Septic & well services in Putnam County

Working in Putnam County

A well inside the District is permitted one of two ways. The District issues the permit, or a delegated authority does. Putnam is a delegated county. The District counts 16 water well permitting delegation agreements with local health departments, and it names Putnam in that group. Two other arrangements sit beside those. One is an agreement with the city of Jacksonville. The other is a memorandum of understanding with the Suwannee River Water Management District. What the delegation covers is stated plainly: the permitting of all wells located in the St. Johns District and not permitted by the District. So the short distance to the District’s Palatka headquarters changes nothing. A delegated application belongs at the county health department.

Four kinds of well never move to the county. Delineated-area wells stay with the District. Florida law treats a delineated area as one with known groundwater contamination, or as vulnerable. Additional water well construction requirements are in place there, to protect public health and groundwater resources. The District permits those wells in counties that do not regulate them, and its list of such counties includes Putnam. Size keeps a well with the District too, at six inches or greater in outside diameter measured at land surface. Gang wells stay as well. Two or more wells coupled together with a common header or manifold make a gang well. The District keeps it where the total nominal casing sizes equal six inches or more and the purpose is water rather than dewatering. Geothermal is the fourth kind. The District keeps open-loop geothermal wells six inches or greater in outside diameter at land surface, and all closed-loop geothermal wells.

The septic permit lands in the same office, for a different reason. DEP sorts Florida into two tables of counties for onsite sewage permitting. Putnam sits in the table where the Environmental Public Health Program of the local county health department issues the permit. The Putnam health department explains the arrangement on its own page. DEP took over implementing the state statutes and regulations for these systems on July 1, 2021. Permitting did not follow. Under Florida’s Clean Waterways Act of 2020, the county health department offices continue to do the permitting and inspection for septic tanks. DEP has begun taking counties over. It says it permits onsite systems in Northwest Florida and Marion County. Putnam is not one of them, and DEP ties the timing for the remaining 50 counties to legislative approval.

DEP publishes how many onsite system permits each county issues. New construction permits in Putnam County ran 153 in 2018-19, 162 in 2019-20, 340 in 2020-21, 371 in 2021-22 and 371 in 2022-23. Repair construction permits over the same five years ran 204, 190, 230, 229 and 211. New permits more than doubled across that span. Repair permits stayed in a narrow band. DEP’s cumulative counts are 42,271 new permits from 1971 to 2023 and 4,956 repair permits from 1991 to 2023. These are permits issued, not systems in the ground. DEP footnotes the new-construction table to say those counts do not reflect systems removed from service. Both tables run on state fiscal years, July 1 to June 30. The series stops at fiscal 2022-23.

Putnam has six Census places. Five are incorporated, per the Census Bureau’s Vintage 2024 subcounty file. They are Palatka city, Crescent City city, Interlachen town, Pomona Park town and Welaka town. The sixth is census-designated: East Palatka, the only one in the county, on the USGS GNIS Census-places layer. Palatka is the county seat as well. The city’s own data sheet dates both facts to January 8, 1853, the day Palatka was incorporated and the day it was established as the seat. Names such as Satsuma and San Mateo are not Census places at all. The U.S. Geological Survey carries them as populated places in Putnam County. That makes them unincorporated communities, and it says nothing about how large they are.

Putnam County is a stakeholder in the Lower St. Johns River Main Stem BMAP. That basin management action plan was published in June 2025. So are the City of Palatka, the City of Crescent City, the Town of Pomona Park and the Town of Welaka. The plan gives “Putnam County Non-MS4” its own nitrogen and phosphorus load allocation. The plan covers the portion of the St. Johns River between the mouth of the Ocklawaha River and the Atlantic Ocean. That is a drainage area of 2,750 square miles. The plan names Palatka among the major population centers in that reach. The boundary is drawn by drainage, not by county lines. So a Putnam address is not inside the area, or outside it, just because it is in Putnam. Whether a given lot sits inside the boundary is a question for DEP. Inside a BMAP area, the septic rule changed on July 1, 2023. From that date, section 403.067, Florida Statutes, applies. It prohibits a new onsite system where connection to a publicly owned or investor-owned sewerage system is available. Where it is not available, a lot of one acre or less must have an enhanced nutrient-reducing system, or another that achieves at least 65 percent nitrogen reduction. Where central sewer is unavailable, the owner must install one of two things. One is a DEP-approved enhanced nutrient-reducing system that achieves at least 65% nitrogen reduction. The other is a wastewater system that achieves at least 65% reduction.

What lies under the west side of the county was mapped by USGS in a 1992 report, Water-Resources Investigations Report 91-4180. Its subject is the Lake Barco basin, in the Interlachen Sand Hills of western Putnam County. The surficial aquifer system there sits in undifferentiated surficial deposits. Those deposits are generally clayey sands to sandy clays. They run from land surface to depths of about 50 to 100 feet. Under them lies the intermediate confining unit, the Hawthorn Group, about 50 to 100 feet thick. Under that lies the Upper Floridan aquifer, in the Ocala Group. The report describes an approximately 200-foot-thick sequence of limestone and dolomite. It calls that the principal water-bearing zone in western Putnam County. It also found that downward hydraulic gradients dominate between these units. That makes the region an important recharge area to the Upper Floridan aquifer. These are 1992 findings for one study basin in the west of the county, not for the river side of Putnam and not for any one property. The 50 to 100 feet is deposit thickness, not a water-table depth.

The Florida Department of Health in Putnam County also tests private well water samples. A special sample bottle has to be picked up from its Environmental Public Health office first. There is a charge for the bottle and the test, paid when the sample is submitted. That is the county’s program, on the county’s terms. It is not Gator’s.

Gator’s work in Putnam County divides along the same two lines as the permits. Septic: tank pumping, inspections, new tank installation, drain field repair and replacement, and septic pump repair. Wells: pump repair, pump replacement, pressure and bladder tanks, water testing, and inspections for a home sale. The office is open Monday through Friday, 8:00am to 6:00pm. Gator holds FDEP Business Authorization SA0222129 and licence CUC1225779.

Towns and communities in Putnam County

We work across the county. The places with a page of their own are linked; the rest are served the same way.

Palatka, Crescent City, Interlachen, Pomona Park, Welaka, East Palatka.