Municipal wells in Douglas County

1,698 of the 22,500 well permits in Douglas County — 7.5% — are decreed for municipal.

How this group compares

Douglas County holds 18.0% of Colorado’s 9,424 municipal permits, while holding 3.7% of the register overall — so it is over-represented in this use.

Municipal means a public water supply.

What happened to these permits

208 of the 1,698 permits decreed for municipal in Douglas County ended with a well the Division was told about — 12.2%. And 618 expired without one: 36.4%.

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 Douglas County, or need a well drilled?

1,698 well permits are on the Division’s register in Douglas County, 618 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 22,500 permits in Douglas County, and every municipal permit in Colorado.

Other groups of a similar size

• Monitoring/sampling — Douglas 2,001
• Domestic — Kit Carson 1,983
• Stock — Washington 1,958
• Irrigation — Adams 1,926
• Domestic — Delta 1,889
• Not stated — Jefferson 1,872
• Domestic — Montrose 1,672
• Stock — Lincoln 1,666
• Other — Denver 1,649
• Household Use Only — Douglas 1,632
• Other — Weld 1,623