Sheet 06
Permits
Who issues yours
Roofing permits in St. Charles County
We are not going to print a rule we could not read. Here is why the answers online disagree with each other, and who can actually settle it for your address.
Stated plainly
The county's own web page for roofing permit requirements, at sccmo.org/1992, returns a not found error. It was checked and it is dead. Several roofing company blogs confidently paraphrase a St. Charles County reroof rule and they do not agree with one another. We are not adding a fourth version to the pile.
The first question is not what the rule is, it is who your jurisdiction is
Most of the confusion online comes from collapsing two different things into one phrase. St. Charles County government issues building permits for unincorporated county land. If your house sits inside the limits of a municipality, that municipality issues your permit and sets your requirements, not the county.
The county holds eight municipalities with roofing contractors registered in them alone, and there are more besides. St. Charles, St. Peters, O'Fallon, Wentzville, Lake Saint Louis, Cottleville, Dardenne Prairie and Weldon Spring all run their own code enforcement. A rule that is true in one of them can be untrue two miles away, and both statements can be found online described as the St. Charles County rule.
Who to ask
For unincorporated county land, the relevant office is the St. Charles County Department of Community Development, which houses the county's building and code enforcement function. For an address inside a municipality, the relevant office is that municipality's building or code enforcement department.
We deliberately do not print a phone number for either. This page is an advertisement, and the only phone number that belongs on it is the advertiser's. Putting a second local number on a page like this is how a homeowner ends up calling the wrong party, and how an advertiser quietly harvests calls it did not earn. Look the number up at sccmo.org, or on your own municipality's site, and take the answer from them rather than from us.
What a contractor should be doing about this anyway
You should not be the one finding this out. A roofing contractor working in a jurisdiction knows which office covers it, pulls the permit where one is required, and includes the cost in the proposal rather than adding it later. If a written scope does not mention permitting at all, that is a question to ask before signing, not a detail to sort out afterwards.
Ask it in this form: which authority issues the permit for my address, are you pulling it, and is the fee inside this price? Three facts, one sentence, and the answer tells you whether the company has worked in your municipality before.
For comparison, the rule across the river
St. Louis County, a different jurisdiction with a different code administration, does not require a permit for a like for like asphalt shingle replacement on a slope of 4:12 or steeper. A permit is required below that pitch, if more than a quarter of the decking is being replaced, or if the material is changing. Ballwin and Kirkwood, both inside St. Louis County, run their own contractor licensing on top of that.
That is included here purely to show how specific these rules get, and it is emphatically not transferable. St. Charles County is a separate jurisdiction and nothing in the paragraph above applies to an address in it.
What is universal, permit or not
- Decking that is soft, delaminated or rotten gets replaced. No permit regime anywhere makes it acceptable to nail new shingles to a deck that will not hold a nail.
- Ventilation is part of the roof. Intake at the eave and exhaust at the ridge have to balance. A new roof over a starved attic shortens the life of the new roof.
- Ice and water membrane at the eaves and in the valleys. This region freezes and thaws repeatedly through a winter, which is the exact condition that puts water backwards up a slope.
- Drip edge at eaves and rakes. It is cheap, it is often the line item that is quietly missing from the lower quote, and without it the fascia takes the water.
Plate 1
A Keys job in the greater St. Louis area. This is a hip, not a valley, whatever the original file name of the photograph said: the two planes rise to a corner and the corner is capped with ridge cap shingles, with the dark strip of a ridge vent running along the ridge beyond. Below is a mown lawn, a chain link fence and some cushioned outdoor furniture at the left. Ventilation of this kind is one of the things a permit inspection would look at where a permit is required.Next sheet
Missouri has no state roofing licenceThree bills, three failures, and the checks that replace a licence.