Monitoring/sampling wells in Adams County

9,123 of the 26,561 well permits in Adams County — 34.3% — are decreed for monitoring/sampling.

How this group compares

Adams County holds 10.0% of Colorado’s 91,022 monitoring/sampling permits, while holding 4.4% of the register overall — so it is over-represented in this use.

Monitoring/sampling means not a water supply at all — a hole drilled to watch the groundwater. These sit on the same register and are not wells anyone drinks from.

What happened to these permits

4,369 of the 9,123 permits decreed for monitoring/sampling in Adams County ended with a well the Division was told about — 47.9%. And 2,009 expired without one: 22.0%.

An expired permit is the trap in a rural sale. A seller can produce a permit that lapsed years ago, and a permit is not a water right — the two are separate, and a purchase turns on both. What an expired permit does and does not mean.

Buying land in Adams County, or need a well drilled?

9,123 well permits are on the Division’s register in Adams County, 2,009 of them expired. This site tells you what a permit says; it does not drill, and it is not advice on a water right. Tell us where and we pass the request to drillers and water-rights advisers working in Colorado.

We take no commission and we recommend no driller. We have no arrangement with any firm today — we are collecting these requests in order to go and find them. What we do with this.

The permits

Part of a bigger picture: all 26,561 permits in Adams County, and every monitoring/sampling permit in Colorado.

Other groups of a similar size

• Household Use Only — Jefferson 13,857
• Domestic — Douglas 13,804
• Monitoring/sampling — Weld 10,978
• Domestic — Elbert 10,857
• Domestic — La Plata 10,644
• Domestic — Adams 9,364
• Domestic — Boulder 8,225
• Monitoring/sampling — Jefferson 8,093
• Domestic — Larimer 7,975
• Household Use Only — Teller 7,077
• Domestic — Arapahoe 6,656