Texas County No county building code, and no authority to adopt one

Barndominium Builders in Texas County, MO

Texas County is the largest county in Missouri by land area — 1,177.267 square miles, about 173 square miles more than second-place Shannon — and it carries 407,913 acres in farms across 1,309 farms at a 312-acre average, on a resident population of 25,715. It is a third-classification county, and that one word settles the question most buyers ask first: RSMo 64.170 empowers only counties of the first and second classification to adopt a building code, and RSMo 64.205 says in a single sentence that those provisions apply to first- and second-class counties. So there is no county building code here, and the county has no legal authority to create one — that is a different and much more permanent answer than a county that could adopt a code and simply has not. What the county does have is a septic gate with real teeth. The Department of Health and Senior Services records Texas County as a Local Authority via Ordinance, so the Texas County Health Department permits on-site wastewater under the county's own ordinance rather than under the state programme, and the department's own published answer to how a system gets sized begins with a soil morphology report rather than a percolation test. Seventeen elected township boards, not a county highway department, maintain the gravel outside the city limits, and 17,460 of the county's 25,715 residents live in that unincorporated balance.

Texas County at a glance

County: Texas County
Population: 25,715
ZIP codes: 65444, 65464, 65468, 65483, 65484, 65542, 65552, 65555, 65557, 65564, 65570, 65571, 65589, 65689
Site visits: First site visits anywhere in the county's 1,177 square miles, usually within the week

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Building conditions in Texas County

Missouri sets no residential building code and no statewide way of adopting one, so the first question on any parcel is not what the code says — it is whether there is one. Only counties of the first and second classification may adopt a building code at all, and classification is set by assessed valuation rather than population, so a small county can hold the power while a much larger one does not. Zoning is a separate power with its own answer, granted only after a vote of the people and repealable by another. What changes from one jurisdiction to the next is whether the work is inspected, who issues the permit, what that office charges, how the parcel is zoned, and the design figures your drawings have to satisfy.

Build conditions for Texas County, drawn from the sourced facts on this page. Every figure above is cited in the quick-facts panel below, with its source and vintage.

This county is not allowed to have a building code

RSMo 64.170(1) empowers "the county commission in all counties of the first and second classification" to control construction, issue building permits and appoint a building commission. RSMo 64.205 states the scope again from the other side: "Sections 64.170 to 64.200 shall apply to all counties of the first and second class." Texas County is third classification on the Missouri Association of Counties list published May 2025, one of 89 class-3 counties out of 114. So the answer here is not that the county has chosen to go without a code — it is that the legislature has never given it the power to have one, and no county commission vote can change that. Only a change in the county's assessed valuation, which is what sets classification under RSMo 48.020, could. The Missouri Department of Economic Development's own county building-code dataset records a dash in the residential, commercial and energy columns for Texas County.

RSMo 64.170 (effective 28 Aug 2008) and RSMo 64.205 (effective 28 Aug 1963), rendered from revisor.mo.gov/main/OneSection.aspx 6 Sep 2026 — a deliberately bogus section on that host returns a 302 redirect rather than a statute page; Missouri Association of Counties, "Missouri Counties by Classification", published May 2025, mocounties.com/s/Missouri-Counties-by-Classification-2025.pdf, downloaded and text-extracted 6 Sep 2026; RSMo 48.020 (effective 28 Aug 2026); Missouri Department of Economic Development, "County Building Codes for Missouri", data.mo.gov dataset iq7s-izvt, FIPS 215 row queried 6 Sep 2026 (dataset last updated 11 Aug 2021)

So who actually inspects the building? Nobody does

The build is gated, but not by anyone who looks at the structure. The on-site wastewater permit is real and it is enforced. A floodplain development permit applies only inside the three cities that belong to the National Flood Insurance Program. A driveway onto a state route needs MoDOT's permission, and one onto a township road needs the township's. The electric cooperative will hold you to its service-entrance requirements. Not one of those examines your foundation, your posts, your trusses, your roof or your wiring. There is no county plan review, no framing inspection, no electrical rough-in, no final. If you want your barndominium checked against a code, you have to arrange that yourself — which is exactly what a lender or an insurer may end up asking you for.

RSMo 64.170 and 64.205 (no county building-code authority); RSMo 701.046 and 701.031 (on-site sewage, rendered 6 Sep 2026); FEMA Community Status Book Report for Missouri, fema.gov/cis/MO.html, report dated 09/06/2026 and downloaded that day; MoDOT Engineering Policy Guide Category 941 "Permits and Access Requests", epg.modot.org, fetched 6 Sep 2026 — a bogus category on that host returns a genuine 404; Texas County, Missouri, Townships page (township road and bridge responsibility), Internet Archive capture 7 Dec 2025

The septic permit here runs on a county ordinance, not the state programme

Missouri's Department of Health and Senior Services sorts every county into one of three authority types, and it records Texas County as a Local Authority via Ordinance, administered by the Texas County Health Department at 950 N. Highway 63, Suite 500, Houston, Missouri. The department's own note on that record is explicit: this county has its own on-site wastewater ordinance and may have requirements beyond the state minimum construction standards. That matters more here than almost anywhere, because RSMo 701.031's exemption for a single-family residence lot of three acres or more is an exemption from the STATE provisions — sections 701.025 to 701.059 and the rules made under them — and a county ordinance under RSMo 701.047 may still reach the same parcel and may be more restrictive than the state. The health department's own published guidance also answers the sizing question the way Ozark ground forces: the first step is a soil morphology report, and where a conventional tank and laterals will not work you are into an engineered alternative system installed by an advanced installer, or a lagoon if the setbacks can be met.

Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, OWTS Construction Permit Process, county selector set to this county, health.mo.gov/business-professionals/onsite-wastewater-treatment/owts-construction-permit-process, rendered in a browser 6 Sep 2026 — a bogus value on the same county parameter returns zero rows; Texas County Health Department, Sewage Disposal FAQ, texascountyhealth.org/sewage-disposal, fetched 6 Sep 2026 (bogus path on that host returns a genuine 404); RSMo 701.031 (effective 28 Aug 2005) and RSMo 701.047, rendered from revisor.mo.gov 6 Sep 2026

The largest county in Missouri by land area, and most of it is grass and timber

1,177.267 square miles of land — about 173 square miles more than Shannon County, which is second — and 407,913 acres of it in farms, 54.1 percent of the county. That is 1,309 farms at a 312-acre average. The use split is the tell: 185,075 acres of pastureland, 112,572 acres of woodland and only 88,012 acres of cropland, with livestock, poultry and their products accounting for 86 percent of the county's $70,406,000 in agricultural sales. It is also a county of buyable pieces rather than estates: 58 farms are 1 to 9 acres, 282 are 10 to 49 acres and 464 are 50 to 179 acres, so 804 of the 1,309 holdings — 61 percent — are under 180 acres.

U.S. Census Bureau, 2024 Gazetteer Files, counties record, ALAND_SQMI for GEOID 29215 (and 29203 for the comparison), downloaded from www2.census.gov 6 Sep 2026 — a bogus filename on that host returns "U.S. Census Bureau: Page not found"; USDA NASS, 2022 Census of Agriculture County Profile, Texas County, Missouri, cp29215.pdf, downloaded and text-extracted 6 Sep 2026 (a bogus county number on the same path returns HTTP 404)

Seventeen township boards maintain the roads, and the road's name tells you who does

Texas County operates under the township form of county government and currently has seventeen townships, each with four elected officials — a Treasurer-Trustee, a Clerk and two Board Members — and two tax levies, one administrative and one for roads and bridges. Township boards, not a county highway department, maintain the roads and bridges in the rural parts of the county, and most township roadways are gravel. The county's own explanation of its 911 naming convention is the single most useful thing a buyer can know before making an offer: a road connects to another public roadway, a drive is a public roadway that dead-ends, and lanes and trails are PRIVATE roadways with at least three residents on them — which the townships do not maintain. Outside the incorporated communities, the paved public roadways are the state's. And 17,460 of the county's 25,715 residents live in the unincorporated balance the townships serve.

Texas County, Missouri, Townships page, texascountymissouri.gov/government/townships/, read from the Internet Archive capture of 7 Dec 2025 (the live host serves a bot-detection interstitial and is therefore not cited directly; a bogus URL returns no archived snapshot); U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2024 Subcounty Population Estimates, sub-est2024.csv, "Balance of Texas County" and county total, downloaded 6 Sep 2026

Cross a city line and every one of those answers changes

The county cannot require a building permit. The City of Houston, Missouri can, and does. Its own Building Permit and Certificate of Occupancy form carries a building permit fee, a sewer connect fee, a water meter fee and a driveway or approach fee; it asks for the zoning district, front, rear and side-yard setbacks, construction cost and number of plans submitted; and it runs an agency-approvals column for zoning, plans review, street and drive, drainage, water and sewage, building final, electric final inspection, plumbing final inspection, and use and occupancy. It also expires six months from issue if work has not started. Seven municipalities hold part of the county's population — Licking at 2,969, Houston, Missouri at 2,191, Cabool at 2,059, the Texas County part of Summersville at 411, Raymondville at 372, the Texas County part of Mountain Grove at 164 and Plato at 89 — and RSMo 89.020 empowers all cities, towns and villages to zone regardless of class. Your mailing address does not tell you which side of a city line your parcel is on.

City of Houston, Missouri, "Building Permit and Certificate of Occupancy" form, houstonmo.org/wp-content/uploads/BUILDING-PERMIT.pdf, downloaded and text-extracted 6 Sep 2026 (a bogus path on that host returns a genuine 404); RSMo 89.020 as summarised in research/statewide/code-regime.md §4f from the section rendered 5 Sep 2026; U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2024 Subcounty Population Estimates, county-part records for county 215

Also worth knowing before you build in Texas County

Zoning is a separate power from a building code, and it has its own answer here: A third-classification county cannot have a building code, but it CAN have zoning: RSMo 64.510 lets the commission of any second- or third-class county provide for a county plan "after approval by vote of the people of the county", and RSMo 64.530 puts the question on the ballot as "Shall county zoning (or planning) be adopted?". Texas County's own board directory lists a Texas County Planning Commission built exactly as RSMo 64.520 prescribes — one resident from the unincorporated part of each township, plus the presiding commissioner — so county planning was approved here at some point. What the directory does NOT list is a county board of zoning adjustment, which RSMo 64.660 says any county that has appointed a planning or zoning commission and adopted a zoning plan shall appoint. The county publishes no zoning ordinance, no zoning map and no zoning administrator among its departments. Note also that whichever way this stands today, RSMo 64.695 lets voters terminate the programme on a petition of five percent of the county's last gubernatorial vote — and on termination every rule made under it becomes "void and of no effect".
The agricultural exemption is a zoning exemption, and it stops at the front door: RSMo 64.620(2) — the exemption that applies to second- and third-class counties — does not exempt farm buildings in general. It exempts "the raising of crops, livestock, orchards, or forestry" and "the erection, maintenance, repair, alteration or extension of farm buildings or farm structures used for such purposes in an area not within the area shown on the flood hazard area map." The exemption follows the USE, and living in a building is not the raising of crops. The same section, at subsection 1, lists "residence" as one of the uses a county may regulate — agriculture and residence sit on opposite sides of the line in one sentence. Two further limits travel with it. It is an exemption from ZONING only, reaching no septic permit, no floodplain permit and no city code. And inside a mapped flood hazard area it does not apply at all — which is worth knowing here, because in FEMA's Community Status Book the only communities in this county enrolled in the National Flood Insurance Program are Cabool, Houston, Missouri and Licking; the unincorporated county appears on neither the participating nor the not-participating list, while 44 Missouri counties do participate at county level. Missouri's own tax statute draws the same line as the zoning statute: RSMo 137.017 adds the value of buildings customarily associated with farming to agricultural land value "excluding residential dwellings and related land".
No authority publishes a design figure here, so the ground sets them instead: There is no adopted residential code in unincorporated Texas County, so there is no Table R301.2 for anyone to fill in — no ground snow load, no design wind speed, no frost line depth, no seismic design category and no climate zone published by any authority with jurisdiction over rural land in this county. Three published figures sit near the question and none of them binds anyone here: the Missouri Public Service Commission's 2016 frost depth map, drawn for MANUFACTURED-HOME INSTALLERS, puts everything south of Interstate 44 — which is all of this county — in a 12-inch band while printing its own note that local jurisdictions may require deeper footings; the USGS seismic design service returns Ss 0.321 g, S1 0.150 g and category D at the county seat on ASCE 7-16 at Site Class D; and EPA's Map of Radon Zones places the county in Zone 2, a predicted average indoor screening level between 2 and 4 pCi/L. What actually decides a foundation here is the rock. Missouri's Department of Natural Resources publishes a statewide sinkhole layer of 16,001 points, and 484 of them fall inside this county's boundary. Map units in which Moko is a major component cover 51,199 acres of the soil survey, and the USDA series description gives Moko's depth to bedrock as 4 to 20 inches over "level bedded dolostone, fractured in the upper part", with soil-filled cracks up to 10 inches deep. Rock outcrop is a major component of map units covering another 77,681 acres, and the county's most extensive soil, Poynor, carries 25 to 60 percent chert gravel through its profile. That geology is also why the septic answer is a soil morphology report rather than a percolation test: the state on-site sewage rule treats a fast percolation rate, a drainfield within 100 feet of a sinkhole's topographic drainage, or cherty soils over shallow bedrock as reasons to require soil evaluation or a registered geologist.
One electric cooperative, and it inspects the meter base, not the house: Intercounty Electric Cooperative Association, based at 102 Maple Avenue in Licking, serves this county — its own service-territory page names ten counties, Texas County alongside Dent, Phelps, Crawford, Gasconade, Laclede, Maries, Pulaski, Shannon and Wright, with more than 24,000 members over 30,000 meters. Its published route to a new service is a membership application, identification, the pole numbers for the location, a deposit and a service charge, with new line construction routed to its engineering department and a staking engineer assigned by area. There is no building permit in that list, no inspection of the house and no requirement to produce a 911 address. That matters because in a county with no building department there is a widespread assumption that the utility is the backstop. In Missouri it is not: cooperative documents statewide condition any meter-base inspection on a city or county requiring one, and enforce only their own service-entrance specification. Interior wiring in unincorporated Texas County is inspected by no one.
There is no instrument out here that could tell you what to clad a house in: Ask whether Texas County restricts exterior materials on a dwelling and the honest answer is that the question has nowhere to land. A material rule has to sit inside something — a building code, a zoning ordinance, a subdivision regulation or a design overlay — and in the unincorporated county there is none of those. RSMo 64.170.1 empowers only "the county commission in all counties of the first and second classification", and RSMo 64.205 states the same boundary from the other side, so there is no county building code and no lawful route to one. The county's own website says the rest. Its Government menu lists Assessor, Circuit Judge, Circuit Clerk, Collector/Treasurer, Coroner, County Clerk, Commission, Emergency Management Director, Prosecuting Attorney, Public Administrator, Recorder, Sheriff and Surveyor, with no building department, no building official, no planning and zoning office and no code enforcement among them; its "Apply For" menu runs conceal carry weapons permit, county auctioneer's licence, liquor licence, marriage licence and merchant licence, with no building permit in the list. An exemption is a carve-out from a rule, and out here there is no rule to carve. Cross a city line and an authority appears, though still not a material rule. Section 5-1 of the code of the City of Houston, Missouri makes it unlawful to "build, structurally alter or construct any building, dwelling, or permanent structure, including, but not limited to a residence, commercial building, detached garage, carport, shed, barn, outbuilding, gazebo and pergola" without a permit, which the city administrator issues on a finding that the plan complies with the city's code of ordinances — and Articles III through V of that building chapter are reserved, so there is no adopted model building code standing behind the review. What the review runs against is Chapter 25, the zoning code, which covers use zones, agricultural, residential, commercial and industrial districts, bulk regulations, accessory buildings, lot coverage, landscaping, off-street parking, grading, home occupations, signs, non-conforming structures, conditional uses and fencing across twenty-four articles — and contains no design or architectural standards article at all. Its one materials clause governs fences.

Below the slab

The expensive surprises are in the ground, not the building

What moves a Missouri budget is usually below grade, and which problem you have depends on where in the state you are. Across the Ozarks it is karst: the Department of Natural Resources maps more than sixteen thousand sinkhole points, and what matters there is what is under the slab rather than what the slab sits in. Across the north and centre it is claypan — dense, slow-draining subsoil that perches water above it for months of the year. In the Bootheel it is deep alluvium carrying the highest seismic demand in the state, where the same soils modelled for liquefaction attack post embedment and slab bearing rather than the frame above them. The same ground then decides the septic system, and Missouri does not run that on a percolation test alone: the rule allows a perc test or a soil morphology examination in a profile pit, and the authority reviewing your parcel picks which. Where a drainfield sits near a sinkhole's drainage, perc testing on its own is not permitted at all. Whether that authority is the state or your own county is itself a local question, and it changes what you have to file. So the site work, the foundation and the drainfield get resolved together rather than one at a time. We price the dirt before we price the building.

What we build in Texas County

All nine services are available in Texas County. What a build costs depends far more on the parcel than on square footage, so we price against your land rather than publishing a rate card.

Custom Plans

Barndominium floor plans drawn to your parcel and your soil, and to whichever Missouri authority — a county, a city, or none at all — will review them.

Barndominium Kits

Barndominium shell packages delivered to your Missouri land, drawn to the criteria your own county or city publishes — because the state publishes none.

Turnkey Builds

Start to finish barndominium construction in Missouri: the permits that genuinely apply, site work, shell and interior finish, under one contract.

See all nine services

What a build looks like

Three stages every Texas County project passes through, from a raw parcel to a finished home. Site work first, because that is where the budget is decided.

Stage one

The parcel

Zoning, setbacks, flood zone and utility access get checked before anything is drawn.

Stage two

Pad and permit

Clearing, grading and a compacted pad, while the submittal works through whichever office issues the permit where you are building.

Stage three

Frame to finish

Shell erected and dried in, then systems, insulation and interior finish through to CO.

Those are the rules where you are building in Texas County. Tell us what you want to build and we will draw it to them.

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Where we build around Texas County

Texas County and the rural land around it. The buildable acreage for a project this size usually sits outside the city limits, which is frequently what changes who issues your permit.

The Texas County service area, including the rural acreage outside the built-up edge, which is where the parcels big enough for a build like this usually sit. The map marks the territory we build in. It is not a branch location, and there is no office at this pin.

Keep reading

The questions that usually come next once you know what Texas County allows.

Barndominium Cost Guide

Sourced per-square-foot ranges by tier and by size, with a calculator built on the same figures.

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Is It Legal in Missouri?

Classification, zoning, the HOA gate, and why "nonresidential farm building" does not cover a home.

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How Long Does It Take?

Census build-duration data, and what actually sets the permit clock where you are building.

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Nearby areas we build in

Others we cover nearby, and they are not interchangeable. One may be a county with an adopted building code, another a county with no legal authority to have one, another a city that permits inside its own limits whichever county the land sits in. So the office that issues the permit, whether anyone inspects the work at all, the fees, the zoning and the design figures can differ from one card to the next — sometimes across a single property line.

Phelps County

Howell County

Building in Texas County: common questions

8 questions we get asked most often about building in Texas County. If yours is not on the list, ask it directly.

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Does Texas County have a building code, and could it adopt one?

It has none, and on its present classification it cannot adopt one. RSMo 64.170(1) empowers "the county commission in all counties of the first and second classification" to control construction and issue building permits, and RSMo 64.205 says those sections apply to first- and second-class counties. Texas County is third classification on the Missouri Association of Counties list published May 2025 — one of 89 class-3 counties out of 114. That is a stronger answer than "the county has decided not to": the power does not exist to be exercised. It is also not permanent. Classification is set by assessed valuation under RSMo 48.020, indexed annually to CPI-U, and under RSMo 48.030 a county's governing body may elect to move up to first classification as soon as its valuation qualifies. Even then, RSMo 64.170(2) would require a referendum before any code could be adopted, and under subsection 3 only voters in the unincorporated area would decide it.

Then who inspects my barndominium while it is being built?

For land outside a city, nobody inspects the building itself. The permits that do exist here look at other things. The on-site wastewater construction permit from the Texas County Health Department is real, it is enforced, and RSMo 701.050 requires the system to be left open for inspection before it is covered. A driveway onto a state route needs MoDOT's approval under its Engineering Policy Guide Category 941; a driveway onto a township road is the township board's business. Your electric cooperative will hold you to its service-entrance specification. Not one of those steps examines a footing, a post embedment, a truss connection, a roof or a circuit. If you want a code-compliance inspection — and your lender or your insurer may want one — you arrange and pay for it privately, because no COUNTY official here has the authority to do it. One thing worth checking rather than assuming: a fire protection district can adopt a residential code under its own statute, independently of the county, so ask your district whether one applies to your address.

My lot is more than three acres. Doesn't that exempt me from the septic permit?

It exempts you from the STATE programme, and that is not the programme running here. RSMo 701.031 excludes the owner of a single-family residence lot of three acres or more from sections 701.025 to 701.059 and the rules made under them — provided every point of the system is more than ten feet from any adjoining property line and no effluent enters adjoining property, contaminates surface water or groundwater, or creates a nuisance. But the Department of Health and Senior Services records Texas County as a Local Authority via Ordinance, meaning the Texas County Health Department permits under the county's own ordinance, and RSMo 701.047 expressly allows a county ordinance to be more restrictive than the state standard. The health department's own published guidance also warns that once a notice of violation has been issued the acreage stops mattering until a proper system is installed. Ask the health department directly about your parcel before you assume the exemption reaches it. And note what the exemption never removes: RSMo 701.031 opens by requiring the owners of all buildings where people live, work or assemble to provide for the sanitary disposal of all domestic sewage.

Is there county zoning, and could it appear or disappear later?

Zoning is a completely separate power from a building code, and a third-classification county genuinely can have it. RSMo 64.510 lets the commission of a second- or third-class county provide for a county plan after approval by a vote of the people, and RSMo 64.530 puts it on the ballot as "Shall county zoning (or planning) be adopted?". Texas County's own board directory lists a Texas County Planning Commission with one member from the unincorporated part of each township, which is exactly the composition RSMo 64.520 prescribes — so county planning was approved here. What the directory does not list is a county board of zoning adjustment, which RSMo 64.660 says a county that has adopted a zoning plan shall appoint, and the county publishes no zoning ordinance, map or administrator. Get the current position in writing from the county clerk. And whichever way it stands, it can move: under RSMo 64.695 a petition signed by voters equal to five percent of the county's last gubernatorial vote puts termination on the ballot, and if it passes, every resolution and regulation adopted under the programme becomes "void and of no effect".

The building is agricultural. Doesn't that exempt it?

Not once you live in it. RSMo 64.620(2) exempts "the raising of crops, livestock, orchards, or forestry" and the erection of "farm buildings or farm structures used for such purposes". The exemption follows the use, not the shape of the building or what a post-frame supplier calls it, and a dwelling is not the raising of crops. The same statute, one subsection earlier, names "residence" as a use a county may regulate — so agriculture and residence are separated in the same sentence. Three further limits are worth knowing. The exemption does not apply at all inside the area shown on the flood hazard area map. It is an exemption from zoning only, and reaches no septic permit, no floodplain permit and no city ordinance. And Missouri's own tax law draws the same line the other way: RSMo 137.017 adds the value of buildings customarily associated with farming to agricultural land value "excluding residential dwellings and related land". A zoning administrator is unlikely to be more generous than the assessor.

What changes if my land is inside Houston, Missouri, Licking, Cabool or Summersville?

Almost everything. RSMo 89.020 empowers all cities, towns and villages to zone, without regard to class and without a referendum, so a municipality inside this county can require what the county never can. The City of Houston, Missouri publishes a Building Permit and Certificate of Occupancy form that asks for the zoning district, front, rear and side-yard setbacks, construction cost and number of plans submitted, charges a building permit fee alongside sewer connect, water meter and driveway or approach fees, and runs an approvals column covering zoning, plans review, street and drive, drainage, water and sewage, building final, electric final inspection, plumbing final inspection, and use and occupancy — with the permit expiring six months from issue if work has not started. Seven municipalities hold part of this county's population, and each answers for itself. A rural mailing address in a 65483 or 65542 ZIP tells you nothing about which side of a city line the parcel sits on. Check the parcel, not the envelope.

If nobody publishes wind, snow, frost or seismic figures, what do I build to?

You and your designer set them, and you write them down. There is no adopted residential code in unincorporated Texas County, so there is no filled-in Table R301.2 anywhere with jurisdiction over your parcel — no ground snow load, no design wind speed, no frost line depth, no seismic design category. Three published numbers exist near this question and none of them is a requirement here. The Missouri Public Service Commission's 2016 frost depth map puts everything south of Interstate 44 in a 12-inch band, but that map was published for manufactured-home installation and prints its own note that local jurisdictions may require deeper footings. The USGS seismic design service returns Ss 0.321 g, S1 0.150 g and seismic design category D at the county seat on ASCE 7-16 at Site Class D. EPA's Map of Radon Zones puts the county in Zone 2. Treat those as a starting point for a conversation, not as compliance. Where the practical answer usually lands in this county is the ground: with Moko soils giving 4 to 20 inches to dolomite and rock outcrop mapped as a major component across 77,681 acres, footing depth here is frequently decided by where bedrock is, not by a frost table.

Who maintains the road my land is on?

Read the road's name — the county built its 911 naming around exactly this question. In Texas County's own words, a road connects to another public roadway, a drive is a public roadway that dead-ends, and lanes and trails are private roadways with at least three residents on them, which the townships do not maintain. Seventeen elected township boards, not a county highway department, maintain the rural roads and bridges, funded by a road-and-bridge levy plus a share of county funds based on township road mileage; most township roadways are gravel. Outside the incorporated communities, paved public roadways are the state's. So a new entrance onto a state route such as Route 63, 17 or 137 goes through MoDOT's electronic permitting under Engineering Policy Guide Category 941, which covers sight distance and entrance design; an entrance onto a township road goes to that township's board. If the listing says "Lane" or "Trail", assume nobody plows it, nobody grades it and the concrete truck's access is your problem to solve before you sign.

Building in Texas County?

Start with the plan. Tell us what you want to build and we will draw it, then confirm which office issues the permit for your parcel, what it will let you put there, and what wind load it has to meet. That conversation costs nothing.

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