In this video, Felicia answers a bunch of your Colorado land buying questions! See what questions get answered in video #2!

From the video:

Hi there I’m Felicia, co-founder and co-owner at Compass Land USA.

Today we are going to answer another of your Colorado land buying questions!

If you have questions for us about one of our videos, make sure you leave a comment! I want to keep this Q&A series going.

Ok so we’re going to cover just one question today because it’s got a lot of detail to it.

Q1: Septic, Water, and Camping Restrictions for Colorado Land

John says “Hey Felicia, thank you for the fantastic input. Perhaps maybe in the future you can pick out a particular county in Colorado and mention their specific restrictions for septic, water, camping allowed or not. I think that may help some folks just for some general county guidelines. Food for thought. Thanks, John.”

Alright John, so what we’re going to do is walk through this together. We’re going to pick a random county in Colorado and figure out together what the restrictions are.

So let’s go with Park County. That might be a good one because it’s west of Denver and Colorado Springs, a lot of people like to look for land there.

The first thing I do to figure these things out in a new county is to go to Google. Google is your friend here 🙂 .

I’m going to search “Park County CO zoning ordinance”. The zoning ordinance for a county is often all-encompassing so I’ll start searching there.

I’ll click on this first result because it comes directly from the county.

Let’s go for the low-hanging fruit first. They have camping broken out on the left-hand side here. So let’s click on that. And let’s check out the camping regulations.

Looks like they have things broken out by zoning. They’re all referring to Section 5-712. Hopefully, that’s in this pdf.

By the way, if you’re not sure how to find out the zoning of a property, I have a video for that as well – you can find it here.

Ok, we got lucky it’s in the doc here. So … it looks like you CAN camp on vacant residentially zoned land for up to 14 cumulative days without a permit. It looks like they also give you the option to get a permit and then you can camp for up to 30 days consecutively, so one day after another.

Great! So we found our answer for camping.

It doesn’t look like this site has any callouts for septic or water restrictions. So I’m going to head back over to Google.

Let’s try searching for “Park County Colorado septic requirements”. This one looks promising.

Let’s try the Regulations link here.

88 pages, holy smokes. Scroll past the definitions and such here.

These are all the requirements for a septic tank. It includes permits, permit fees, repair fees, penalties, soil evaluation. It looks like this is a pretty comprehensive document.

Not as clear-cut as the camping rules. Honestly, what I would do here is call the department, the Environmental Health department, and talk to someone on the phone. I would ask them, “What do I really need to know about septic restrictions on my property?”. That would probably be easier than trying to parse through and understand an 88-page document.

Ok so the last part of the question was about water restrictions. This pdf covers wastewater, but I think John, you’re referring to drinking water. Like a well or having it hauled or something. So I’m going to roll with that.

Back to our buddy Google. So if the property you’re looking at in Park County has city or municipal water, great. You’re all set. If it doesn’t you’re either going to have to drill a well or have it delivered or haul it.

We’re going to assume that this is a more rural piece of vacant land, so now city or municipal water. If you’re wondering how to check if your property has utilities like city water, I have a separate video I’ll put the link for in the description.

So on Google, let’s search “Park County Colorado well permit”. Well permits in Colorado are issued at the state level. But sometimes the County will have information available for you.

This link looks promising.

Ok so there’s your answer, before you drill a well or have a company do it for you, you need to obtain a permit from the Colorado Division of Water Resources in Denver. And they give you a phone number to call.

The costs for the well will vary by location, the company that drills it, and how deep they need to drill to access water. I’m saying this a lot in this video, BUT we have a tutorial on how to quickly check well depth, which you can find here.

Ok, so there you have it! Google is your friend John, and we went through how to find specific restrictions for septic, water, and whether camping allowed or not.

Of course, if you don’t want to use Google, a really easy way to get answers to these restriction concerns is to call the County. I would start with the Planning and Zoning or Building and Development departments, and go from there.

This process is pretty much the same for any County, too. So it doesn’t matter if your land search is in Park County or not.

Ok! So I hope you guys enjoyed that Colorado Q&A session number 2! I thought that was kind of fun and hopefully, John catches this video to see his question get answered.

Alright if you have any questions, as always leave a comment, which means something more now that we have these Q&A series going. Give us a like and click that subscribe button so that you’re the first to know when a new property tour or land blog video comes out!

Thank you so much for watching, and I’ll talk to you soon.🙂