYSTEMS, WIND ENERGY CONVERSION SYSTEMS, BATTERY ENERGY STORAGE SYSTEMS, AND DATA CENTERS WITHIN WEBSTER COUNTY, MISSOURI'. Substance (Section 2, OCR artifacts preserved and flagged -- 'Dats Centers' for 'Data Centers', 'moraiorium'/'moraionum' for 'moratorium', 'mun' for 'run', 'shal]' for 'shall', 'al' for 'at', 'Mgratenum' as the section's OCR'd heading for 'Moratorium'): 'Webster County, Missouri, hereby enacts and establishes a moratorium on the construction, establishment, operation, or expansion of any Solar Energy Systems, Wind Energy Conversion Systems, Battery Energy Storage Systems, and Dats Centers, including the issuance of any permits related thereto, with said moraiorium to mun from the date of passage for a period of six (6) months from the date of adoption of this Ordinance.' A 'Data Center' is defined (Section 3(a)) as 'a building, group of buildings, or facility of 2,500 square feet or more, or with an aggregate information technology power capacity of 250 kilowatts or more, whose primary use is data processing or data storage'. The moratorium 'shall not apply to any Solar Energy System, Wind Energy Conversion System, Battery Energy Storage System, or Data Center which is currently in existence or for which the owner or developer has physically commenced on-site construction activities beyond site grading or preparation prior to the date of adoption of this Ordinance' (Section 2) -- this is the carve-out already on file in this corpus protecting the ARY/Lumon Solutions Rifle Range Road project (facility id ary-rifle-range-webster), which the county's own June 16, 2026 press release separately confirms by name ('The County is aware of the data center development currently under construction in the Rifle Range Road area... the County does not intend to use the proposed moratorium as a basis to halt that project'). The ordinance is also expressly inapplicable to regulated utilities: 'This Ordinance shall not apply to any railroad company, telecommunications or wireless company, public utility, rural electric cooperative, or municipal utility, or other electrical corporation regulated by the Public Service Commission. This Ordinance shall only apply to the unincorporated sections of Webster County.' (Section 4, OCR'd 'telecommunications' rendered 'telecommmunications'/'telecommunications company' rendered oddly -- cleaned only of the accidental accent-mark artifact on 'evaluate'/'e virtual server' elsewhere; the Section 4 text itself OCR'd cleanly). Enforcement is via injunctive relief with fee-shifting to the violator (Section 5). Legal effect: 'This Ordinance shall be in full force and effect from and after its passage and approval.' (Section 7). Webster County's own June 16, 2026 press release frames the moratorium as a response to public concern, expressly noting the county 'does not currently have countywide planning and zoning' and that the moratorium is not intended as a long-term regulatory framework. This is the first time this order's own primary text (rather than only the county's press-release description of it, already on file in collect-mo-maintenance-2026-08-20.json) has been fetched and OCR'd for this corpus.

• Order and Ordinance of County Commission of Webster County, Missouri -- Temporary Moratorium on Solar Energy Systems, Wind Energy Conversion Systems, Battery Energy Storage Systems, and Data Centers government single-reviewer

  “AN ORDER AND ORDINANCE ENACTING A TEMPORARY MORATORIUM ON SOLAR ENERGY SYSTEMS, WIND ENERGY CONVERSION SYSTEMS, BATTERY ENERGY STORAGE SYSTEMS, AND DATA CENTERS WITHIN WEBSTER COUNTY, MISSOURI”

  p.1, title block
  https://webstercountymo.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/2026-03-Order-Data-Centers-Moratorium-2026-06-16.pdf
  IMAGE-ONLY PDF (pdfplumber returned zero characters on all 6 pages -- no text layer). OCR'd via PyMuPDF (fitz) 300dpi page renders + pytesseract, raw PNG artifacts preserved locally. This title-block line OCR'd cleanly (no artifacts). Linked from Webster County's own June 16, 2026 press release ('Full text of the Order can be found HERE').

• Order and Ordinance of County Commission of Webster County, Missouri -- Temporary Moratorium on Solar Energy Systems, Wind Energy Conversion Systems, Battery Energy Storage Systems, and Data Centers government single-reviewer

  “Webster County, Missouri, hereby enacts and establishes a moratorium on the construction, establishment, operation, or expansion of any Solar Energy Systems, Wind Energy Conversion Systems, Battery Energy Storage Systems, and Dats Centers, including the issuance of any permits related thereto, with said moraiorium to mun from the date of passage for a period of six (6) months from the date of adoption of this Ordinance.”

  p.2, Section 2 ('Moratorium')
  https://webstercountymo.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/2026-03-Order-Data-Centers-Moratorium-2026-06-16.pdf
  OCR artifacts PRESERVED AND FLAGGED per standing rule: 'Dats Centers' (Data Centers), 'moraiorium' (moratorium), 'mun' (run). Every fact this quote carries (6-month moratorium duration, scope, permit-issuance freeze) is independently corroborated by the county's own plain-text press release, cited separately in this file. Confidence set to medium to reflect the OCR degradation, though the underlying facts are high-confidence via the press release.

• Order and Ordinance of County Commission of Webster County, Missouri -- Temporary Moratorium on Solar Energy Systems, Wind Energy Conversion Systems, Battery Energy Storage Systems, and Data Centers government single-reviewer

  “Data Center” shall mean a building, group of buildings, or facility of 2,500 square feet or more, or with an aggregate information technology power capacity of 250 kilowatts or more, whose primary use is data processing or data storage,

  p.3, Section 3(a), definition of 'Data Center'
  https://webstercountymo.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/2026-03-Order-Data-Centers-Moratorium-2026-06-16.pdf
  OCR'd this segment cleanly (compare to the more heavily garbled remainder of the same definition, not quoted here). Also on p.3: the moratorium's carve-out for already-under-construction facilities -- 'This moratorium shall not apply to any Solar Energy System, Wind Energy Conversion System, Battery Energy Storage System, or Data Center which is currently in existence or for which the owner or developer has physically commenced on-site construction activities beyond site grading or preparation prior to the date of adoption of this Ordinance.' -- not separately quoted as a row but consistent with the facility-level source already on file for ary-rifle-range-webster.

• Order and Ordinance of County Commission of Webster County, Missouri -- Temporary Moratorium on Solar Energy Systems, Wind Energy Conversion Systems, Battery Energy Storage Systems, and Data Centers government single-reviewer

  “This Ordinance shall not apply to any railroad company, telécommunications or wireless company, public utility, rural electric cooperative, or municipal utility, or other electrical corporation regulated by the Public Service Commission. This Ordinance shall only apply to the unincorporated sections of Webster County. ... This Ordinance shall be in full force and effect from and after its passage and approval.”

  p.4-5, Section 4 ('Applicability') and p.5 Section 7 ('Legal Effect')
  https://webstercountymo.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/2026-03-Order-Data-Centers-Moratorium-2026-06-16.pdf
  OCR'd; 'telécommunications' preserved verbatim as an OCR artifact (accent mark inserted by the OCR engine, not present in the source's actual typeface -- flagged, not corrected). Grounds the utility exclusion (spanning the p.4/p.5 page break) and the ordinance's own immediate-effect clause. '...' marks an ellipsis across the intervening Section 5 (Enforcement) and Section 6 (Severability) text, omitted here for brevity but present and legible in the source; both halves are individually contiguous verbatim OCR text.

• Order and Ordinance of County Commission of Webster County, Missouri -- Temporary Moratorium on Solar Energy Systems, Wind Energy Conversion Systems, Battery Energy Storage Systems, and Data Centers government single-reviewer

  “WHEREAS, § 49.650; RSMo., authorizes a county to adopt ordinances and resolutions relating to its property, affairs, and jocal government for which no provision has been made in the constitution or laws of Missouri regarding nuisance abatement and storm water control, excluding agricultural and horticultural property, the promotion of economic development for job creation purposes, and for emergency management when the safety and welfare of the inhabitants of the county are jeopardized; and”

  p.2, WHEREAS clauses citing county authority
  https://webstercountymo.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/2026-03-Order-Data-Centers-Moratorium-2026-06-16.pdf
  OCR ARTIFACT FLAGGED, unresolved: this recital cites '§ 49.650, RSMo.' as the county's ordinance-making authority, but a second, nearly identical recital later on the same page (p.2, WHEREAS beginning 'the County Commission of Webster County concludes...') cites '§ 49.630, RSMo.' for what appears to be the SAME statutory grant. We could not determine from the OCR'd image alone whether this is (a) an OCR digit-flip artifact (5 vs 3) on one occurrence, or (b) the county's order genuinely citing two different Missouri statutes. Both readings preserved verbatim; not resolved this tick. Also OCR'd: 'jocal government' for 'local government' (artifact preserved).

• Webster County Commission other

  “We recognize that the right to own and use private property is a fundamental constitutional right, and any action taken by this Commission must respect that right. At the same time, we take seriously the concerns of our residents regarding public health, safety, infrastructure, and emergency management.”