Accomplishing the function of countif with wildcards on numeric data - help please

Hello all, I have what I think is a fairly simple workflow that I would like to make a ton more efficient. I have to make summary tables for reports that have source data from county assessors concerning the "land use" of tax lots. I get a ton of tax lot data and want to be able to crank through it very quickly, and currently do not like my process. What I want to setup is a master spreadsheet that I can paste my source data into. This master spreadsheet would have built in formulas that would recognize the source data and spit out my summary tables with a few macros and some clever formulas. One of the formulas I am having trouble with, and know must be possible, is achieving the function of a countif with wildcards on numeric data.

The land use data I get is numerically coded, I only care about the first digit of the three digit code, for example 960, 950, and 940 are all listed as "Exempt" in my summary table because that is the level of specificity we use in our reports. Specifically all three digit numbers starting with 000 and ending with 900 are coded to a different land use, so I need to have wildcards that only sum values for numbers that start with a given number, not that contain a given number. Thusly I want to search my source data for 9** and count that way for my "Exempt" values and count them. Then I need to accomplish the function a sumif based on that "Exempt" dataset gathered by the 9** function built previously for the acreage of the tax lots. I appreciate any help that is given to me, and realize that my questions are a bit specific. I wish I had more experience in array based excel formulas because all the searching into actual useful formulas for this seems to point that direction, but sadly I do not. If anyone needs a short example of the data I am working with and the summary table I am turning it into I would be happy to provide it.