Think of the Denver Basin, a groundwater aquifer beneath El Paso County, as a coffee cup with water in it. If you are looking at it from the side across the room, you can't tell how much water is in it. All you know is it's a finite amount. In El Paso County, there are 26,000 wells sucking water from the Denver Basin. No one knows how much water is being used because most of the wells do not have meters on them. We know the water will run  out, but we don't know when. In addition to not measuring how much water is being used, we're not keeping track of the water levels around the county, which we could easily do. Many water districts want to acquire surface water rights so they'll have a stable supply, but in many cases, their prospects a5re not good. Thousands of residential well owners do not belong to water districts, anyway, and they're worried they'll have no protection against dramatic drops of the water level as pumping increases each year.

A report on water in El Paso County concluded that:

"Water Plan for Private Well Owners
There are almost 22,000 individual residential wells
in the County, with approximately 19,000 of these
wells completed in the Denver Basin aquifers, while
approximately 3,000 of these wells are completed in
the eastern portion of the County in the Pierre Shale
and/or Dakota/Cheyenne aquifers. While water use
is low in these generally rural areas, the aquifers are
still experiencing water level declines due to the
E-4
pumping of others and, ultimately, it may be
necessary to drill wells to tap deeper aquifers or to
find alternate water supplies.
As current water supplies decline at these individual
residential wells, there are four potential options to
maintain water supply availability, (a) drill separate,
deeper wells, (b) install cisterns at individual homes
and have water trucked in, (c) have either individual
or collective homeowners’ associations finance the
construction of a community-type well or well field,
and/or (d) participate in a regional water supply
distribution system. Individual residential wells are
currently the cheapest source of water, since
residences typically tap the uppermost aquifer,
which minimizes the cost of drilling and the power
to lift the water from the aquifer to the residences. It
is likely that individual residential wells will
continue to be the preferred alternative for water
supplies in rural areas until such time as these
uppermost aquifers can no longer support individual
residential use."

As serious as that sounds, the report actually toon an overly optimistic view of local water supplies, because it used dated estimates for the amount of water in the Denver Basin. More recent investigations indicate there is not as much water down there as was thought in the 1980s, when certain assumptions were made.

How much is a house worth is the toilet won't flush? It sounds like a funny question, but it won't be funny to homeowners in some future time, when it becomes too expensive to pump water up for single-family domestic use. It is time to slow growth down in the county? The correct answer is we don't have enough information to answer that. And right now, county officials don't want to find out.

Douglas County, which also is highly dependent on the Denver Basin, is taking a different approach. In October 2008 the county formalized an agreement with residential well owners to work proactively to monitor well levels and encourage conservation programs.

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