Municipal wells in El Paso County

1,003 of the 46,491 well permits in El Paso County — 2.2% — are decreed for municipal.

How this group compares

El Paso County holds 10.6% of Colorado’s 9,424 municipal permits, while holding 7.7% of the register overall — so it is over-represented in this use.

Municipal means a public water supply.

What happened to these permits

242 of the 1,003 permits decreed for municipal in El Paso County ended with a well the Division was told about — 24.1%. And 219 expired without one: 21.8%.

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?

1,003 well permits are on the Division’s register in El Paso County, 219 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 municipal permit in Colorado.

Other groups of a similar size

• Irrigation — El Paso 1,164
• Other — El Paso 1,162
• Commercial — La Plata 1,103
• Monitoring/sampling — Morgan 1,103
• Household Use Only — Alamosa 1,102
• Irrigation — Washington 1,098
• Stock — Morgan 1,075
• Monitoring/sampling — Routt 1,068
• Household Use Only — Pitkin 1,064
• Domestic — Montezuma 1,031
• Commercial — Adams 1,007