The Water Under the Palmer Divide: The Dawson, Denver and Arapahoe Aquifers in 2026

The water in the Arapahoe aquifer beneath Monument fell as rain around the end of the last ice age. The U.S. Geological Survey dated it: a median of about 24,000 years, against 2,000 years for the shallower Dawson and more than 30,000 for the Denver below it. Those three stacked sandstone layers remain a primary, backup or drought supply for most Tri-Lakes water systems, and very little refills them. In March 2025 the county’s own consultant reported that the aquifers are in better condition than the paperwork suggests, and in October the commissioners were told no rule needed changing. The same report names six wells where the Dawson has been drawn down into the aquifer itself — by a fifth to two-fifths where it is worst — and a further group in the Arapahoe whose levels have been sliding for two decades. All twelve turn out to be wells that supply drinking water here, and three of the Arapahoe wells have not been measured since 2006 or 2013. The one district that does measure its own wells hourly says its records agree the levels are falling — and its adopted plan states that regional pumping “greatly exceeds aquifer recharge.” Then came a winter with almost no snow.

Editor’s note. This article runs to about 9,600 words before the source list and the methodology at the end — call it forty minutes. We know that is a great deal to ask of anyone, and that most readers will take it in pieces, or take only the parts they came for.

It is long deliberately. The question underneath it is whether the aquifers beneath the Tri-Lakes are in the condition the county concluded they were in last October, and answering it meant setting the county’s own documents against each other, matching anonymous permit numbers to the districts that actually own the wells, and establishing when each of those wells was last measured. Compressed, all of that becomes a set of assertions a reader has to take on trust. At this length it is a record that can be checked.

The headings are there to be skipped between. Anyone who wants the short answer can go straight to “What the Record Actually Shows”, and everything the piece rests on is listed at the end. Our thanks for indulging a small newsroom that decided this one was worth the room.

What Is Down There

The Denver Basin is a bowl of sedimentary rock roughly 6,700 square miles across, reaching from Greeley in the north to Colorado Springs in the south and from the hogback east to Limon. The Tri-Lakes sits near its southwestern margin. The county’s consultant notes that along the western edge the aquifers are bounded by the Precambrian granite of the Front Range, so all four water-bearing layers are present there, stacked one on the next and separated by claystone. The basin’s structural low is not here; it lies well to the north.

They are named, from the surface down, for the formations that hold them.

The four Denver Basin aquifers, top to bottom
Aquifer and how far down it starts	What it is made of	Thickness	Typical well yield	Area in El Paso County	Water in storage
Dawsontop reached at 200–620 ft^d	Coarse arkosic sandstone; at or near the surface throughout its extent	Up to almost 1,200 ft near Monument^c	Up to 300 gpm	316 sq mi^a	32 million acre-ft^b
Denver527–987 ft^d	Interbedded clay shale, claystone, siltstone and sandstone, with coal beds	Up to 1,000 ft	50–150 gpm	718 sq mi	71 million acre-ft
Arapahoe1,100–2,074 ft^d	Interbedded conglomerate, sandstone, siltstone and shale; the most productive of the four	About 400 ft	Up to 800 gpm	974 sq mi	90 million acre-ft
Laramie–Fox Hillsdeeper still; no Woodmoor wells^d	Marine and fluvial sandstone; deepest, least developed, water-quality problems from coal seams above	250–300 ft	About 350 gpm	1,169 sq mi	102 million acre-ft

Composition, thickness, yields and storage from the Colorado Division of Water Resources, Groundwater Levels in the Denver Basin Bedrock Aquifers 2017, hydrogeology summary and Table 1. ^a Areas within El Paso County from U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 2024–5123, Table 1; the Dawson figure is for the lower Dawson, the only Dawson unit that study maps in the county. ^b Dawson and Arapahoe storage are the sums of the upper and lower units the state reports separately. The state notes that the specific-yield values behind these volumes “may be as much as 25 to 30 percent above an ‘average’ value,” so the actual volumes may be less. ^c This is the state’s basin-wide maximum for the Dawson. Measuring the same formation in the county’s northwestern quadrant in 2025, Moore Engineering put total thickness at 800 to 900 feet, of which as much as 400 feet is saturated. ^d Depth to the top of the screened interval in Woodmoor Water and Sanitation District’s own wells — the only complete local well table the Independent has — from Table 2-12 of its 2022 Long Range Plan: nine Dawson wells, five Denver, ten Arapahoe. Depths vary across the Tri-Lakes and these are one district’s; the district holds Laramie–Fox Hills water rights but no wells in that aquifer. Total drilled depths run 616–1,126 ft in the Dawson, 1,130–1,438 ft in the Denver and 1,765–2,500 ft in the Arapahoe.

The Colorado Division of Water Resources puts the Dawson’s greatest thickness at almost 1,200 feet “in the vicinity of Monument” — the maximum it reports for that aquifer anywhere. The county’s own consultant, measuring the same formation in 2025, puts the total thickness in the northwestern quadrant of the county at 800 to 900 feet, with as much as 400 feet of that saturated — the water-bearing portion used in storage and production calculations, which is not the same as the depth a well is drilled to. Either way the Dawson is at its deepest directly beneath the Palmer Divide, and it thins abruptly to nothing within about ten miles to the east and south, around Black Forest.

The Arapahoe, several hundred feet lower, is the aquifer most Tri-Lakes municipal systems draw on. The Division of Water Resources calls it the most prolific of the four, with wells yielding up to 800 gallons a minute, and the county’s consultant describes it as both the most productive and the best in water quality — which is why municipal systems drill into it.

Those layers are usually drawn as four tidy parallel bands. Under the Tri-Lakes they are not. Woodmoor’s own wells strike the top of the Dawson anywhere between 200 and 620 feet down and the top of the Arapahoe anywhere between 1,100 and 2,074 feet, and the district’s deepest Dawson well is deeper than its shallowest well into the Denver.

The single most consequential fact about all four is that they barely refill. Direct precipitation recharge happens mainly where the formations reach the surface around the basin’s edge; water also moves between the aquifers and, at the margins, between bedrock and the alluvium along the creeks. All of it is small set against what is pumped. The Colorado Supreme Court, reviewing the law that governs them in November 2024, put it flatly: pumping “has long exceeded recharge,” producing what the court called a “mining condition” that will eventually drain the basin of recoverable water. Roughly half the water in the basin is estimated not to be recoverable at all, on a 1978 study the court cites.

The volumes involved are nonetheless enormous, which is what makes the arithmetic so easy to misread. The figure usually quoted is about 295 million acre-feet in storage across the four aquifers — the court cited 292 million, “some 1,200 times the volume of water contained in Dillon Reservoir” — published with the warning that the values behind it “may be as much as 25 to 30 percent above an ‘average’ value.” Asked what that number represents, the Division of Water Resources told the Independent it first appeared in the division’s 1997 Denver Basin water level report, and that it estimates the water held in each aquifer’s pore space using the specific yield values from the Denver Basin Rules. The division does not have the exact reference the hydrogeologists who prepared that report worked from. It has since removed the table from the reports altogether and now defers to the USGS for aquifer volume estimates. The county’s consultant put 259 million on the screen in October, labeled recoverable. Neither figure describes water that can actually be lifted to the surface at a useful rate, which is the number that decides whether a tap runs.

The Rules, and Where They Came From

Before 1973, the Division of Water Resources records, Denver Basin withdrawal was “limited primarily by an assessment of proximity to other groundwater appropriations in the same aquifer” — an applicant could take large quantities regardless of how much land they owned. Senate Bill 213 changed that in 1973, tying the right to the land above and capping withdrawal on the basis of an aquifer life of one hundred years, administered as one percent of the volume underlying the property each year. Senate Bill 5 followed in 1985, and the State Engineer adopted the Denver Basin Rules effective January 1, 1986.

El Paso County went further. In 1986, by its own account in the 2019 Water Master Plan, it adopted what everyone here calls the 300-year rule, which takes the state’s formula and divides by 300 instead of 100. For the subdivisions it covers in the unincorporated county, an applicant must show a supply calculated over three centuries — and the reason water arguments here so often turn on which government is deciding. Triview’s published primer states that inside a municipality with its own land-use authority the standard reverts to 100 years; the Independent has not checked that against Monument’s and Palmer Lake’s codes, and it is set out here as the district’s description rather than a statement of the law.

The most recent change came from the courts, and it matters more than its dry framing suggests. In Parker Water and Sanitation District v. Rein, decided 6-1 in November 2024, the Colorado Supreme Court held that every nontributary Denver Basin well permit carries a total volumetric limit “whether expressly stated or not” — a lifetime cap equal to the water the State Engineer found beneath the applicant’s land. Reach it and pumping stops, whatever remains in the ground.

The county’s consultant explained why that bites here. Because the legal allocation is calculated as though the aquifer were unconfined and drained by gravity, while the actual pumping happens under pressure, “much if not all of the water being pumped is not related to” the allocated volume “but is being debited as though it is part of” it. A district can therefore exhaust its paper right while water it cannot legally touch is still in the rock beneath it. Lytle put the consequence to the commissioners in one line: instead of a minimum useful life, there is now “a hard stop at 100 years of usage,” and the likely result is that “appropriations will be discontinued when aquifers can still provide viable water resources.”

What the County’s Own Study Found

In mid-2024 El Paso County hired Moore Engineering, working as Lytle Water Solutions, to assess the extent and reliability of the Denver Basin aquifers beneath it. The 79-page report is dated March 2025. Bruce Lytle presented it at a public work session on October 21, and the county issued a release the same day reporting that the aquifer “is a reliable long-term source of water,” that “no policy or code changes are recommended,” and that across much of the county “there may be more water in the aquifers than the amounts allocated on paper.”

All three statements are in the report, and in the slides Lytle put on the screen that morning, which the county publishes alongside it. So are several others.

The slides are blunter than the prose, and both are blunt about the formula the whole system rests on. It assumes one continuous sandstone, uniform throughout, drained like a bathtub. “None of these assumptions is correct,” the report says; the presentation says they are “demonstratively false and result in misleading conclusions.” The presumed drainage value is between 0.15 and 0.20; the real one, under present conditions, is around 0.0001 — smaller by a factor of about 1,500. The consequence cuts in the county’s favor: as long as the water level stands above the top of an aquifer, a decline is pressure being released, not rock being drained, and none of the statutory supply has been used.

The slides also say more about the Dawson than the release did. That aquifer shows “signs of dewatering” and is “best suited for low yield exempt residential/commercial wells,” with higher-production wells “limited” and given “significant well-to-well spacings.” And the headline conclusion is stated as a double negative worth reading slowly: there is “no evidence that would suggest the 300-yr Rule is too lenient.”

It is also blunt about how little it had to work with. The county and the consultant asked every major municipal and quasi-municipal supplier in the basin for water-level records. “The responses to these requests was mostly unsuccessful.” Four entities answered — Woodmoor Water and Sanitation District, Triview Metropolitan District, the Town of Monument and Paint Brush Hills Metropolitan District — and two of those four supplied data the report describes as limited. The analysis rests on 20 long-term hydrographs in the Dawson, 17 in the Denver, 37 in the Arapahoe and 17 in the Laramie-Fox Hills, for a county of more than 730,000 people.

And within that thin record, the picture varies sharply by aquifer and by place. Eight of the twenty Dawson hydrographs show water at or above the top of the formation. But in the area of heaviest use, the report finds “significant dewatering,” which it puts at “approximately 20-25 percent, with up to 40 percent” at one well. It names the place: “the concentrated area of pumping near the Palmer Divide along I-25 where it is most developed.” That is this corridor — the developed strip running from Palmer Lake through Monument and Woodmoor down toward Gleneagle — rather than the Town of Monument alone.

The Denver aquifer comes through the report well — thick, largely still under pressure, no sign of significant dewatering. The Laramie-Fox Hills comes through best of all, and the report is candid that this is because almost nobody uses it; it is deep, expensive to drill and carries water-quality problems from the coal seams above it.

The Arapahoe is where the report is most equivocal. It is “the most heavily used aquifer in the County.” Many wells remain confined and steady. Many others are confined but have levels “trending downward,” some since the early 2000s. Moore’s overall verdict is that the aquifer is reliable, with “only indications of minor dewatering of the uppermost water-bearing strata.”

The Question the County Asked Itself First

The finding that no rule needed changing is easier to place once you know what the county was answering.

In February 2019 El Paso County adopted a Water Master Plan, prepared by Forsgren Associates. It recorded that, Colorado Springs Utilities and its partners aside, water providers in the county rely on Denver Basin and designated-basin groundwater for 85 percent of their supplies. It dated the 300-year rule precisely — a subdivision regulation adopted in 1986, “with the intent, at least in part, of encouraging land developers to bring in additional renewable water sources” — and then observed that “land development continues to occur primarily where it can be supplied from Denver Basin aquifers.”

The plan drew the distinction the whole argument turns on, in the county’s own words: “Although most water providers have sufficient ‘paper’ water rights, aquifer characteristics dictate the amount of groundwater that can be economically withdrawn. A water provider may not be able to economically pump to the limits that their paper water rights would indicate. In some cases, there may not be enough reliable ‘wet water’ to serve the buildout of development in specific service areas over the long-term.”

It also did the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is where the two documents diverge most sharply. The plan divides the county into eight planning regions; Region 2 is the Monument area. Comparing projected demand against the supplies actually connected and available in 2018, it found Region 2 with 7,532 acre-feet of demand against 13,607 acre-feet of supply — a comfortable surplus of 6,075 acre-feet. By 2040 that surplus falls to 1,894 acre-feet. At build-out, which the plan places in 2060, it falls to 353 acre-feet against 13,254 acre-feet of demand — a margin of under three percent.

For the county as a whole the margin is already gone on the plan’s own numbers. “When looking at the County as a whole, in 2040 the demand is 159,250, but the total supplies are only 146,070.” By 2060 the shortfall reaches 59,930 acre-feet, or 29 percent of demand.

Two qualifications belong with those figures, and they pull in opposite directions. The comparison is against current supplies, not against the larger supplies providers told the county they intended to develop — the plan excludes those deliberately, because “their yield and reliability has not been realized yet.” Region 2 reported plans to raise its supply to 20,516 acre-feet by 2040, which if realized would change the picture entirely. But the plan also records what those planned supplies mostly consist of: “a number of water providers are relying upon nonrenewable Denver Basin aquifers and designated basins to fulfill these future supplies. Denver Basin water comprises a large share of future supplies for Regions 2, 3, 4a, 4b, 4c, 5, 6, and 8.”

And beside every one of those regions, including Region 2, the plan prints an asterisk. The footnote reads: “Water production from Denver Basin wells in this region may not be economically sustainable in the long term, depending on local aquifer conditions.” The body text is blunter — heavy use of Denver Basin supplies “is not expected to be economically sustainable over the long term,” and that “would serve to increase the water supply needs beyond the 8% that is shown.”

So the county’s adopted plan says the Tri-Lakes covers itself at build-out with a margin of three percent; that the margin depends on new supply which is largely more of the same groundwater; and that the groundwater may not be economically sustainable. Those three statements sit on facing pages.

And it made a recommendation. The project team recommended “that the County complete a more detailed analysis of the 300-Year Rule and available groundwater supplies, possibly leading to revision of this regulatory requirement.” Revising the rule was one of the options the plan put to the public in its own engagement survey.

The Moore study is that analysis, commissioned five years later. It came back recommending the rule stay as it is. Both documents are the county’s; the second answers a question the first raised, and it answered it in the negative.

One more thing the county has said about that plan is worth recording. When the New Falcon Herald asked in 2023 how the master plan bore on development approvals, a county spokesman answered that it is “an advisory document,” and that “El Paso County’s subdivision regulations do not include a review of or compliance with the water master plan to find a sufficient supply of water.” In the same article, senior assistant county attorney Lori Seago explained how the state calculates an applicant’s allocation and said of the formula: “At no point is any proof required that the water is actually down there.”

The View From Outside the County

El Paso County’s conclusion is one reading of the evidence. It is not the only one on the record, and the others were not produced by anyone with a stake in the county’s land-use code.

An older federal simulation puts some of its largest modeled declines in and east of Monument. The U.S. Geological Survey’s 2011 groundwater availability assessment of the Denver Basin included a fifty-year predictive run that holds pumping at 2003 rates and recharge at the drought-era pattern of 2000 to 2003. The USGS is explicit that such runs “are not considered definitive predictions of future conditions.” Read as the stated scenario it is, the geography of the result is still striking: maximum modeled drawdown in the upper Dawson “occurring in the Monument area”; as much as 340 feet in the lower Dawson there; 630 feet in the Denver aquifer east of Monument; and 400 to 1,200 feet in the lower Arapahoe east of town. The model is now fifteen years old, and its second simulation shows that reducing pumping slows the loss materially.

Its more durable contribution is a physical explanation for why this corner of the basin behaves differently, which does not depend on the scenario. Monument’s municipal wells, the USGS records, sit “near the southwestern margin of the basin, which is the regional discharge area of Monument Creek.” The Tri-Lakes is not in the middle of the bowl. It is near the rim. And here the Arapahoe carries water less freely than under south Denver, so instead of one broad regional cone of depression the model produces drawdown “restricted to individual cones of depression with steep gradients surrounding pumping centers.” Each well field digs its own hole.

The statute was never designed to protect the pressure. The same USGS study describes what Colorado’s 1985 law actually did: Senate Bill 85-5 “adopted a 100-year aquifer life to determine decreed pumping rates for a given parcel of land and accepted storage depletion by not protecting artesian head or aquifer water levels.” That is the crux of the disagreement. Moore’s reassurance rests on water levels still standing above the tops of the aquifers, which means pressure rather than rock is being lost. The scheme that governs those aquifers was written on the understanding that the pressure would go.

Independent researchers found the two aquifers the county relies on losing the most. In 2019 three Colorado School of Mines researchers — Christopher Ruybal, Terri Hogue and John McCray — published a basin-wide analysis of storage change between 1990 and 2016. According to its abstract, hydraulic head “decreased in some areas by up to 180 m” — about 590 feet — on the west-central side of the basin, and the conclusion names names: “The Denver and Arapahoe aquifers show the largest groundwater storage losses, with the highest rates occurring in the 2000s.” The abstract flags the same uncertainty Moore does, that storage estimates depend heavily on which storage coefficient is taken as representative.

The county next door measured, and found declines nearly everywhere. Douglas County sits on the same four aquifers. Through the Rural Water Authority of Douglas County it paid the USGS to build a monitoring network — 36 wells, 15 of them fitted with pressure transducers recording hourly. The first two years produced more than 500 manual and 213,900 automated measurements and showed “water-level declines in all aquifers.” The 2011-19 report found that of the thirteen wells with statistically significant trends, twelve were negative, with median declines of 0.23 feet a year in the upper Dawson, 0.31 in the lower Dawson, 0.92 in the Denver and 2.26 in the Arapahoe. The USGS attaches a caution to that last figure that ought to travel with it: the Arapahoe median rests on a single well. The Denver figure, drawn from more of them, is the more solid number.

A third county published its own numbers this year, and they run the same way. Elbert County, which borders El Paso to the east, has had a USGS network since 2015. Its latest report, published in January 2026, covers 36 wells across eight years — more than 1,700 manual measurements and 340,000 hourly ones. Of the 35 wells with enough data to analyze, 29 showed statistically significant trends, and in every aquifer but the lower Dawson every one of those trends pointed down. The median rates were 0.23 feet a year in the upper Dawson, 0.66 in the lower Dawson, 0.64 in the Denver, 0.39 in the Arapahoe and 0.63 in the Laramie-Fox Hills. They are gentler than Douglas County’s, and they were measured over a different period using a stricter test, so the two sets are not interchangeable. What carries between them is the direction.

One well in that network deserves a paragraph of its own. The USGS records that a multi-residential development went up near lower Dawson well LDAW 12 between 2017 and 2019, and that state permit records show it brought two commercial wells into the Denver and Arapahoe. That well now shows the largest departure in the study — about 60 feet below its 2015 level — with the deepest drawdowns falling in those same years. The USGS puts it as proximity and coincidence in time rather than proven cause, and notes the well still recovers most of that each season. It is nonetheless the closest thing in any of these reports to a picture of what arrives with a subdivision, and it exists only because somebody was already measuring before the subdivision did.

And the region that took the problem most seriously has the most sobering numbers. The South Metro Water Supply Authority was formed in 2004 by thirteen providers across Douglas and Arapahoe counties to address the threat of relying on nonrenewable groundwater. Two decades and a great deal of infrastructure later, it reports non-renewable sources down to 22 percent of supply, per-capita demand down 30 percent since 2000, and this: “In the 1990s, groundwater levels in the Denver Basin Aquifers were declining by about 30 feet per year. Today, groundwater levels in these aquifers are declining by around 5 feet.” Those are the authority’s own figures for a different set of providers and wells. What they show is what one Denver Basin region reports after twenty years of deliberate and expensive effort to stop leaning on the aquifers — and the levels are still going down.

A Tri-Lakes provider has published its own estimate, and it is not three hundred years. Triview Metropolitan District carries a water primer on its website, written by a former board member, Marco Fiorito, who states plainly that he is not a hydrologist and assembled it with the district’s staff and consultants. It says that “it is roughly estimated that there are approximately between 30-100 years of water remaining in the Denver Basin Aquifer,” and adds the qualifier that matters most here: the range varies by location, because “water levels on the edges appears to recede faster than at locations near the center.” The primer is undated and appears to predate the district’s own Northern Delivery System; it is a provider’s published position rather than a current technical estimate.

The gap in all of this is measurement, and it is specific to here. The USGS runs purpose-built monitoring networks on the Denver Basin in Douglas County, in Elbert County, and in the Upper Black Squirrel Creek basin in eastern El Paso County. Each exists because a local body — a rural water authority, a groundwater management district — asked for it and helped pay. The Independent checked the USGS Colorado Water Science Center’s project listings and found no equivalent on the Palmer Divide, the corridor the county’s own consultant calls a concentrated pumping area with significant Dawson dewatering. What exists here instead is the state’s voluntary cooperator program, which for several Tri-Lakes wells last recorded a measurement in 2013. The Division of Water Resources confirmed in September that it runs no location-specific monitoring on the divide beyond its basin-scale program.

The nearest thing to a purpose-built network on the divide was built by residents. In the spring of 2020 the Black Forest Water and Wells Committee, a volunteer group under Friends of Black Forest, began measuring private Dawson wells east of Monument. It asked for volunteers, got 106, and selected 64 wells across Black Forest. It bought a sonic tester that reads the water level from sound pulses without putting anything down the well, and records each reading against the static level on the original permit. As of October 2025 it had completed five annual rounds. Its stated reason: “it is imperative that our wells are monitored so that we will be able to alert our elected officials if we see patterns that are not good in the Dawson aquifer.” Its stated position is not the county’s. “The aquifers of the Denver Basin, including the Dawson aquifer, are declining and, with current use, are not sustainable.”

That is a citizens’ committee, not a hydrogeological survey, and its readings are annual measurements of domestic wells. But it is the densest current record of Dawson levels anywhere on the Palmer Divide, it covers the eastern ground the Moore report calls barely used, and it exists because no public agency was doing it.

Whose Wells Those Are

The Moore report identifies every well by its state permit number and never says who owns it. Those numbers can be matched against the Division of Water Resources’ 2025 well records, which carry the owner, the aquifer, the location and the measurements. Doing so changes how the findings read.

The Tri-Lakes wells named in the county’s study
State permit in the report	Well	Owner	Aquifer	What the report says about it	Last year measured
11349-R-R	Monument Well 1	Town of Monument	Dawson	Significant dewatering in the area of most intense use	2025
3826-F	Woodmoor 6	Woodmoor Water & Sanitation	Dawson	Significant dewatering in the area of most intense use	2013
12278-F	Woodmoor 5^†	Woodmoor Water & Sanitation	Dawson	Significant dewatering in the area of most intense use	not in state file
4949-F	Woodmoor 7^†	Woodmoor Water & Sanitation	Dawson	Significant dewatering in the area of most intense use	not in state file
9260-F	Woodmoor 2^†	Woodmoor Water & Sanitation	Dawson	Significant dewatering in the area of most intense use	not in state file
9259-R-F	Woodmoor 3A^† (emergency use only)	Woodmoor Water & Sanitation	Dawson	Significant dewatering in the area of most intense use	not in state file
16248-F	Woodmoor 8	Woodmoor Water & Sanitation	Arapahoe	Confined, water levels trending downward	2006
17483-F	Forest Lakes Metro	Forest Lakes Metropolitan District	Arapahoe	Confined, water levels trending downward	2021
24030-F	Woodmoor 10 (abandoned) redrilled 2001 as Well 10R, permit 56480-F	Woodmoor Water & Sanitation	Arapahoe	Confined, water levels trending downward	2006
29314-F	named “Woodmoor 11” in the state’s file district says it has no record of this permit its Well 11 is permit 39116-F, which the state’s water-level file does not contain	Woodmoor Water & Sanitation holder of both permits	Arapahoe	Confined, water levels trending downward	2013
27229-F	Donala 2A	Donala Water & Sanitation	Arapahoe	Confined, water levels trending downward	2023
34671-F	Donala 3A	Donala Water & Sanitation	Arapahoe	Listed both as trending downward and as not trending	2023
56816-F	Palmer Lake A-2	Town of Palmer Lake	Arapahoe	Water level below the top of the aquifer	2023
37502-F-R	Monument Well 7	Town of Monument	Arapahoe	On its hydrograph, at or near the top of the aquifer	2025
47303-F	Monument Well 8	Town of Monument	Arapahoe	Very stable, at or near the top of the aquifer	2025

The Independent’s own matching. Permit numbers and findings from Moore Engineering / Lytle Water Solutions, Denver Basin Aquifer Resources: Evaluation of Extent and Reliability, March 2025, sections 4.1 and 4.3. Owner, well name, aquifer and period of record from the Colorado Division of Water Resources’ groundwater water-level well database, queried through the state’s public API and cross-checked against each well’s page. ^† These four permits appear in no state water-level record; they are identified from Table 2-12 of Woodmoor Water and Sanitation District’s 2022 Long Range Plan Update, provided to the Independent by the district. Every well on the report’s Dawson dewatering list and on its Arapahoe declining list is now accounted for, and all twelve supply drinking water in the Tri-Lakes. Years in red mark wells the state has no water-level measurement for since 2013 or earlier. On the two anomalies: the report writes “DB-120 (Woodmoor 11A)” and the state’s file names permit 29314-F as DB-120 Woodmoor 11; the district says it holds no record of that permit and that its Well 11 is 39116-F. The state’s well-permit database returns both numbers as Woodmoor permits, each for a 2,500-foot well in the same section. Questions are with the district and the state.

All six of the Arapahoe wells the report lists as trending downward are wells the state names for Tri-Lakes public water systems: one at Forest Lakes Metropolitan District, three at Woodmoor and two at Donala. Four of the six Dawson wells on the dewatering list could not be found in the state’s water-level database at all, and the consultant says it drew some of its hydrographs from well-construction records rather than from monitored wells. In response to questions from the Independent, Woodmoor supplied the well table from its 2022 Long Range Plan, which identifies all four. Permit 12278-F is Woodmoor’s Well 5, 4949-F its Well 7, 9260-F its Well 2, and 9259-R-F its Well 3A, drilled in 1988 to replace an abandoned 1965 well and now held for emergency use only because of iron and manganese the district says it cannot economically treat.

That closes the list. Five of the six Dawson wells the county’s consultant describes as significantly dewatered belong to Woodmoor Water and Sanitation District. The sixth is the Town of Monument’s Well 1. Every well the report cites as evidence of Dawson dewatering, and every well it cites as evidence of a downward Arapahoe trend, is a well that supplies drinking water to this part of the county.

Matching the permits also turns up two things the report does not mention. The first is the age of the record. Three of the six Arapahoe wells have no water-level measurement in the state’s file since 2006 or 2013. Woodmoor’s wells 8 and 10 were last measured in 2006, the well the state files as Woodmoor 11 in 2013. Forest Lakes runs to 2021; the two Donala wells, which the district measures itself and reports, run to 2023. So half of the evidence for a downward trend in the aquifer the towns depend on rests on records that stopped between twelve and nineteen years before the report describing them was written. That is a reason to hold the finding loosely, and Woodmoor’s own current data — set out below — largely bears the finding out anyway.

The second is stranger, and the Independent raises it because a reader checking the report will hit it. Two of the six Arapahoe wells on the county’s list are not quite the wells the list implies.

Permit 24030-F is on it, and the state’s own well-permit database records that well’s status as abandoned. Woodmoor’s 2022 plan says the same: Well 10 was filled in and redrilled in 2001 as Well 10R, under a different permit. The state’s water-level file still carries 24030-F, with a record that stops in 2006, and that is the record the county’s consultant drew on.

The other is permit 29314-F, which the state’s water-level file names “Woodmoor 11” and which the Moore report renders as “Woodmoor 11A.” Woodmoor says it holds no record of that permit, and that its Well 11 is permit 39116-F — a number that appears nowhere in the state’s water-level file. Both permits, it turns out, are Woodmoor’s: the state’s permit database returns each of them as a 2,500-foot well held by the district, at the same latitude and longitude, spotted from the same section lines. Two permits, one set of coordinates, one depth, one owner. The plain reading is that this is a single well carrying two permit numbers, tracked by the state under one and by its owner under the other, though neither has yet said so. The Independent has asked both.

Neither point overturns the county’s finding. Woodmoor’s own current data, set out below, shows the Arapahoe falling across its well field. But the report is the document on which the county rested a decision not to change any rule, and its evidence for a declining Arapahoe includes a well that was plugged a quarter of a century ago and another whose owner does not recognize the permit number attached to it.

The individual hydrographs in the report’s appendix are more striking than the prose around them. The Forest Lakes well stood at roughly 6,500 feet above sea level in 1988. By the 2010s it was sitting between about 5,920 and 6,100 feet — against a top-of-aquifer line the report draws at about 5,950. Read off the printed chart, that is a decline of roughly 400 to 580 feet of hydraulic head, depending on which of the later plotted points is used, and it puts the well at the boundary the report itself treats as the line between pressure loss and dewatering. Palmer Lake’s A-2 well, drilled into the Arapahoe to 2,232 feet, shows the same shape over a shorter record: about 6,040 feet in 2002, and 5,600 to 5,700 by the early 2020s, against a top at roughly 5,640.

A third, smaller discrepancy: well 34671-F, which state records identify as Donala 3A, appears in the same section both among the wells “trending downward” and among those “not exhibiting a downward water level trend.”

The Measurements the State Still Takes

Monument’s wells are the ones with current readings. The Division of Water Resources measured them in the spring of 2025, and its published record for each well shows the ten most recent readings.

Monument Well 1 reaches into the Dawson, 565 feet down from a surface 6,970 feet above sea level. In April 2025 the water stood 193 feet below the ground. In September 2024 it stood 355 feet down. The 161.9-foot difference between those two readings is consistent with heavy pumping through an irrigation season and recovery over a winter, which is the pattern the Moore report has in mind when it recommends the Dawson be left to “small diameter, low production wells.” Two single-point measurements taken seven months apart cannot establish that cause on their own, and the town’s water manager, Jonathan Rigaud, says the swing is unremarkable: “Static water levels can vary depending on when the well was last operated and how much time it has had to recover.”

On the county’s finding for that well, though, the town does not dispute it. Asked whether Monument’s own monitoring shows the Dawson dewatering the consultant describes, Rigaud replied that “the consultant’s study used data provided directly by the Town, and our records show a similar trend.” He added the qualifications an operator would: well screens clog with age and reduce yield on their own, and summer changes may reflect regional pumping interference as much as the aquifer. The town has seen a smaller decline in static levels in recent years, he said, but also reduced run times — which is to say the wells are being asked for less.

The town’s three Arapahoe wells sit far deeper and move much less. Wells 7 and 8 have held between about 1,246 and 1,364 feet below the surface across seven years of state readings. On the Moore hydrographs both sit essentially at the top of the aquifer, with individual measurements dipping below it.

The town keeps the same information the other way up, and the difference is worth understanding, because it is the number an operator actually watches. Asked for his current levels, Rigaud gave figures around 374 feet for Well 7 and 343 for Well 8 — roughly a thousand feet different from the state’s. Neither is wrong. A well has a pump hung at a fixed depth, with a sump below it where sediment collects, and the pressure sensor sits at the pump and measures the water standing above it. The state’s number counts downward from the ground; the town’s counts upward from the pump. Rigaud worked the arithmetic himself: Well 7 is drilled to 1,766 feet, its pump is set at 1,678 feet, and subtracting the state’s 1,308-foot water level “leaves approximately 370 feet of water above the pump.”

That second number is the one that decides whether a well keeps working. A pump cannot be lowered indefinitely — below some depth there is no hole left to lower it into. And it is the measure by which the difference between the two biggest systems in the Tri-Lakes becomes plain. Monument’s Well 7 has something like 370 feet of water above its pump. Woodmoor’s Well 8, one of the six the county’s consultant lists as trending downward, has 74 — and its own long-range plan records that the pump is already “the deepest practical setting in this well.”

One limit applies to every state figure in this article: these are single measurements taken roughly twice a year, and the state warns they “may be complicated by unknown pumping schedules.”

The District That Measures Its Own

There is one body of current, high-resolution data on these aquifers, and it does not belong to the state. Woodmoor Water and Sanitation District has measured its own wells to a written standard since 2004. Ten carry pressure transducers wired to the district’s control system, recording water levels and pumping rates every hour; twice a year an airline is dropped down the well to check the instruments. Since 2020 its consultants, BBA Water Consultants, have written the results up in a memorandum before and after each irrigation season. Asked for its data, the district supplied the current memorandum, dated June 2026, and the water-resources chapter of its 2022 Long Range Plan.

Together they are the most detailed public account of what is happening under the Palmer Divide, and they do not read like a reliable long-term source.

Start with the plan’s own explanation of why its wells are falling. “Denver Basin aquifer water level declines are expected,” it says, “because regional well pumping greatly exceeds aquifer recharge.” That is the district’s engineers, in an adopted planning document, stating as a premise the thing the county’s conclusion talks around.

The plan then puts dates on it. Using a straight-line fit to each well’s history, BBA projected when the water level in each well would fall to the top of the screen — the point at which it starts drawing on a shrinking column of saturated rock rather than on pressure — and when it would fall halfway through the production zone. For the Arapahoe wells, which supply most of the district’s water, the average answers were August 2024 and March 2040. Three of them, wells 15, 16 and 18, were already below the top of their screens when the plan was written, as was Dawson Well 6. Well 18 was projected to be halfway through its production zone by December 2029.

The plan is careful about those: they assume a straight-line decline, are not based on a groundwater model, and take no account of the fall slowing as an aquifer changes from confined to unconfined. But they were not written to alarm anyone. They were written to decide what size pump to buy.

And the buying tells its own story. Between 2017 and 2021 the district replaced the pumping equipment in six wells. In five of the six it installed something smaller, because there was less water to lift: Well 10R went from 400 gallons a minute to 250, Well 9R from 200 to 100, Well 17 from 125 to 100, Well 15 from 200 to 180, Well 5 from 30 to 25. Of Well 8 — one of the six wells on the county consultant’s Arapahoe list — the plan records that the water now stands just 74 feet above the pump, which is already as deep as a pump can practically go in that well, and that “due to declining water levels and limited practical pump setting depths, utility of Well 8 is decreasing and the well may be taken offline in the future.” Ten of the district’s 24 Denver Basin wells are past the 25-to-30-year life the plan expects of them.

The 2026 memorandum shows where things now stand. Measured as total change since each well came online, the district’s longest-serving Arapahoe well has lost on the order of 700 to 800 feet of water level. Well 21, which only started producing in 2018, is falling fastest of all. At their deepest pumping levels last year, more than half the screen was dewatered in wells 10R, 15, 16 and 18, and 58 percent in Denver Well 9R. Well 15 has been below the top of its screen since 2011, Well 16 since 2018. Well 20 spent the summer of 2025 below the top of its screen, was rested for five months, and came back up 104 feet.

That last detail is the one to hold on to, because it points both ways. Rest works. Again and again the memorandum records water levels recovering when a well is left alone — 68 feet at Well 10R over 50 days, 43 feet at Well 16, 20 feet at Well 11 during a treatment-plant upgrade. The aquifer is not empty and it is not past saving. What the district is managing is a system with no slack in it, in which every well recovers only as long as its neighbors are not pumping. The plan quantifies that too: well-to-well interference of about 100 feet by the end of the 2022 irrigation season, projected to reach 150 feet by the end of 2027. And it draws the conclusion that matters for anyone proposing to solve a shortage by drilling. “Since well-to-well impacts are cumulative, constructing additional wells in the Arapahoe aquifer will reduce yield from existing wells resulting in a diminishing return.”

In 2025 Woodmoor pumped 1,138 acre-feet from the Denver Basin — 856 of it from the Arapahoe, 182 from the Dawson, 100 from the Denver — and diverted another 431 acre-feet of surface water. Groundwater was 72.5 percent of what it produced. Jessie Shaffer, the district manager, cautioned against reading any single well as a verdict on an entire aquifer: two of the district’s Arapahoe wells, drilled into the same formation at different spots, are falling at 20 feet a year and 10 feet a year respectively, and “to conclude that the Arapahoe aquifer as a whole is drawing at 20 ft/yr would be a flawed conclusion.” On the county consultant’s broader finding, though, he was direct. Across all the district’s wells and aquifers, he said, “our records agree with the statement that water levels are trending downward over time in each of the aquifers.”

What the State’s Own Tally Shows

The Division of Water Resources publishes an annual roll-up of water-level change by aquifer. The 2025 edition is the most recent.

Change in water levels by aquifer, as the state reports it
Aquifer	Wells in the average	2025 range of water levels (ft)	1 year 2024–25	5 years 2020–25	10 years 2015–25
Upper Dawson	9	84–202	+1.22	+2.97	−2.56
Lower Dawson	4	289–625	+0.50	−9.77	−32.01
Dawson	14	22–860	−2.24	+4.39	−3.69
Denver	24	14–1,421	−0.62	+9.16	−10.23
Upper Arapahoe	1	132	—	−9.83	−13.71
Lower Arapahoe	3	109–180	+4.45	+15.05	+10.92
Arapahoe — the aquifer the towns rely on	34	75–1,728	−23.14	−7.63	−58.09
Laramie–Fox Hills	26	28–1,399	−3.31	−12.11	−27.96

Colorado Division of Water Resources, Groundwater Levels in the Denver Basin Bedrock Aquifers 2025, Table 1. Figures are changes in depth to water, in feet, averaged across the wells measured in 2025; a minus sign means the water sits deeper than it did. The state cautions that the comparisons are “based on single point comparisons and may be complicated by unknown pumping schedules or other site-specific hydrologic factors.” The number of wells behind each average has fallen sharply — the 2017 edition averaged 108 Arapahoe and 58 Denver wells — and the wells are not the same from year to year. The Arapahoe row is marked because it is the aquifer that supplies most Tri-Lakes municipal systems.

The Arapahoe — the aquifer the towns depend on — shows the largest declines over one year and over ten. Over five years it does not: on that horizon the barely used Laramie-Fox Hills and the Lower Dawson both show larger drops. That inconsistency is itself the finding, and it is worth pausing on before anyone quotes a single row.

The reason is that the number of wells behind each figure has collapsed. The 2017 edition of the same report averaged 108 Arapahoe wells and 58 Denver wells; the 2025 edition averages 34 and 24. The state received data from 126 cooperating wells in 2017 and 37 in 2025. These are not the same wells year to year. The direction is consistent across editions — the 2017 report showed a ten-year Arapahoe decline of 22 feet, the 2025 report shows 58 — but the precision is not what the decimal places imply.

The Independent put that collapse to the Division of Water Resources, which confirmed it. “The decline is accurate,” wrote Marie Sullivan, the division’s compliance and communications specialist, on Sept. 7. “The major driver is failure to respond from the cooperators and monitoring wells being removed from service.” Staff turnover at the cooperating entities, she added, produces “disconnects” of its own. The program is voluntary, and what it records is what its participants choose to send.

Asked whether the state runs any monitoring specifically along the Palmer Divide corridor near I-25 — the ground the county’s consultant identifies as the most concentrated pumping and the greatest Dawson dewatering — the division said it “is not engaged in any location-specific monitoring programs other than our general basin-scale monitoring,” and that water districts or other groups may be running programs of their own. It has “ambitions to work on improvements to the program in association with the USGS’s National Groundwater Monitoring Network as schedule and budget permit,” and would welcome local governments and districts to monitor their own wells and submit the readings through its cooperator program.

The division was also asked what its data shows about the Dawson and Arapahoe beneath northern El Paso County. It does not say. “Our monitoring program is focused on collecting and displaying water level data for use and interpretation by others,” Sullivan wrote. “At this time we are not engaged in any specific water level studies.” Asked how closely actual withdrawal tracks the volumes decreed on paper — the gap between allocation and pumping — she answered that the division has not conducted that analysis.

The last question was whether there is a point at which falling levels would prompt the state to act. There is not. “DWR would rely on the best available data for any new permit evaluation or Denver Basin determination,” Sullivan wrote, “but the statutes and rules do not require the maintenance of water levels at any particular location.” She added the premise underneath the whole scheme: “the Denver Basin aquifers are considered to be nonrenewable aquifers, and declines in water levels in the Denver Basin aquifers over time are expected.” Declining levels are not a signal this system is built to read. They are the outcome its rules assume.

A Winter That Melted in March

None of the above is what made 2026 a water year people will remember.

Colorado’s snowpack peaked between late February and mid-March, three to five weeks early, at about half the normal peak. March temperatures ran roughly nine degrees above normal for the month, with 26 days above the median, and the snow left at a quarter-inch of water equivalent a day. Statewide snow water equivalent fell from 60 percent of median on March 1 to 20 percent on April 1. At the end of March, 103 of the 117 measuring sites in the state were at or near the zero percentile, and 95 percent of sites were recording their lowest or second-lowest values on record.

The runoff followed. By May 1 the forecast for May through July was 24 percent of median statewide and 33 percent in the Arkansas basin, which drains this side of the Palmer Divide. Forty-eight of 86 forecast points ranked lowest or second lowest in their period of record; all 86 sat at or below the 13th percentile.

By late August the U.S. Drought Monitor had all of El Paso County in drought, 93 percent of it in severe drought and 63 percent in extreme drought. A year earlier, in the last week of August 2025, none of the county was in drought at all.

A dry winter does not drain the Dawson or the Arapahoe. Those aquifers are sealed under claystone and take in only minor recharge at the basin’s edges; a single season of snow, or its absence, does not reach them. What a dry winter does is take away everything else. Creeks that carry a district through the summer stop carrying it, reservoirs that stretch a supply stop stretching it, lawns need more water rather than less, and the wells absorb the whole difference at once.

Palmer Lake is the worked example. Monument Creek, the town’s primary surface source, has been dry since the middle of June. The town declared a Stage 1 water emergency in August and cut outdoor watering to a single hour a week — Wednesdays, 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., by hand, from a bucket or can of five gallons or less. Its Arapahoe well, A-2, has produced water every day since the end of June, and its water supervisor has reported a significant decline in that well’s performance and rising drawdown, approaching the level at which its production rate would have to be cut. The town’s Denver well cannot meet demand on its own. The resolution requires the water superintendent to report to the board at every regular meeting on well production and on aquifer drawdown — a standing agenda item that did not exist in the spring.

Woodmoor described the same year in a quieter register. Its second-quarter newsletter called the year so far “extremely dry,” with Arkansas basin snowpack “at just 25% of normal,” while reporting the district “in good shape with Lake Woodmoor near full and our wells online standing at the ready.” A district that can hold that line through a winter like this one is a district that has spent money not to be caught out.

Everything Asking for More

Against that, demand keeps arriving, and each request is decided under rules written for a different question.

The town of Monument describes the effect in plain terms. Asked whether it now leans harder on the Arapahoe than it did five years ago, Rigaud answered that it does, and said why: “Throughout my tenure with the Water Department, we have relied more heavily on the Arapahoe Aquifer to meet increasing water demands. Growth has driven both baseline and irrigation-related water use higher.” He is not alarmed by it — the system, he said, “remains robust, with sufficient capacity and built-in redundancies to meet current needs,” and the town is pursuing renewable and reusable supplies “with the goal of preserving the existing well system as a reliable backup resource.” That is the same destination Woodmoor, Donala and Triview have been walking toward for years, at considerable cost. It is also a description of growth pushing a town deeper into the one aquifer the county’s consultant found to be trending downward.

In the water year that ended in October 2025, Monument pumped 164 acre-feet from its Denver and Dawson wells and 298 from the Arapahoe. Rigaud notes that a calendar-year split would look much the same, because use through the winter months is low and steady.

Commercial demand arrives on the same aquifers under rules written parcel by parcel. A single large non-exempt well can be permitted at 150 gallons a minute — ten times the ceiling on the exempt household wells much of the surrounding county runs on — and the state’s discretion to refuse one is narrow. Deputy State Engineer Sarah Brucker told Colorado Public Radio that her division applies the statute and nothing beyond it: “we cannot impose additional restrictions on the evaluation of a well permit or the issuance of a well permit beyond what is in statute.” Changing that takes legislation.

Where the county’s own stricter standard applies is narrower than it sounds. The 300-year rule attaches to subdivision, so a project on an existing legal parcel does not trigger it. Colorado’s water-adequacy statute reaches further — C.R.S. § 29-20-303 bars a local government from approving a development permit without finding the supply adequate, and § 29-20-103 defines that term to include a “development or site plan” for anything using more water than fifty houses — but it leaves the government discretion over which stage to make the finding at, and requires it only once.

The current public-review draft of the county’s land development code, released in July and not yet operative law, carries the 300-year standard forward unchanged and would require a water resources report earlier in the process, at rezoning and site development plan rather than only at subdivision. It also keeps the arithmetic that makes the standard bite: renewable supplies are credited with a 300-year life, while non-renewable Denver Basin bedrock is credited at 100 times its annual appropriation — a fixed volume that must then be stretched across three centuries.

Data centers are the other appetite, and both towns have moved before being asked. Monument froze them in July, 6-0, before any developer had applied. Palmer Lake’s board directed staff in August to bring a six-month moratorium to its September meeting as a resolution rather than an ordinance, on advice that a resolution would be easier to unwind.

The Way Out, and What It Now Costs

Several Tri-Lakes providers have spent years reducing their dependence on the rock beneath them, or planning to. Two of those efforts are worth watching closely this year, because they moved in opposite directions.

Triview Metropolitan District finished its Northern Delivery System in August 2024 — a 16-inch pipeline built with Colorado Springs Utilities that brings renewable surface water north to roughly 4,500 homes and businesses, with the Denver Basin wells kept as backup for peak summer demand and drought. The district says the system, with the rest of its portfolio, will let it meet more than 80 percent of future demand from renewable supplies.

The Loop went the other way. The El Paso County Regional Loop Water Authority was formed in 2022 by four members to move renewable water north; the county granted it $4 million. Cherokee Metropolitan District left at the end of 2024. Monument voted to begin leaving on August 3 this year, and Donala did the same. In its third-quarter newsletter, Woodmoor told customers that the withdrawal of its partners “will cause automatic dissolution of the Loop Authority,” and that it intends to carry the project on alone — “downsized and reconfigured,” on a timeline that “will probably have to stretch a number of years.” What entity will hold the assets and agreements after the authority dissolves, and what the board has actually authorized, are not yet on the public record.

Then the sentence that will reach every Woodmoor bill: the board “will also have to decide on the best method to fully finance this project, with input from our customers.” Woodmoor bought a ranch near Fountain in 2011 and says its decree made more than 3,000 acre-feet a year available for municipal use — a decreed quantity, which is not the same as a guaranteed physical yield in any given year. Four governments were going to share the cost of moving that water north. One is left, and it is the one that says on its own website that it has depended on the Denver Basin for all of its water for more than 40 years and that those aquifers “cannot be expected to supply affordable water indefinitely.”

What the Record Actually Shows

Set the documents side by side and the striking thing is how little anyone disagrees about the direction.

The county’s consultant found significant Dawson dewatering along I-25 and an Arapahoe with wells trending downward. Woodmoor’s engineers wrote that declines “are expected because regional well pumping greatly exceeds aquifer recharge.” Monument’s water manager said his records show a similar trend and that growth has pushed the town deeper into the Arapahoe. The Black Forest committee says the aquifers “are declining and, with current use, are not sustainable.” The USGS measured declines in every aquifer in Douglas County. Three researchers at the School of Mines found the Denver and Arapahoe losing the most storage of the four. The Colorado Supreme Court called it a mining condition. Nobody in this article argues the water levels are holding steady.

What they disagree about is what falling levels mean, and the disagreement turns on a single technical point with a very large consequence. Moore’s reassurance is that while water stands above the top of an aquifer, what is being lost is pressure rather than rock, and so none of the statutory supply has been consumed. That is correct, and it is beside the point for anyone running a water system. What a utility runs out of is not water in the ground. It is water above the pump — and a pump can only be lowered so far. Monument’s Well 7 has about 370 feet of that margin left. Woodmoor’s Well 8 has 74, with the pump already as deep as the hole allows, and its owner’s plan says the well may have to come out of service.

The 300-year rule does not measure that margin. It measures a volume, divided by three centuries, calculated on a formula the county’s own consultant calls demonstratively false. A volume says nothing about rate, and rate is what fails first. Woodmoor’s plan makes the point in the plainest possible terms: because well interference is cumulative, “constructing additional wells in the Arapahoe aquifer will reduce yield from existing wells resulting in a diminishing return.” The paper number can be satisfied indefinitely while the physical system tightens underneath it.

So the aquifers are not about to run dry, and nothing in this record suggests they are. What is being consumed is something harder to see on a hydrograph: the cheapness of the water, and the room to be wrong. That cost has already landed. Woodmoor has downsized five of six replacement pumps, will carry the Loop pipeline alone after its partners left, and has told customers the board must decide how to finance it. Triview spent years and a great deal of money building its way onto renewable supply. Palmer Lake is watering by the bucket, one hour a week. Donala left the Loop. None of those are responses to an emergency. They are what it looks like when a resource stops being the easy answer.

Against that, two facts deserve more weight than they usually get. The first is that rest works. Woodmoor’s Well 20 came back 104 feet after five months off; Well 10R recovered 68 feet in fifty days. What returns is pressure, not water — the aquifers barely refill, and nothing here says otherwise. But it means the rate at which a well field tightens is something an operator can manage, and the district’s own numbers show it. The second is that almost nobody is watching closely enough to know when to act, and that nobody is required to. The state’s cooperator network has fallen from 126 wells to 37, a decline the state confirms and attributes to cooperators not responding and wells going out of service; it says its own rules do not require water levels to be maintained anywhere, and that decline in these aquifers is expected. The county’s consultant asked every major supplier in the basin for water levels and four answered. Half the wells it cites as evidence of an Arapahoe decline have not been measured by the state since 2006 or 2013, one was plugged twenty-five years ago, and one carries a permit number its owner does not recognize. The densest current record of the Dawson under the Palmer Divide belongs to a volunteer committee with a sonic tester.

That is the finding. Not that the water is running out, but that the county closed a question in October 2025 that its own 2019 plan had opened — and closed it on a record too thin to have detected the thing that would have justified leaving it open. The same plan still says the Monument area reaches build-out with a margin under three percent, and still prints, beside that number, the warning that this groundwater “may not be economically sustainable in the long term.”

Both documents are the county’s. Only one of them was the basis for deciding nothing needed to change.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage: El Paso County Is Rewriting the Rules the Buc-ee’s Fight Turned On — how the code rewrite treats water · In Palmer Lake, Outdoor Watering Is Now One Hour a Week, by Bucket — the Stage 1 emergency and the wells behind it · Monument Town Council, August 3, 2026 — the vote to leave the Loop · Woodmoor, Explained — the district, its aquifer dependence and the Renewable Water Investment Fee · Not an HOA: The Government That Runs Much of Monument — Triview and the Northern Delivery System · What the Garden of the Gods Data-Center Fight Means for the Tri-Lakes — why water is the constraint on data centers here · Monument Town Council, July 20, 2026 — the 6-0 data-center moratorium · Palmer Lake’s November Ballot Is Set — the town’s data-center resolution and what did not reach the ballot.

The county’s own planning record: El Paso County, Water Master Plan, prepared by Forsgren Associates, February 2019 · Pete Gawda, The county’s watered-down water plan, The New Falcon Herald, April 2023 · Savannah Eller, “Report recommends no changes to water policy in El Paso County,” Colorado Springs Gazette, Oct. 21, 2025 (paywalled; cited for its existence, not its contents).

The county’s study: the presentation Bruce Lytle gave the commissioners on Oct. 21, 2025 · El Paso County, Denver Basin Aquifer Resources: Evaluation of Extent and Reliability, Moore Engineering / Lytle Water Solutions, March 2025 · El Paso County, Independent Evaluation Confirms El Paso County’s Approach to Water Reliability, Oct. 21, 2025.

State records and rules: Colorado Division of Water Resources, Groundwater Levels in the Denver Basin Bedrock Aquifers 2025, by Andrew D. Flor · the 2017 edition, which carries the hydrogeology summary · DWR, Denver Basin well permitting · Parker Water & Sanitation District v. Rein, Colo. Supreme Court, Nov. 4, 2024 · DWR, written answers to the Independent’s questions, Marie Sullivan, Sept. 7, 2026 · DWR, Cooperator Groundwater Level Measurement Program.

Groundwater age: U.S. Geological Survey, Quality of Groundwater in the Denver Basin Aquifer System, Colorado, 2003–5, Scientific Investigations Report 2014-5051 (Musgrove and others), p. 87.

The water-adequacy statute: C.R.S. § 29-20-303 and § 29-20-103.

Science and the view from outside the county: U.S. Geological Survey, Groundwater Availability of the Denver Basin Aquifer System, Professional Paper 1770, 2011 — the predictive simulations are in Chapter B, the statutory history in Chapter A · USGS, Groundwater-Level Elevations in the Denver Basin Bedrock Aquifers and Upper Black Squirrel Creek Alluvial Aquifer, El Paso County, 2021–24 · USGS, Groundwater Levels in the Denver Basin Bedrock Aquifers of Douglas County, 2011–19 and the Rural Douglas County Groundwater Network · K.M. Palko, C.A. Russell and N.J. Pieseski, Groundwater-Level Elevations in the Bedrock Aquifers of the Denver Basin Aquifer System, Elbert County, 2015–23, USGS Scientific Investigations Report 2026-5115, Jan. 29, 2026, read in full · USGS, Ground Water Atlas of the United States, Denver Basin aquifer system, from which the cross sections reproduced here are figure 81 · Christopher J. Ruybal, Terri S. Hogue and John E. McCray, Assessment of Groundwater Depletion and Implications for Management in the Denver Basin Aquifer System, JAWRA, 2019, and Evaluation of Groundwater Levels in the Arapahoe Aquifer Using Spatiotemporal Regression Kriging, Water Resources Research, 2019 · South Metro Water Supply Authority, Accomplishments · Marco Fiorito, Water Source Primer, Triview Metropolitan District.

Drought and snowpack: NRCS Colorado Snow Survey, An Early Start to Runoff and Reduced Seasonal Volume, April 9, 2026 · Colorado Water Supply Forecasts Remain Well Below Median Following Early Melt, May 8, 2026 · U.S. Drought Monitor, National Drought Mitigation Center.

Citizen monitoring: Black Forest Water and Wells Committee, formed under the Friends of Black Forest · its Well Monitoring Program and Sustainability pages, read Sept. 3, 2026.

The districts’ own records and answers: Woodmoor Water and Sanitation District No. 1, 2022 Long Range Plan Update, Section 2 (Water Resources), prepared with BBA Water Consultants · Decline Summary Spring 2026, Water Level Monitoring Program memorandum, BBA Water Consultants, June 24, 2026 · written responses from District Manager Jessie Shaffer, Sept. 3, 2026. The two documents were provided to the Independent on request and are quoted here with the district’s knowledge. · Written responses from Jonathan Rigaud, Water Manager, Town of Monument, Sept. 3, 2026.

The districts and the demand: Woodmoor Water and Sanitation District, 2026 third-quarter and second-quarter Pipeline newsletters and District Facts and FAQs · Triview Metropolitan District, Northern Delivery System · Sarah Brucker’s remarks on the limits of the state’s well-permitting discretion are from Shanna Lewis’s reporting for CPR/KRCC, April 2, 2026.

Methodology

The aquifer descriptions, thicknesses and typical well yields are taken from the Division of Water Resources’ own hydrogeology summary, which appears in the 2017 edition of its annual Denver Basin report and is dropped from the data-only 2025 edition; the storage estimate and its caveat come from the same summary. The division’s account of where the 295 million acre-feet figure came from, what it measures, and its removal from the reports was given to the Independent in writing on Sept. 7, 2026, and is quoted rather than paraphrased. Areas within El Paso County are from the U.S. Geological Survey’s 2024 study.

The findings attributed to the county’s consultant are taken from two documents the county publishes: the slide deck Bruce Lytle presented on Oct. 21, 2025, read in full, and the March 2025 Moore Engineering report, also read in full — all 79 pages — including the executive summary, the discussion of each aquifer and the well lists. The report’s hydrograph appendices carry no text layer, so the individual well charts cited here were read as rendered images rather than extracted as text.

The well ownership table is the Independent’s own work and is the one part of this article that appears in no single document. The Moore report identifies wells only by state permit number. Those numbers were matched against the Division of Water Resources’ groundwater water-level well database, queried directly through the state’s public API for El Paso County and its neighbors and cross-checked against the individual well pages, each of which carries the well name, owner, source aquifer, location, construction details and the period of record. Every match printed here was confirmed that way. The periods of record quoted in the text come from the same database.

An earlier version of this article said five of the six Arapahoe wells were named for Tri-Lakes systems, because one — permit 16248-F — does not appear in the state’s 2025 printed report, its record having ended in 2006. Querying the live database identifies it as Woodmoor W.D. #8. All six are Tri-Lakes wells.

The four Dawson wells the Independent could not originally identify were identified by their owner. Permits 12278-F, 4949-F, 9260-F and 9259-R-F appear in no state water-level record, which is why the first version of this article left them unnamed. Woodmoor Water and Sanitation District, asked about the report, supplied Table 2-12 of its 2022 Long Range Plan, which lists every district well by permit number, aquifer, construction year and operational status. That table identifies the four as the district’s wells 5, 7, 2 and 3A. The identification therefore rests on the owner’s own adopted planning document rather than on state records, and is described that way in the text.

Two anomalies in the consultant’s Arapahoe list were checked against three separate state records before being described. On permit 24030-F: Woodmoor’s 2022 plan records the well as abandoned and redrilled in 2001 as Well 10R, and the state’s well-permit database independently returns 24030-F with the status “Well Abandoned,” while its water-level database still carries the permit. On Well 11: the state’s water-level file names permit 29314-F as DB-120 Woodmoor 11, record ending 2013; Woodmoor says it holds no record of that permit and that its Well 11 is 39116-F, which appears in no state water-level record. The well-permit database returns both numbers as wells held by the district, each 2,500 feet deep, each at latitude 39.115559 and longitude −104.839179. That these are one well under two permits is the Independent’s reading of those records, is labeled as a reading in the text, and is with the district and the state.

The groundwater ages are the median adjusted carbon-14 ages published by the U.S. Geological Survey from 79 bedrock-aquifer samples collected in 2003–5. Dawson samples frequently contain a component of younger water; the ages are medians, not the age of every drop. The elevations read off the Moore hydrographs are approximate, taken from the printed charts rather than from a data table, and are given as ranges for that reason.

On the county’s 2019 Water Master Plan. The plan was read in full for this version, not only in the sections cited earlier. The Region 2 and county-wide figures are Tables 5-2, 5-3, 5-4 and 5-5 and the narrative around them in Section 5. Region 2 is the plan’s own name for the Monument area. The 2040 and build-out comparisons are against supplies connected and available in 2018, which is the plan’s stated method — it excludes supplies providers said they intended to develop because “their yield and reliability has not been realized yet” — and the article says so rather than presenting the margin as a forecast. The build-out year of 2060 is the plan’s assumption. The asterisk and its footnote appear against Region 2 in Tables 5-3, 5-4 and 5-5 as printed.

On the Black Forest Water and Wells Committee. The description of the monitoring program and the quoted positions are from the committee’s own website, read Sept. 3, 2026, and are attributed to the committee in the text rather than presented as findings. The Independent has not seen the readings themselves, has not verified the number of wells independently, and does not characterize what five years of data show. The committee’s website also lists several Black Forest developments and their water sources; those are not repeated here because they have not been checked against county records, and they are a separate story. The committee’s paraphrase of the county’s Water Master Plan prompted the Independent to read that plan in full; the quotations from it in this article are taken from the plan itself, not from the committee’s rendering, and differ from it in wording.

On the Town of Monument’s figures. Jonathan Rigaud, the town’s water manager, answered the Independent’s questions in writing on Sept. 3, 2026 and a follow-up on Sept. 4. His quoted characterizations of Well 1, of the consultant’s use of town data, and of the town’s growing reliance on the Arapahoe are printed as given. His withdrawal figures are for the water year November 2024 to October 2025 and combine the Denver and Dawson wells in a single total; they are labeled that way in the text, and his own note that a calendar-year split would be nearly the same is given alongside. They are still not set out beside Woodmoor’s calendar-year, per-aquifer figures as though the two were compiled the same way.

The town’s water levels and the state’s differ by roughly a thousand feet in the same wells, and the Independent asked about that before printing either. Rigaud confirmed the reason: the pressure transducer sits at the pump and reads the water column above it, while “the state used our data but measured from the ground surface downward.” He supplied Well 7’s construction to demonstrate it — drilled to 1,766 feet, pump set at 1,678, less the state’s 1,308-foot water level, leaving about 370 feet above the pump. Both figures describe the same water. The article uses the state’s depths for comparisons over time and the town’s water-above-pump figures where the point is what an operator can still draw on. Well 7 is the only pump setting the town supplied.

On Woodmoor’s own data. The district provided two documents in response to written questions: the Water Resources chapter of its 2022 Long Range Plan Update, an adopted planning document prepared with BBA Water Consultants, and “Decline Summary Spring 2026,” the current memorandum from the district’s Water Level Monitoring Program, dated June 24, 2026. Both were read in full. Decline rates given as annual figures are the plan’s own linear-fit estimates. Where the article describes total decline since a well came online, that figure is read from a chart in the 2026 memorandum rather than from a data table, and is given as a range for that reason; the same chart’s annual rates are computed as total change divided by years in service and differ from the plan’s linear-fit rates, so the two are not mixed. The projected dates for water levels reaching the top of well screens and the middle of the production zone are the plan’s Table 2-13, which states that they assume a linear decline, are not based on modeling, and do not account for any slowing as the aquifers change from confined to unconfined. The 2025 production figures and the surface-water share are the district manager’s, given in writing. Percentages of well screen dewatered are the 2026 memorandum’s, measured at each well’s deepest pumping level during the period covered.

Where the article sets Woodmoor’s Well 8 against Monument’s Well 7 on water standing above the pump, the two figures are from different years — Woodmoor’s 74 feet is from the 2022 plan, Monument’s roughly 370 feet from the town in September 2026 — and both wells are in the Arapahoe. The comparison is offered as an illustration of what that measure means in practice, not as a reading taken on the same day. Woodmoor’s Well 8 has not been measured by the state since 2006, so no current independent figure exists for it.

On the two U.S. Geological Survey figures. The map of aquifer extents is figure 1 of USGS Scientific Investigations Report 2026-5115 and is captioned there as modified from Paschke (2011) and Malenda and Penn (2020), both USGS publications; its red box marks that report’s Elbert County study area, not the area of this article, and the caption printed here says so. The two cross sections are figure 81 of the USGS Ground Water Atlas of the United States, HA 730-C, modified from Robson (1987); the lower section runs south to north from Colorado Springs through Castle Rock to Greeley, and its vertical scale is greatly exaggerated, as the figure states. Both are works of the federal government and are in the public domain; neither carries a copyright notice, and the Independent checked the parent report’s own statement that copyrighted items within it are marked as such. They are credited to the USGS and reproduced unaltered. The Colorado Geological Survey holds a cross section drawn along the Greeley-to-Colorado-Springs line, which would have suited this article better still, but CGS asserts copyright over its publications and no permission was sought.

The map plots each well from the UTM zone 13N coordinate the state publishes on that well’s page, converted to latitude and longitude. The state records those positions as spotted from section lines or from quarters, meaning each is accurate to roughly a quarter-quarter section — close enough to show which community a well sits in, not close enough to identify a wellhead. Roads, streams, lakes and place names on the map are OpenStreetMap data, retrieved through the Overpass API.

Figures for the Town of Monument’s wells, including the chart, are transcribed from the “Ten Most Recent Readings” tables on the state’s well pages. The state cautions that its water-level comparisons are “based on single point comparisons and may be complicated by unknown pumping schedules or other site-specific hydrologic factors,” and that caution applies to every well figure in this article. Readings are taken roughly twice a year, in spring and again in late summer, which is why a spring-to-autumn difference is a seasonal figure and not a trend.

The state’s aquifer-wide change table is reproduced as published, with one caveat stated in the article: the number of wells behind each average fell by roughly two-thirds between the 2017 and 2025 editions, and the wells are not the same from year to year.

Snowpack, runoff and drought figures are from the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s April 9 and May 8, 2026 releases and from the U.S. Drought Monitor’s published statistics for the week beginning August 25, 2026, with the comparison week beginning August 26, 2025.

The statutory text on water adequacy was read directly. The statement that the county’s 300-year rule attaches to subdivision is the planning director’s answer at a public hearing on Aug. 27, 2026, reported by the Independent at the time. How the county applies the water-adequacy statute in practice, and at which stage of review, is a question the Independent has put to the county and is not asserted here.

The material in “The View From Outside the County” was gathered specifically to test the county’s conclusion against sources with no stake in its land-use code. The U.S. Geological Survey’s Professional Paper 1770 was read in the chapters this article draws on — Chapter A for the statutory history and the hydrogeologic setting, Chapter B for the development effects and the predictive simulations — not in all three volumes; every drawdown figure quoted is from Chapter B’s predictive-simulation section, including the Laramie-Fox Hills result, which is the one aquifer where the modeled maximum is shared with the south Denver metropolitan area rather than occurring at Monument alone. The article states in its own text that the simulations are hypothetical, that they hold both 2003 pumping and 2000–03 drought-period recharge constant, that the USGS does not consider them definitive predictions, and that the model is now fifteen years old. The Douglas County findings come from the abstract and summary of the USGS 2011–19 report and from the project page for that monitoring network.

For the two Ruybal papers, the Independent reviewed only the published abstracts. Both are behind a subscription this newspaper does not hold, and the figures quoted from them — the 180-meter head change, the finding that the Denver and Arapahoe aquifers show the largest storage losses — are taken from the published abstracts, retrieved through an open bibliographic database. They are attributed in the text as coming from the abstract. Nothing about the papers’ methods or limits is characterized here, because those sections were not read.

The statement that no equivalent monitoring network exists on the Palmer Divide is an absence claim and is limited accordingly: the Independent checked the U.S. Geological Survey’s Colorado Water Science Center project listings and found networks for Douglas County, Elbert County and the Upper Black Squirrel Creek basin, and none for northern El Paso County. A network could exist under another sponsor without appearing there. The claim is now also supported from the agency’s own side: the USGS’s January 2026 Elbert County report, read in full for this article, lists the monitoring networks operating in this part of the basin as Douglas County since 2011, Elbert County since 2015 and El Paso County’s Upper Black Squirrel Creek basin since 2021, and names those three as the candidates for a future regional study. The Palmer Divide is not among them.

The Triview primer is signed by a former member of that district’s board, who states in it that he is not a hydrologist; it is quoted as a Tri-Lakes provider’s published position rather than as a technical finding.

Woodmoor’s spring assessment is quoted from the district’s own second-quarter newsletter, and its account of the Loop from the third.

The explanation of why a dry winter does not directly drain the bedrock aquifers, but does increase the load on them, is the Independent’s own synthesis of the recharge findings in the sources above rather than a statement any one of them makes in that form.

The two 2023 quotations are the New Falcon Herald’s reporting, read in full and dated in the text. The Colorado Springs Gazette also covered the October 2025 work session; that article is behind a paywall and the Independent has read only its headline, byline and photo caption, so nothing is attributed to it.

Who was asked, and who answered. The Independent put written questions to Moore Engineering, El Paso County Planning and Community Development, the Colorado Division of Water Resources, the Town of Monument, the Town of Palmer Lake, Woodmoor, Donala, Triview and an outside consultant hydrogeologist. Woodmoor, the Town of Monument and the Colorado Division of Water Resources answered in full, and their answers and documents are used throughout. The division’s questions went to Kevin Donegan, chief of its hydrogeology section, who referred them to Marie Sullivan, its compliance and communications specialist; she answered all eight in writing on Sept. 7, 2026, and every quotation attributed to the division in this article is from that reply. At the time of publication the county, Moore Engineering, Palmer Lake, Donala and Triview had not responded. Their answers will be added, and any correction made, when they arrive.

Three questions remain open and are flagged in the text where they arise: whether permits 29314-F and 39116-F are one well or two, why the state’s published file lacks recent levels for wells the districts say they report, and how the county reconciles its 2019 plan’s figures for the Monument area with its October 2025 conclusion. On the second of those, the division has given a general answer — cooperators who do not respond, wells taken out of service, and staff turnover at the participating entities — but not a well-by-well one, and the Independent has not put the specific Tri-Lakes wells back to the districts that operate them.

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The Water Under the Palmer Divide

What Is Down There

The Rules, and Where They Came From

What the County’s Own Study Found

The Question the County Asked Itself First

The View From Outside the County

Whose Wells Those Are

The Measurements the State Still Takes

The District That Measures Its Own

What the State’s Own Tally Shows

A Winter That Melted in March

Everything Asking for More

The Way Out, and What It Now Costs

What the Record Actually Shows

Sources & further reading

Methodology

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Michael Christensen

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The Palmer Divide Digest

Get the Palmer Divide Digest

What Is Down There

The Rules, and Where They Came From

What the County’s Own Study Found

The Question the County Asked Itself First

The View From Outside the County

Whose Wells Those Are

The Measurements the State Still Takes

The District That Measures Its Own

What the State’s Own Tally Shows

A Winter That Melted in March

Everything Asking for More

The Way Out, and What It Now Costs

What the Record Actually Shows

Sources & further reading

Methodology

Like this:

Related

Share this story:

Michael Christensen

Leave a comment

The Palmer Divide Digest