Saguache building permits

Building department

Address

504 San Juan Avenue, P.O. Box 417, Saguache, CO 81149

Phone

719-655-2232

Email

townclerk@townofsaguache.org

Office hours

Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., per the Town Hall page as preserved by the Wayback Machine (townofsaguache.org/town-hall-546.htm, captured 2025-12-10). NOTE: as of this review's live-site check (2026-07-06), the Town's website has been migrated/rebuilt on Netlify and no longer publishes this page or most of its prior content (see sources note below); hours/contact are carried forward from the last-known-good archived capture, cross-verified independently against ColoradoEnergy.org's own listed Town Clerk contact (matches exactly: 504 San Juan Ave, Saguache, CO 81149, 719-655-2232).

Website

Official site

Codes adopted

Colorado has no statewide-mandated building code edition. Under the Colorado Constitution's home-rule provisions (art. XX, home rule for municipalities since 1902; home rule for counties since 1970), building codes and zoning are an enumerated home-rule charter power, so cities and counties adopt and amend their own construction codes independently — predominantly the I-Codes, with editions and local amendments varying by jurisdiction. The one statewide floor is for energy: HB22-1362 (2022) created the Energy Code Board (jointly appointed by the Colorado Energy Office and the Department of Local Affairs) and requires that, on or after July 1, 2023 and before July 1, 2026, any municipality or county that adopts or updates a building code must adopt and enforce an energy code achieving performance equivalent to or better than the 2021 IECC together with the board's Model Electric Ready and Solar Ready Code (which includes electric-ready, EV-ready, and solar-ready provisions); from July 1, 2026 onward the floor shifts to the board's Model Low Energy and Carbon Code or an equivalent. Electrical and plumbing permitting defaults to the Colorado State Electrical Board and State Plumbing Board (within DORA's Division of Professions and Occupations) — the state issues permits and inspects statewide except in counties/jurisdictions that operate their own certified Electrical or Plumbing Inspection Program, in which case the local program has authority instead. Always confirm the currently adopted code edition, local amendments, and inspection authority (state board vs. local program) with the specific jurisdiction before submitting plans.

• NONE — ColoradoEnergy.org, a statewide Colorado building/energy code-adoption tracking directory maintained independently of any single jurisdiction, lists the Town of Saguache's Building Code status explicitly as 'No Building Codes' (coloradoenergy.org/codes/codes.aspx?City=Saguache), with a Town Clerk contact (504 San Juan Ave, Saguache, CO 81149, 719-655-2232) matching this file's independently-verified Town Hall contact exactly — confirming this listing is genuinely about the Town, not Saguache County. NOTE (2026-07-07 liveness re-check): coloradoenergy.org's HTTPS endpoint is currently hanging at the application layer, not blocked at the network layer — DNS resolves, TCP connects, and the TLS handshake completes normally (verified via a verbose curl trace), but the server accepts the HTTP request and then returns zero bytes indefinitely; plain HTTP (port 80) does eventually answer with a slow ~17s 301 redirect to the same broken HTTPS endpoint. This points to a stuck/overloaded backend on their end, not a DNS or network-path problem. Its own Wayback captures for this exact page stop at 2010, too stale to cite as current-state confirmation. The 'No Building Codes' finding is retained on the strength of the independent Town Clerk contact match above, not the ColoradoEnergy.org citation alone. Re-check coloradoenergy.org liveness in a future session.
• UPDATE (2026-07-07): the Town's Municode Chapter 18 — previously flagged as unreachable (see prior note below) — was successfully read directly via a live browser render (library.municode.com/co/saguache/codes/municipal_code?nodeId=CD_ORD_CH18BURE; the site is a client-rendered SPA that returns an empty shell to plain HTTP fetches/Wayback, which is why earlier non-browser attempts failed). 'CHAPTER 18 - Building Regulations' is codified through Ordinance No. 2023-2 (enacted March 13, 2023) and contains exactly three articles, none of which adopt a model construction code: Article 1 (Sec. 18-1-10 through 18-1-90), Dangerous Buildings — an unsafe-structure abatement/demolition procedure whose text references 'the adopted building code' only as hypothetical boilerplate (comparing a damaged structure's remaining strength to what a new building would need), never naming or adopting the IBC/IRC/any specific code; Article 2 (Sec. 18-2-10 through 18-2-80), Flood Damage Prevention — a FEMA/NFIP floodplain-management ordinance adopted under Title 29 C.R.S. authority, unrelated to general construction permitting (this corrects an earlier speculative title guess of 'Field Approval,' sourced only from search-engine snippets before this chapter could actually be read); Article 3 (Sec. 18-3-10 through 18-3-50), Manufactured Homes, Mobile Homes, Mobile Home Parks and RV Parks — zoning/prohibition rules, not a construction code adoption. This directly confirms, from the Town's own primary source rather than the third-party ColoradoEnergy.org directory alone, that the Town has NOT adopted the IBC/IRC or any other model building code.
• PRIOR NOTE (superseded by the UPDATE above, retained for audit trail): The Town's own currently codified Municipal Code (hosted on Municode Library, library.municode.com/co/saguache) does contain a 'CHAPTER 18 - Building Regulations' with at least an 'Article 2 - Field Approval' and an 'Article 3 - Manufactured Homes/Mobile Homes/Home Parks/Vacation Parks' (chapter/article titles confirmed via Municode's own site-indexed page titles across multiple independent search-engine queries). However, the verbatim text of Chapter 18 (including any fee schedule, permit-issuance procedure, or code-edition citation it may contain) could NOT be retrieved after exhausting every available recovery avenue: Municode's MunicodeNEXT platform serves this content exclusively via an authenticated Angular/API backend (library.municode.com/api and mcclibraryfunctions.azurewebsites.us/api both returned 401 Unauthorized to unauthenticated and referer-header requests); the Wayback Machine never captured real chapter content because Municode is a client-rendered SPA that legacy crawlers indexed as an empty shell (CDX lookups for library.municode.com/co/saguache* returned zero snapshots); Firecrawl (which can render JS) was unavailable due to exhausted account credits at time of this review; and Google/Bing search snippets surfaced only page titles, never body text, for this specific chapter.
• No adopted electrical code (NEC) or plumbing code (IPC) edition was found attributable to the Town specifically; per Colorado's standard structure for small statutory towns without their own trade-permitting programs, electrical and plumbing work is presumed to fall to Colorado DORA state board licensing/permitting rather than a Town-run trade-permit program, but this file does NOT assert a Town electrical or plumbing permit process given the complete absence of any Town-published fee, form, or procedure for either trade (see localAmendments).

Permit types & fees

• Building Permit

  The Town of Saguache requires a Building Permit for construction activity within town limits, per the Town's own official 'Licenses and Permits' page. Applications are handled directly by the Town Clerk or Deputy Clerk at Town Hall — there is no dedicated Building Department, Building Official, or Zoning Administrator role documented for the Town, and no confirmed adopted model building code (IBC/IRC) governs plan review; ColoradoEnergy.org's independent statewide code-tracking directory lists the Town's Building Code status as 'No Building Codes.'

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• EV Charger / EVSE Permit (Town Building Permit + State Electrical Permit)

  The Town of Saguache has no dedicated EV charger/EVSE permit type, no adopted model building or electrical code, and no dedicated Building Department — a residential or commercial EV charging station installation within Town limits is still subject to the Town's general Building Permit requirement (per the Town's own 'Licenses and Permits' page and the downloadable 'Application for Building Site Permit'), administered by the Town Clerk/Deputy Clerk, with the electrical-connection scope handled entirely by the State of Colorado (DORA State Electrical Board), not the Town. Colorado's HB24-1173 (EV Charging System Permits, effective for permitting requirements by 12/31/2025) applies only to counties with population 20,000+ and municipalities with population 10,000+ — Saguache (population 539) is well under both thresholds and is not subject to that law's streamlined-permitting/model-code/3-business-day-decision requirements.

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• Solar PV Permit (Town Building Permit, Statewide Fee Cap)

  The Town of Saguache has no dedicated solar/photovoltaic permit type, no adopted model building code, and no dedicated Building Department — but a solar installation within Town limits is still subject to the Town's general Building Permit requirement (per the Town's own 'Licenses and Permits' page and the downloadable 'Application for Building Site Permit'), administered by the Town Clerk/Deputy Clerk. Regardless of the Town's minimal local process, Colorado state law caps what ANY local government (including a small statutory town like Saguache) may charge in aggregate fees for a solar installation, and the electrical-connection scope is handled entirely by the State of Colorado, not the Town.

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