Corrections and clarifications

Correction, September 28, 2026 5:23 pm: An earlier version of this article said the Board of County Commissioners' next land-use meeting was Tuesday, Sept. 29. The Sept. 29 meeting is a regular Board meeting with no land-use items; the county cancelled its Oct. 8 land-use hearing, and the next land-use hearing is Oct. 22. The closing line has been corrected and a dated note added to the article.
Needles Highway 83 Approved 3–1, on the Criterion That Denied Walker Road

Correction, September 18, 2026 8:19 pm: An earlier version of this article said that an industrial use not already allowed by county zoning goes to the county Planning Commission for a recommendation and then to the five commissioners for a public-hearing vote, and that the decision on any data center in the Tri-Lakes would come at a county hearing. That described only the rezoning route. Under the county's Land Development Code, the planning director may determine that an unlisted use is similar to one a zoning district already allows (§ 5.3.6), and may act on most special uses administratively, elevating an application to a public hearing at the director's discretion (§ 5.3.2(H)). The Buc-ee's proposal on Monument Hill went first to the director for an administrative determination and reached the commissioners only on appeal. The error came from describing the rezoning procedure as though it were the only one. The article has been corrected to describe both routes. Its other findings are unchanged.
What the Garden of the Gods Data-Center Fight Means for the Tri-Lakes

Correction, September 15, 2026 9:44 am: <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>An earlier version of this article said that Ray Micklewright, the Gleneagle Civic Association's secretary and one of the five directors facing a removal vote, had not replied to questions from The Independent. He replied at 6:55 p.m. on September 13, some six hours after publication and well inside the 10 a.m. September 14 deadline The Independent had set. His reply was not seen before the article was updated later that evening, and he was wrongly recorded as silent in both the article and its methodology note. The error was The Independent's alone. His answers on the number of proxies he held, how he intended to vote them, and the board's conflict-of-interest reasoning have been added to the article, and the account of who had and had not responded has been corrected throughout.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph -->
Gleneagle’s Proxy Form Names a Director Facing Removal

Correction, September 10, 2026 6:23 pm: When this article was published on August 13, 2026, it described TriLakes Growth as indexing El Paso County's development review filings for the Tri-Lakes region. A defect in the tracker meant that was not fully true, and the article did not disclose it. The tracker decides whether a county filing belongs to the region by testing the location string for a Tri-Lakes ZIP code and, when there is none, by testing the parcel's map coordinates against a set of boundary boxes. Those boxes did not meet. A gap sat over the Highway 83 corridor north of Black Forest, and any filing whose parcel fell in it was classified as out of area and discarded without being stored, so nothing recorded that a decision had been made and every subsequent daily run repeated it. Eight active county files were affected: both Monument Academy infrastructure rezoning applications (P2611, seeking RS-5000, and P2612, seeking RM-12), the Monument Academy site development plan addition (PPR2621), Iron Ridge Final Plat Filing No. 2 (SF2612), Mariah Trail Filing No. 1 (PAV262), High Forest Estates Filing No. 1 (SF2512), Willow Springs Estates Filing No. 2 (VR264) and the Highview Drive right-of-way vacation (VR266). A reader searching the tracker for any of them on the day this article ran would have found nothing. All eight have been restored. The boundary has been corrected and is now covered by an automated test. The tracker also now logs every record it excludes, so a future gap of this kind surfaces within a day rather than going unnoticed for a month. The article's figures, which were accurate when published, have also been refreshed to September 10, 2026, and a dated note recording both changes has been added to the article. The defect was found because a reader sent in the two Monument Academy file numbers and asked why they were not on the site.
Three Governments, One Map: The Independent Launches TriLakes Growth

Correction, September 9, 2026 6:44 pm: An earlier version of this article attributed two remarks to Town Manager Madeline VanDenHoek: the reference to “another $32 million in storm water projects” in the section on the Federal Lands Access Program grant, and the statement that the town is already working on the emergency water connection to Triview Metropolitan District. Both remarks were made by Finance Director Jennifer Phillips, who filled the town manager’s role at the September 8 meeting. VanDenHoek was not present. The article was reported from the town’s agenda packet and from the meeting recording. The recording’s captions are generated by automatic speech recognition and carry no speaker labels. The Independent assigned the two remarks to the town manager by role rather than by voice, and did not establish who was in the room. The article has been corrected and carries a dated note.
Monument Town Council, September 8, 2026: An E-Bike Ordinance Ordered, a Drive-Thru Sent Back, a Plan Nobody Could Find

Correction, September 5, 2026 6:06 pm: An earlier version of this article, published September 5, 2026, cited Article IV, Section 5 of the Gleneagle Civic Association's bylaws in describing how directors are seated when their terms end, and pointed to the appointment of Ray Micklewright in 2026 as an example. Section 5 governs something narrower: the filling of a vacancy arising for any reason other than the removal of a director, which the remaining directors may fill for the balance of that term. Micklewright's appointment followed the mid-term resignation of Jimmy Owenby and is what that section provides for. Elections at the end of a term are governed by Article IV, Section 4, which requires nomination by a committee and election by secret ballot, and by Article III, which sets the annual meeting in October. The error was in The Independent's reading of the bylaws, not in any document supplied to it. It was raised by a reader after publication. The passage has been rewritten to distinguish the two provisions and to set out what the record does and does not show about the 2025 ballot, which carried three questions and no board election.
Gleneagle Votes September 15 on Recalling Its Entire Board

Correction, September 2, 2026 1:21 pm: An earlier version of this article, published Sept. 2, 2026, said that at least two of Palmer Lake's seven elected positions would change hands because trustee Atis Jurka was "leaving the trustee bench" to run for mayor. That was wrong. Under Palmer Lake Municipal Code § 2.04.010 and C.R.S. § 31-4-301, a trustee's seat is not vacated by candidacy for another office; Jurka keeps his trustee seat if he loses the mayoral race, and only if he wins does the seat become vacant, to be filled by board appointment until the 2028 election. The conclusion that at least two positions will change hands remains correct for a different reason — the mayor's office, which the sitting mayor is not seeking, and at least one trustee seat, since only four sitting trustees are among the ten candidates for five seats. The error arose from an inference about the effect of candidacy that was not checked against the town code before publication. The passage was rewritten and a dated correction note added to the article on Sept. 2, 2026.
Palmer Lake’s November Ballot Is Set: Two for Mayor, Ten for Five Trustee Seats

Correction, August 31, 2026 9:19 am: School Spotlight: Monument Academy, the Charter That Rebuilt Its High School, published July 19, 2026, contained two errors, both corrected on August 31, 2026. The article's fact box named Angela Duca as principal of Monument Academy's secondary campus. Monument Academy's staff directory lists Mason Young as secondary campus principal, covering grades 6 through 12, and his name appears in the leadership block on the school's own high school page. The fact box now names Mason Young. The article also said that when a grade fills, seats at Monument Academy go by lottery rather than by address or a years-deep list. That is wrong. The school's board Admission Policy 1511 fills open seats first come, first served and, when applicants outnumber seats, uses a wait list with a set order of priority: students already enrolled and moving up a grade, then children of paid Monument Academy employees, then siblings of current students, then District 38 residents, then families outside the district. The policy describes no lottery. The passage has been rewritten and now links the policy. Both errors arose the same way: the fact box and the admissions passage were written from general description rather than from the school's staff directory and its governing board policy, which are the documents of record on each point. Both were caught while reporting a companion spotlight on Monument Academy Middle School.
School Spotlight: Monument Academy, the Charter That Rebuilt Its High School

Correction, August 30, 2026 5:08 pm: An earlier version of this article said that a use marked “S” in the draft’s tables goes to a public hearing, and that special use approval is what sends a project to one. Current § 5.3.2(H) of the Land Development Code provides that any special use may be acted upon by the planning director, except those involving a conditional-development request or mineral and natural resources extraction, and that the director may elevate an application to a public hearing at his own discretion. The draft’s procedures chapter is unwritten, so neither label settles the approval path. The error came from reading the draft’s use tables without checking the current code’s special use procedure. The article also described the draft’s lighting limits as the first numeric limits of their kind in the code. Current § 6.2.3 already sets the ten-footcandle on-site maximum, the twenty-footcandle loading exception, the tenth-of-a-footcandle boundary limit and the twenty-footcandle canopy limit. What the draft adds is a color-temperature standard. Further corrections in the same pass: the classification dispute ran from the summer of 2026, not fourteen months; the gas-pump setback carries two express exceptions and covers abutting residential uses as well as districts; parking minimums do not fall for detached single-family homes; residential height changes vary by district, with residential flex at forty-five feet and residential manufactured unchanged at thirty; the cluster development option covers nine districts and three land splits, with an exception to perpetual protection for limited-term clusters; the overlay districts are carried forward with revisions rather than unchanged, and two further overlays are dropped; the design standards for the largest retail tier are two numbered requirements rather than one; the quoted commitment on meeting notice appears in the county’s August 2024 code assessment rather than its public involvement plan; and a sentence reading “It is now September” has been corrected in an article published August 30. The corrections followed an outside fact check. The article’s central findings — that the draft consolidates convenience stores into a size-tiered retail category, extends water-report triggers beyond subdivision, and omits the four legacy districts including the C-1 zoning on the Monument Hill parcel — were unchanged. A sentence that referred to the county's planning director as "he" was corrected on September 18, 2026. The director, Meggan Herington, is a woman.
El Paso County Is Rewriting the Rules the Buc-ee’s Fight Turned On

Correction, August 26, 2026 11:34 am: An earlier version of this article gave the doors-open time for the August 27 Board of County Commissioners hearing as 8:00 a.m. That time was confirmed by telephone with the El Paso County Clerk to the Board on the morning of August 26 and was accurate when published. The County subsequently set the doors-open time at 8:30 a.m. The article has been updated throughout, and a dated note added above the sources.
Thursday’s Buc-ee’s Hearing: Time, Place, and How to Take Part

Correction, August 21, 2026 8:38 pm: The statistics in this article have been revised, and the forecast tool it describes has been updated to match. Two problems were found. The analysis was run on all 62 performances the venue has held, but the resident complaint map did not exist for the first twelve of them; those dates were carrying zero submissions for reasons unrelated to sound. And a joining error credited some submissions to two consecutive shows at once, double-counting 26 of them across five dates. Correcting both strengthened the reported relationships rather than weakening them: wind direction moved from +0.42 to +0.43, and low-frequency content from +0.40 to +0.51. The complaint-centroid bearing moved from 19 to 18.8 degrees, and the genre medians and comparable-night figures changed accordingly. The article also reported a held-out correlation of +0.274 without stating how it was calculated. That figure could not be reproduced. It has been replaced with +0.42, computed by a method now described in the text.
The Independent Builds a Sound Forecast for the Ford Amphitheater

Correction, August 21, 2026 4:11 pm: <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>An earlier version of this article gave Colorado's 2025 grade-11 SAT figures as 79.0 percent in reading and writing and 43.9 percent in mathematics. Those numbers are Lewis-Palmer District 38's own. They were read from the district row of the Colorado Department of Education's summary file rather than the state row. Colorado's figures for that year were 61.5 percent and 32.5 percent.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The error understated the district. On this measure Lewis-Palmer High and Palmer Ridge High stand roughly sixteen to nineteen points above the state in reading and writing rather than level with it, and both are clear of the state in mathematics. The article drew the wrong conclusion from the comparison, calling the high-school picture “solid but unremarkable” and its margin there narrower than in grades 3 to 8. That passage has been rewritten. The table now also carries Colorado's 2024 figures, which were previously left blank.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The same table and the surrounding text described these percentages as College Board benchmark rates. They are Colorado's own met-or-exceeded measure. The state's files carry the College Board's college-readiness benchmark in a separate field and do not use it in the published percentages. That wording has been corrected throughout.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The error surfaced while reporting the 2026 results, when the state row was read again from the same file and did not match what this article had published.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph -->
Blame the Buildings? What D38’s Test Scores Actually Show — Colorado SAT comparison

Correction, August 21, 2026 1:17 pm: This article originally described the May 9, 2025 sound-threshold crossing as the second among the first three shows of the 2025 season to carry one. The City of Colorado Springs' project page records the same "extraneous factors" note against all three of those shows — April 30, May 5 and May 9. The passage has been corrected. The error came from reading the city's posted summaries for two of the three shows rather than all three.
At the Ford Amphitheater, the Complaints Track the Wind

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”