Monitoring/sampling wells in El Paso County

5,469 of the 46,491 well permits in El Paso County — 11.8% — are decreed for monitoring/sampling.

How this group compares

El Paso County holds 6.0% of Colorado’s 91,022 monitoring/sampling permits, while holding 7.7% of the register overall — so it is under-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

2,310 of the 5,469 permits decreed for monitoring/sampling in El Paso County ended with a well the Division was told about — 42.2%. And 1,574 expired without one: 28.8%.

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 El Paso County, or need a well drilled?

5,469 well permits are on the Division’s register in El Paso County, 1,574 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 46,491 permits in El Paso County, and every monitoring/sampling permit in Colorado.

Other groups of a similar size

• Domestic — Park 6,433
• Household Use Only — Grand 6,408
• Household Use Only — Larimer 6,200
• Domestic — Pueblo 5,760
• Domestic — Chaffee 5,602
• Household Use Only — Boulder 5,582
• Domestic — Garfield 5,381
• Domestic — Fremont 5,023
• Monitoring/sampling — Arapahoe 4,924
• Irrigation — Yuma 4,622
• Household Use Only — Summit 4,534