Buying Land in Martin County, Texas

Groundwater: a district that predates most of its Permian Basin neighbors

All of Martin County falls under the Permian Basin Underground Water Conservation District (PBUWCD), which has a longer institutional history than many Texas GCDs: it was originally chartered as the Martin County Underground Water Conservation District under House Bill 2382, passed by the 69th Texas Legislature in 1985, before later expanding its name and reach to cover most of neighboring Howard County as well. The district's central resource is the Ogallala Aquifer, the largest of the aquifers it manages, and PBUWCD conducts annual depth-to-water level measurements beginning each January specifically to track how ongoing agricultural and other pumping is affecting the aquifer over time -- a genuinely long-running, documented monitoring effort rather than a district that exists on paper only. Confirm current well-spacing rules, permitting requirements, and any exemption thresholds directly with PBUWCD before drilling a new well.

Septic permitting handled locally, in TCEQ Region 7

Martin County has no general zoning ordinance for its unincorporated area, consistent with the statewide default, but it does administer its own on-site sewage facility (OSSF) permitting process directly out of Stanton rather than deferring applicants to a TCEQ regional office -- the county's own posted septic application materials make that local role clear. For any TCEQ function the county doesn't handle directly, Martin County falls within TCEQ Region 7, headquartered in Midland. Confirm current fees, required planning materials, and site/soil evaluation steps directly with the county before budgeting a septic system.

Oil and gas: the Midland sub-basin is genuinely active here, not just historically

Martin County sits inside the Midland sub-basin of the Permian Basin, one of the most productive oil-and-gas plays in the country, and this research found evidence the activity here is current rather than a legacy boom from decades past: multiple horizontal development-well permits targeting the Spraberry Trend Area were issued for Martin County wells as recently as early 2025. On the midstream side, Brazos Midstream's August 2025-announced 300 MMcf/d cryogenic gas-processing facility build-out in the county -- bringing its combined Midland Basin processing capacity to 500 MMcf/d -- was significant enough to be publicly announced by the Governor's office, a level of state-level attention that underscores how much active investment is still flowing into the area. For a land buyer, this means it's worth checking a specific Martin County parcel's mineral-estate ownership, any existing oil-and-gas lease, and whether a pipeline or gathering-line easement already crosses the tract, rather than assuming rural West Texas land here is necessarily free of surface-use complications.

Given the intensity of agricultural pumping the PBUWCD itself monitors and the concurrent oil-and-gas activity across the county, it's also worth asking the appraisal district directly how a change in surface use -- a new well pad, access road, or pipeline right-of-way -- interacts with any existing agricultural (1-d-1) valuation on a parcel, since converting qualifying acreage away from agricultural use can trigger a rollback tax recapturing prior years' savings.