What the holding actually covers, and what it does not

Read narrowly, the decision does two separate things, and they have different reach.

1. The flat ban falls, everywhere, regardless of vintage. A covenant term prohibiting rooftop solar on an owner-controlled roof is unenforceable in Missouri from 1 January 2023 forward. The recording date of the declaration is now irrelevant to that question.
2. The placement rule fell on this record. Subsection (2) still lets an association write placement rules. What the court held is that a rule shown on evidence to cut output 24 percent and add roughly $17,000 in cost is outside the allowance, on an unrebutted showing. That is an evidentiary holding, not an announcement that all placement rules are void.

The limit that matters most for condominiums is in the statute itself, not the opinion. Subsection (3) confines the whole thing to rooftops “owned, controlled, and maintained by the owner of the individual property or structure.” A typical condominium roof is a common element maintained by the association, so this decision does not speak to it. Single-family subdivisions, villa and townhome projects where the owner holds the roof, and detached-unit planned communities are where it lands hardest.

The reasoning is not about solar

This is the part worth circulating to a board. The argument the court rejected — our covenant predates the statute, so the statute cannot reach it — is not a solar argument. It is the argument Missouri associations have been making about every statutory override of a recorded restriction. After Eikmeier, the Supreme Court of Missouri has answered it at the level of principle: a private contract does not outrank a later legislative declaration of public policy, and making a class of covenant term unenforceable from a date forward is prospective, not retroactive.

Section 442.404 contains other overrides built the same way — political signs, for-sale signs, and the chickens provision. The structural argument that any of them cannot reach an old covenant just got substantially harder to run.

What a Missouri board is already on notice of

1. Stop enforcing a flat rooftop-solar prohibition. If the declaration still carries one and the architectural committee is still denying applications on that basis, the denials rest on a term the state's highest court has said cannot be enforced. Minutes recording such a denial are a record of it.
2. Re-read any placement rule against the four listed effects. The statute bars a rule that prevents installation, impairs functioning, restricts use, or adversely affects cost or efficiency. A blanket “rear-facing only” rule is the one most exposed, because on many lots it is the one most likely to be measurable in kilowatt-hours.
3. Understand who carries the evidence. Granite Springs lost the placement point because the homeowners produced production and cost numbers and the association produced nothing. Footnote 6 records that the association had told the homeowners its rule allowed panels in locations “all of which offer similar cost and functionality,” and the court noted flatly: “This conclusion was not borne out by the evidence.” An association that intends to defend a placement rule needs its own engineering, not an assertion.
4. Fix the application process, not just the answer. The enforceable space left to a Missouri association is narrow and technical. A review process that asks for a production estimate and evaluates the rule's effect on it is inside that space. One that asks whether panels are visible from the street is not.
5. Do not cite the Court of Appeals decision in this case. The opinion records its own posture: “After an opinion by the court of appeals, this Court granted transfer.” That earlier Southern District opinion, No. SD38515 (13 May 2025), was superseded and has no precedential effect. Any memo or vendor summary still citing it is citing a vacated opinion.

The tension in the Missouri record

There is a fact here that belongs on the table, and we are going to state it as a fact rather than resolve it. Three months before Eikmeier issued, a Cole County circuit judge invalidated House Bill 2062 — the 2024 act that put the chickens provision into section 442.404 — on several grounds including impairment of a property owners association's restrictive covenant. Then the Supreme Court of Missouri, on the impairment question, held that a statute making a class of covenant term unenforceable is not an unconstitutional impairment, and said a private contract cannot override a later legislative policy judgment.

A trial-court judgment and a Supreme Court opinion are not equals in the Missouri hierarchy, and the two cases turned on different statutory subsections and different procedural attacks. But the reasoning pulls in opposite directions on the same question, and the record now contains both. We are not going to predict how that resolves.

What to watch next

Whether a motion for rehearing was filed in Eikmeier, and whether the mandate has issued, are docket events we have not confirmed. What is already fixed is the published rule: the Revisor of Statutes now prints one case annotation under section 442.404, and it is this one — “(2026) The prohibition of covenants, deed restrictions, or similar binding agreements running with the land that limit or prohibit the installation of solar panels encompasses covenants existing prior to the effective date of this statute.”²