When the board of the Woodmoor Water and Sanitation District sat down last September to figure out how to handle accessory dwelling units, the board president offered a forecast that had nothing to do with zoning. He said he expected interest in ADUs to cool off once people understood what they would actually cost. That comment, made in a routine meeting about tap fees and service line sizes, is the most useful piece of information a buyer or owner can have before deciding whether a Woodmoor property is a good candidate for a guest house, a rental unit, or a place for aging parents.
Colorado passed a law in 2024 requiring most jurisdictions to allow accessory dwelling units. The assumption that follows, reasonably enough, is that the hard part is now settled: if the state says you can build one, you can build one. In Woodmoor, that assumption gets you about a third of the way there.
What The State Law Actually Requires
House Bill 24-1152 took effect on June 30, 2025. It prevents local governments from banning ADUs outright, bars rules that require the primary home to be owner-occupied, and stops jurisdictions from regulating parking as a way to discourage them. It is a permission law. It tells local governments what they cannot do to block an ADU. It says nothing about who pays to run water and sewer to one, and it says nothing about what a homeowners association can require of the structure's exterior.
That gap is where Woodmoor's own governance fills in the blanks, and it fills them in three separate ways.
The Three Gates the State Law Doesn't Touch
Woodmoor is unincorporated El Paso County, which means there is no city hall issuing a single building permit and calling it done. A resident who wants to add an ADU has to clear three separate reviews. The county issues the building permit. The Woodmoor Improvement Association's Architectural Control Committee reviews the exterior design, materials, and placement on the lot. And the Woodmoor Water and Sanitation District decides how the unit connects to water and sewer, a question the district had never formally answered until the ADU applications started arriving.
That third gate is the one most out-of-area buyers never think to ask about, and it's the one with the most concrete cost attached to it.
The District's Answer: No New Tap, But a Bigger Pipe
When the water district's manager brought the ADU question to the board, he laid out the practical problems nobody had written rules for. Must an ADU have its own water and sewer tap? Does it pay a separate tap fee? After a lengthy discussion, the board settled on an approach that cuts both ways.
An ADU in Woodmoor cannot get its own separate water tap. Instead, it has to tie into the primary home's existing service line, what the district calls a daisy chain configuration. To handle the added demand, the owner has to upgrade that line from three quarters of an inch to a full inch, and pay the cost difference themselves. In exchange, the district decided an ADU will not trigger an increase in sewer fees, and it will not be charged the district's Renewable Water Infrastructure Fee, the surcharge the district uses to fund new supply projects.
So the recurring bill stays close to flat. The one-time cost of digging up and replacing a service line does not.
There's a reason the district is this careful about a few hundred extra gallons a day. Woodmoor has relied on Denver Basin aquifers for more than forty years, and those aquifer levels have been declining for long enough that the district now supplements groundwater with surface exchange credits from Monument Creek and Dirty Woman Creek. A district managing a shrinking primary water source has an incentive to control exactly how new demand gets added to the system, even demand as small as a backyard cottage. The daisy chain rule isn't bureaucratic caution for its own sake. It's a district protecting a resource it has been stretching for decades.
The Architectural Control Committee Still Has Its Own Process, and Its Own Contradiction
Clearing the water district doesn't clear the HOA, and here the paperwork gets more interesting. Woodmoor's original covenants, filed in 1971, require Architectural Control Committee approval for any exterior modification. The committee's design standards manual treats adding square footage to an existing residence, including a garage, as a Major Modification project, the category a detached ADU would likely fall under if it's built as an addition to the existing home rather than a freestanding structure. Major Modification and new construction applications need to go in at least two weeks ahead of the scheduled ACC meeting, and that same two-week minimum applies if neighboring property owners have to be notified. Most projects that reach the full committee carry an administrative fee and a compliance deposit on top of it.
A freestanding unit is where it gets complicated. The same design standards manual defines a detached shed or outbuilding as an ancillary building, caps it at 530 square feet and fourteen feet in height, and states plainly that ancillary buildings cannot be used as living quarters or for commercial use. A detached ADU is, by definition, living quarters. The state's 2024 law tells the county and the water district they have to permit ADUs. It says nothing about a private HOA's own covenant language, and nothing in Woodmoor's published architectural materials shows that language has been rewritten to carve out an exception for a detached unit. For anyone planning a standalone ADU rather than an addition to the existing house, that's a conversation to have directly with the ACC before drawing up plans, not an assumption to make from the state law alone.
What This Means If You're Weighing a Woodmoor Property With ADU Potential
For a buyer looking at a Woodmoor listing with rental income or multigenerational living in mind, the practical takeaway is to price the approval process into the timeline and the budget, not just the construction estimate.
A few things worth confirming before writing an offer:
- The size of the existing water service line. A three quarter inch line means an upgrade is coming; a one inch line already in place removes one cost line item entirely.
- Whether the property has any prior Major Modification history with the WIA. A lot with recent ACC approvals on file tends to move faster through committee than one with no paper trail.
- Realistic timing for two parallel approvals, not one. The county permit and the ACC review can often run at the same time, but the water district's line upgrade work needs to be scheduled and completed before the ADU can be occupied.
- Whether the flat recurring fee structure, no added sewer charge, no Renewable Water Infrastructure Fee, changes the long-run economics enough to offset the upfront line replacement cost. For a rental unit intended to run for a decade or more, it often does.
None of this makes an ADU a bad idea in Woodmoor. It makes it a project with a specific, knowable sequence, which is more than most buyers get from a general real estate guide written for ADUs anywhere in Colorado.
The Pattern Underneath the Policy
The state law lowered the permission barrier everywhere it applies. It did nothing to touch the internal governance of a place like Woodmoor, where a homeowners association still operating under 1971 covenant language and a special water district managing a shrinking aquifer both get an independent say before anyone breaks ground. The state told the gatekeepers they have to say yes to an ADU somewhere on the property. It didn't tell the water district how to price the connection, and it didn't tell the HOA to update language written decades before the term "accessory dwelling unit" existed in state statute.
A Few Questions Worth Answering Directly
Does an ADU in Woodmoor need its own water meter? No. Under the district's current policy, an ADU connects through the primary home's existing service line rather than receiving a separate tap or meter.
Will building an ADU raise my HOA dues? The district's policy does not add a recurring water district fee for the ADU itself. Whether the WIA's compliance deposit or administrative fee applies depends on the scope of the project as reviewed by the Architectural Control Committee.
How long should I expect the approval process to take? Plan for at least two weeks of ACC lead time for a Major Modification submission, on top of the county building permit timeline and the scheduling required for the water line upgrade. Properties with a documented ACC history tend to move faster.
If you're considering a Woodmoor property with an ADU in mind, or you already own one and want to understand what a future addition would actually require, Eric Scott works Woodmoor and the surrounding Tri-Lakes area regularly enough to walk you through the sequence before you're mid-project and surprised by it. You can learn more about the neighborhood on our Woodmoor page, or book a private consultation to talk through a specific property and what it would take to add space, income, or room for family on it.
