Waynesville, MO Soliciting & Door-to-Door: No-Knock Registry (2026)

Section 210.100, adopted by Ordinance No. 205, does not require residents to post a sign or register on a do-not-knock list before the rule applies; the ordinance itself declares uninvited residential solicitation a nuisance citywide. It reaches anyone "going in and upon private residences" for the purpose of soliciting orders for goods, wares, and merchandise, or disposing of or peddling or hawking merchandise, or begging, when the resident has not requested or invited the visit. The list of covered actors is broad by design: solicitors, beggars, peddlers, hawkers, itinerant merchants, and transient vendors of merchandise are named specifically, so the rule reaches everything from unsolicited sales pitches to panhandling at the front door.

Because the section frames the conduct itself as "a nuisance," Waynesville does not need a separate civil abatement process for this offense; the same sentence that declares the nuisance also makes it "punishable as such nuisance as a misdemeanor," folding enforcement directly into the criminal code rather than into the nuisance-abatement machinery used elsewhere in Chapter 210 for junk and weeds. The ordinance places the duty to police the rule squarely on the Waynesville Police Department: the Chief of Police and his subordinates are charged with suppressing and abating any such nuisances as they occur, meaning officers can act on a resident's complaint about an uninvited peddler or beggar at the door without a separate permit-revocation step.

The rule predates the city's current organizational structure, having been carried forward since Ordinance No. 205, and it has not been amended with a licensing or registry requirement in the current code.