Category: Government

Six Flock license-plate cameras watch Monument’s roads, reading nearly every passing plate. What they capture, how long the data is kept, who can see it, where they are, and how the town got them.

Palmer Lake has spent a year showing what becomes of a small town when the ordinary machinery of self-government goes missing — an ethics code, a permanent administrator, a clean line between the police and the town’s payroll, and minutes that match the recording. Local watchdog groups have published a heavily documented dossier arguing that an elected trustee is being run out of office by improper means; the town’s own record and the region’s reporting fill in the rest. The striking thing is not who is right. It is how little now works in Palmer Lake to decide it.

Live, unofficial results for the El Paso County Board of Commissioners primary — Districts 1 and 5, updated through the night.

Before El Paso County’s June 30 primary: which commissioner candidates are funded by developers versus individual donors, by district — and how to vote.

Buc-ee’s lost a public vote in Palmer Lake, then bought the land anyway and turned to El Paso County — where a citizen never gets to vote, where the Board of County Commissioners has denied just two of 476 land-use decisions since 2018 — neither a housing or commercial development — and where the company is now trying to avoid even that board. An examination of eight years of votes, two decades of campaign money, and the small circle of people who keep electing one another.

The Monument use tax on the November ballot: the town’s own survey shows the 1.5% road-tax measure can fail or pass depending on the wording.

Since 2021 the El Paso County commissioners have approved every land-use application they have voted on. Follow the money, and the pattern looks less like coincidence.