Corrections and clarifications

Correction, August 14, 2026 11:10 pm: This article originally misspelled Kellie Currie's name as "Kelly Curry." The name was taken from an automated transcript of the August 13th meeting and was not checked against another source before publication. It also misreported Ms Currie's public comment on the proposed Highbrook development in two respects. The article said the developer had told her she must buy her own survey because its plat crossed "a backyard she has owned since the 1980s." What she described was that the homes below the proposed development were built in the 1980s. The article also framed the encroachment as a dispute between the developer and Ms Currie alone; she says the developer has notified residents below the site that the north side of the block encroaches on property he has newly acquired. The article has been corrected and carries a dated note. Ms Currie raised all three errors with the Independent.
Palmer Lake Board of Trustees, August 13, 2026: A New Administrator, a Land Swap and a Legal Bill Past Budget

Correction, August 10, 2026 4:15 pm: The Monument Independent reported on August 10, 2026 that written comment on Buc-ee's appeal (county files ADM264 and APP261) was due by 9 a.m. on Wednesday, August 26. That was an inference drawn from El Paso County's general practice of accepting written comment up to 24 hours before a land-use hearing, and it was labeled as such in the article's methodology. El Paso County published the specific procedure for this hearing later the same day. The deadline for written evidence is noon on Wednesday, August 26, not 9 a.m. The article has been corrected. The same update replaced an attribution. The requirement that speakers register before the hearing, and the possibility that each will be limited to one minute, were first reported here as the account of Tri-Lakes Preservation, an opposition group, because the county had published no such rule at the time. The county's hearing-participation page now sets out both, and the article attributes them to the county.
Buc-ee’s Hearing Set for Aug. 27

Correction, July 31, 2026 4:02 pm: An earlier version of this article said the age-targeted premise for Home Place Ranch "lived in the marketing narrative and the hearing testimony." That understated the record. The premise also appeared in the Town of Monument's own staff report, in the official Planning Commission and Board of Trustees packets, and in the applicant's formal response to the Town's review criteria. The article has been revised to say so. The finding is unchanged, and stronger: the premise was documented throughout the approval record, and no covenant, deed restriction or condition required it to be kept — a point the Town's staff report made to the Board at the time. The article also treated the five conditions listed in Exhibit A to Ordinance 28-2019 as though they were the whole of the written approval. They were not. The Board decided the application against twelve review and approval criteria in the Municipal Code then in force, at Section 17.40.190(E). The article has been revised to reflect that, and to note that none of the twelve criteria concerns age, occupancy or amenity access. Several clarifications have been added: that the traffic studies' use of standard single-family trip rates was the conservative choice; that Lewis-Palmer School District 38 would gain per-pupil revenue from added enrollment; that the age-targeted premise applied principally to Phase 1; that the 2019 proposal voluntarily reduced Phase 1 from the roughly 400 units contemplated by the sketch plan to 300; and that HR Green was the developer's planning and engineering consultant rather than the landowner or homebuilder, with nothing in the record reviewed indicating any party acted unlawfully. The description of the entitlement has been revised to give its full sequence, from 1,019 units in the earliest 2006 sketch to 990 as revised, to the 912 approved in 2007. The caption on the site plan has been revised to identify the document precisely. These changes follow correspondence with Phil Stuepfert of HR Green.
Home Place Ranch: The Empty-Nest Promise

Correction, July 30, 2026 8:17 pm: An earlier version of this article said ACCO Engineered Systems would build a $36 million fabrication plant in Monument, and reported that no site had been identified. The company is not constructing a new building. It is taking over an existing empty warehouse in the town and fitting it out, and the $36 million capital investment covers that work. Mayor Pro Tem Steve King said the company's sign is already on the building. The error arose from the wording of the July 30 announcement by the Governor's office and the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, which described a "new fabrication facility" and a "planned capital investment of $36 million" without stating whether the building already existed. The Independent did not check that assumption with the town before publishing. The article has been corrected throughout, its social card has been replaced, and a dated correction note has been added to the article.
Monument Wins Its First Bidding War

Correction, July 27, 2026 11:27 am: An earlier version of this article compared the three districts' average teacher salaries using the Colorado Department of Education's combined figure, which blends each district's own teachers with its charter-school teachers. Charter teachers are paid substantially less, and the three districts carry very different charter loads, so the combined column is not comparable from one district to another. Cheyenne Mountain reported 115.8 charter teaching posts in 2019-20 and none by 2022-23; that change alone made its pay appear to rise far faster than it did. The comparison has been rebuilt on the non-charter column — the teachers in each district's own schools. D38's average pay is higher than we first reported, at $60,495 for 2024-25 rather than $57,582, and the gap to Cheyenne Mountain is smaller than we first reported. D38 remains the lowest-paid of the three in every year the state publishes the split, and the article's conclusion is unchanged. We have also noted that the state has since published its 2025-26 turnover figures, which show D38's teacher turnover falling from 24.4 percent to 18.8 percent — still the highest of the three districts. That change is examined in the third article in this series.
A Quiet Downgrade: How D38 Lost Its “Distinction” — teacher pay basis

Correction, July 24, 2026 7:02 pm: D38’s four-year graduation rate for the classes of 2015–18 was given as “around 95–96 percent.” The class of 2016 graduated 94.8 percent, so the range began just below 95. The figure now reads “close to 95 percent.” The article’s per-school tables used “Monument Charter Academy,” which is the name under which the Colorado Department of Education publishes the school’s data. The school has called itself Monument Academy since 2000. The tables now use the school’s own name, and the Colorado Department of Education’s entity names and school codes — Monument Charter Academy, code 2295, for the PK-5 campus, and Monument Charter Academy Secondary School, code 5093, for grades 6-12 — are given in the notes so the figures remain traceable to the source.
Blame the Buildings? What D38’s Test Scores Actually Show

Correction, July 24, 2026 7:02 pm: An earlier version of this article carried a note of caution saying that Colorado had “tightened its salary definition in the last two years,” and advised readers to treat the level of D38’s teacher-pay gap as sound but not its year-to-year movement. On review, the Colorado Department of Education’s published workbooks provide no evidence of any such change: the 2022-23 file already used the same teacher job codes — 201, 202, 204 and 206 — that the later files name in their titles, and the December 1 snapshot and the salary-divided-by-FTE calculation are documented as unchanged. D38’s teacher full-time-equivalent count also moved smoothly across the period, and the district publicly announced an average 12% pay increase for exactly the year in question. The caveat has been replaced with an accurate description of the basis. The correction strengthens the article’s finding rather than weakening it. The same version said D38’s achievement score “held near the top of the state” while its growth score fell. In fact achievement also fell, from 79.9 to 75.5 between 2023 and 2025 — less steeply than growth, and from a higher base, but it did not hold. That sentence has been corrected. The three districts’ average teacher salaries in 2016 were described as “within a couple thousand dollars” of one another. The spread was about $3,200. Corrected. Separately, the article described the figure to which the state’s 95 percent participation rule is applied as a “tested-participation rate.” That was imprecise. Colorado publishes two figures: a total participation rate, counting the students who actually sat the assessment, which for D38 was 84.2 percent in 2025; and an accountability participation rate, which counts formally excused students as participating, which was 99.7 percent. The 95 percent requirement is applied to the second. Both are now defined in the article. The article’s conclusion is unchanged.
A Quiet Downgrade: How D38 Lost Its “Distinction”

Correction, June 19, 2026 6:01 pm: An earlier version of this article stated that the El Paso County Board of County Commissioners had never denied a land-use application — a “354–0” record. In fact, the board denied two applications since November 2021: the 1825 Summit Drive two-lot rezoning (April 2023, 4–1) and Xcel’s Colorado Power Pathway 1041 utility permit (July 2025, 5–0). The original count was built from vote tallies, which record how each commissioner voted but not whether a motion was to approve or to deny; a motion to deny that passes is indistinguishable from an approval in that data. We have since reviewed the minutes of all 83 Land Use meetings since 2021 and corrected the article and its vote tracker. The correction does not change the article’s central finding: the board has not denied a single subdivision, master-planned community, metropolitan district, or developer rezoning in that period.
Permission granted: a county board that has never said no