Eight Hours at Centennial Hall: How Buc-ee’s Won Its Appeal

The Board of County Commissioners voted 4-1 on Thursday to allow a 74,000-square-foot travel center at Interstate 25 and County Line Road. The motion that carried never found the project to be a convenience store. It found it similar enough to other things the district allows — and that distinction governs everything that follows.

The agenda item was called twenty minutes and forty-three seconds into Thursday’s meeting and disposed of eight hours, twenty minutes and thirty-four seconds later. In between, El Paso County’s five commissioners heard from their own planning director, from a consultant for Buc-ee’s EPCO, LLC, and from something close to a hundred and sixty residents who had come to say no. Two people spoke in favor. Four had registered to.

The Board then answered a single question of classification and, in the same motion, closed what may prove to be the last public hearing this project receives.

The Room

Centennial Hall reached capacity. Everyone admitted wore a red lanyard, and the chair asked anyone who had got in without one to leave before security obliged them — “this is not an R-rated movie and you’re not 17,” Carrie Geitner said, in the tone of someone describing a teenager sneaking into a cinema.

The county had built machinery for the day. The speaker list and running order were published online, divided into those registered in support and those registered in opposition, with supporters called first. Speakers waited upstairs in what the county called a “speaker queuing area,” and were told to watch the published list and their phones and to come down when roughly thirty-six names remained ahead of them. Staff escorted them in panels to three microphones and rotated between them. “One, two, three,” Geitner said, explaining the rotation. “I think we can all at least count to three.”

Then she set the clock. The county’s published guidance had warned that speakers “may be limited to one minute.” Faced with the turnout, the chair went the other way, if only slightly: “Based on the number of people here today, I have decided that we will do one and a half minutes per speaker.”

Public testimony ran from two hours into the meeting until just short of seven — four hours and fifty-six minutes, three-fifths of the entire item, broken by an hour for lunch. By The Independent’s count roughly 160 people spoke against the appeal.

The county had said in advance, and repeated afterwards, that none of that arithmetic counted. Because the proceeding was quasi-judicial, its guidance ran, the Board “must base its findings on specific, factual evidence instead of public popularity,” and the number of people testifying either way “will not outweigh evidence that the project meets the legal criteria for approval.” The post-hearing release put it flatly: “As legally required, the decision was not based on the number of people supporting or opposing the proposed use.”

The two who spoke for it

Supporters went first, and there were fewer of them in the room than on the list. Matt Dunston, the second of the two and the one in the Buc-ee’s shirt, told the Board that four people had signed up in favor and two had appeared. “It’s hard to muster the courage,” he said, before thanking the commissioners for running a meeting he could actually speak at: “This is tough. At Palmer Lake we got shouted down. Couldn’t even speak.”

The first supporter, a Monument resident of twenty-six years who owns two nearby properties, made the argument that anyone who bought land near that interchange knew what the zoning permitted. He had walked the parcel himself, he said, and understood it was C-1 and that something large would eventually go there. His own thought at the time, he told the Board, was: “This looks like a good place for a Target.”

The neighborhood, named

The opposition led with the presentation this newspaper previewed on Wednesday. It ran as designed: numbered segments, one speaker each, delivered in sequence and split across the lunch break — “that concludes the first half of our presentation,” the last speaker before the recess told the Board.

The first segment did what the document promised. Twenty-seven years ago, the speaker said, the county drew a sub-area of roughly 1,560 acres around the County Line Road interchange and called it Elephant Rock, bounded by the county line, the interstate, Monument and Palmer Lake. A planning department map printed on July 26th 1999 names the places inside it — Meirs, Beacon Heights, Varner, Colorado Estates, Wakonda Hills. The site sits at its northeast corner. The applicant’s filing, the speaker noted, uses the word neighborhood throughout and names none of them.

The second segment drew the distinction the whole argument rested on: the applicant defines the neighborhood by three roads, and two of them connect the community while the interstate does not.

Others in the sequence went at the arithmetic. One speaker took the applicant’s most-repeated figure — that the land has been zoned commercial for 68 years — and turned it round: “For 33 of those 68 years, fuel sales were prohibited entirely, and for the last 35 they have only been included as a neighborhood” use. Another noted the traffic study takes in no traffic to or from Monument Hill Road, where Palmer Ridge High School sits, which is an odd omission for a store said to serve the immediate area. A speaker who had gone to look at the Johnstown store reported that “convenience is a sixth-grade vocabulary term,” and asked the commissioners whether they were smarter than a sixth grader.

Ninety seconds, and a promise

The most quoted ninety seconds of the day belonged to a child who needed a wooden box to reach the microphone.

“My name is Benji Peters,” he began. “Madam Chair, in 2024 you made a promise that all projects you approve would have to provide you with proof and evidence that they have 300 years worth of water. Buc-ee’s has not given any evidence that they have 300 years of water. And if you approve them as a convenience store today, they won’t ever have to.”

“They are not following the rules. You made a promise. My parents have taught me that it is important to keep our promises. I am counting on you to do the right thing.”

The room’s reaction was loud enough that the chair shouted over it: “Ladies and gentlemen, please keep order in the chamber.”

Four and a half hours later, Applegate asked Herington whether the county’s 300-year water rule applies to commercial development. She answered that the rule attaches to subdivision, and would not be triggered by developing this existing legal parcel without one. On the narrow point, the ten-year-old was right: classified as an allowed use, the project never reaches the test.

Among those opposed was John Suthers, the former mayor of Colorado Springs and former attorney general of Colorado. He disclosed at the podium that his law firm represents landowners near the site who oppose the project, and said he was appearing on his own volition as someone who regards Greenland Ranch as “the best open space project in the history of Colorado,” preserving 21,000 acres “of scenic prairie to peak vistas from dense urbanization.”

“It would be one thing if what was proposed was truly a convenience store with a small square footage imprint that catered to local residents seeking necessities like milk and bread,” he said. “But by its own description, Buc-ee’s is a travel center, a combination restaurant, department store and huge gas station with 120 pumps.”

Other speakers worked the same seam with less lawyering. A resident who had driven up to see the Johnstown store said that approaching it at night “we thought it was an airport. It was that bright at five miles.” Another, addressing the chair’s later analogy about dogs, offered her own: “A skunk is still a skunk. A beaver is still a beaver.”

Geitner intervened with the room through the day. The clearest instances are unambiguous. Before lunch, with the noise rising while she was still speaking: “You’re getting very loud and I’m still speaking. Man, it’s like a high school classroom in here. I used to teach high school and that’s what the kids would do before I could dismiss class.” During the applicant’s rebuttal: “Ladies and gentlemen, come on. We’re all adults here. Let’s follow the rules. Please don’t call out and interrupt.” And after Wysong announced he would vote no, over the reaction: “Ladies and gentlemen, please — you know the rules. You can do it. I believe in you.”

Two Paths to Yes

Meggan Herington, the county’s executive director of planning and community development, opened by explaining why her office had not answered the question itself. On July 1 she had found she could not determine whether the proposal met the Code’s definition of a convenience store, or whether it was sufficiently similar to another use the obsolete C-1 district allows.

She set the inquiries out in sequence. First, does the project fit an existing defined use? If not, does it satisfy Section 5.3.6(C)(1), which permits an unlisted use only where its “function, performance characteristics, and location requirements” are consistent with the purpose and description of the district and it is “compatible with the uses specifically allowed in the district, and similar in characteristics such as traffic and parking generation, noise, glare, vibration, and dust.”

The criteria are conjunctive. The applicant carries the burden on both. Herington’s presentation recommended neither approval nor denial; it put the unanswered question to the elected board the Code names the “ultimate interpreter” of its own text.

Nina Dossey of Vertex Consulting Services presented for Buc-ee’s and argued the two paths in the alternative. On the first, the Code’s definition enumerates goods the store sells — groceries, ready-to-eat food, over-the-counter drugs, sundries — expressly contemplates the retail sale of gasoline, and sets no ceiling on floor area, fuel volume or where customers come from. On the second, the project is comparable to, and in traffic terms less demanding than, combinations of general retail, restaurants, hotels and indoor amusement that could occupy the same parcel.

On rebuttal she addressed the charge that this is a filling station wearing a smaller label. Less than half of the company’s sales come from fuel, she told the Board: “I know people might believe that that’s the case, but when you look at their books, it is not. Their primary purpose is actually providing convenience goods.”

Vice Chair Lauren Nelson’s motion took the second path, and she said so before making it. Having noted that the Board had heard the project called a gas station, a convenience store, a travel center and a filling station in the course of a day, she went on: “I’m going to focus more on the pathway of whether it meets similar use to listed allowed uses within the C-1 zone district.”

Geitner said later that she believed both tests had been met. Which finding the county actually adopted turns on the written resolution — and as of Aug. 28 the posted approval resolution remained unsigned and still carried bracketed alternatives.

How the Five Voted

Lauren Nelson (District 5, Vice Chair) rested on similarity. She had staff scroll slowly through the Code’s own use table on the screens, and through the applicant’s hypothetical build-outs of the parcel — a general retail concept, a supercenter, a theater. She noted the district states no size limit and that a hotel is an allowed use in it, which “points to the intention of travelers being a permitted use.” She observed that “this 30 acres has been zoned commercial for 68 years,” and framed the balance as one of property: the role of government, she said, is respecting private property rights, and a neighbor’s claim to control another owner’s land or preserve a view is “not in the constitution.”

Holly Williams (District 1) cast the vote that decided it and said she had “gone both ways” in the discussion. She conceded the scale — “we have never dealt with a store this big” — and said the size had troubled her. What tipped her was the shape of the parcel: an earlier configuration had included a small corner zoned CC, and the current concept excludes it, leaving the development wholly on C-1 ground. “The key picture that probably leads me to vote yes is this cutout of the corner property. I would say it needs to be a full rezone if that corner wasn’t pulled out.” She asked the record to reflect that she does not want traffic turning left out of the site onto Beacon Lite Road, while acknowledging access was not before the Board — and that she may not be there when it is: “I may not be here anymore.”

The remark is not idle. Williams represents District 1, which contains the site, and is term-limited. The site development plan will be reviewed under a board she will have left.

Carrie Geitner (District 2, Chair) spoke last and longest, and built her reasoning on reading the words as drafted. She opened with an analogy about being asked to picture a dog — everyone imagines a different animal — which is why a code must be read as written rather than as imagined. “We can’t change the rules mid-game if we’re not getting our desired outcome.”

Her strongest textual point came from the dissenting commissioner. “I appreciate the question from Commissioner Wysong and the information from staff that the word ‘small’ was removed from this the last time they did the code,” she said. “If there was any doubt that that was the intent — and again I still believe we are directed to read this literally — they took that word out. If they had wanted those words to literally say ‘small use’, they would have left that in.”

She answered Suthers directly, without naming him. “I heard things like ‘common sense tells you’, but that tells me not to look at the words, which is what the code lawfully requires of me.” And: “If you want to know if this is a convenience store, ask Google. But that’s not what we do here. That literally would not be the lawful way of viewing this application.”

She also cited the Fuel B’s convenience store, approved while she and Williams were on the Board: “There isn’t a residential area around Fuel B’s, and yet it was approved as a convenience store under this same definition.” A speaker during testimony had put the same store to the opposite use, telling the Board that “even the small 3,500-square-foot Fuel B’s convenience store had to be rezoned to a CS zone, which is for large commercial purposes.” Both statements are in the record; the resolution does not reconcile them.

Several of her remarks were addressed to the audience rather than to the record. She said many in the room had not understood what a quasi-judicial hearing was before becoming involved, and that she could count many times when what the Board was actually deciding “was just not accurately represented.” She closed: “I believe you all came here in good faith, and I came here today in good faith as well.”

Bill Wysong (District 3) dissented on the burden. “The burden of proof still remains on the applicant. I do not believe they met that burden of proof.” He answered the hotel comparison by pointing at the district’s 30-foot height cap, which “automatically takes a whole bunch of these out of consideration,” and objected to reasoning from conceptual site plans that had been through no drainage or engineering review. On the Code’s undefined term he offered his own reading: a neighborhood “usually revolves around the elementary school … it does not traverse miles.” Then, of himself and the commissioner from Fountain: “I live in Mountain Shadows, and Cory lives in Fountain. We’re neighbors. I don’t agree with that.”

He also used his last turn on something no one else raised, and it may matter more than the vote. The county is drafting a new land development code, he told the room, and it is out for public comment. “It’s a shameless plug. Participate.”

Cory Applegate (District 4) seconded the motion and voted for it. His remarks at the close were thanks to staff, to law enforcement and to those who had presented. He gave no stated reasoning for his vote.

Before the roll was called, Wysong asked the chair to spell out what a yes and a no would mean. “A yes is to approve the appeal,” Geitner said. “A no is to not approve the appeal.” The clerk first announced the result as four to zero, then corrected it to four to one.

Who Asked the Questions

Across the eight hours the Board put twenty-one distinct substantive questions to staff and to the applicant. The Independent consolidated repeated follow-ups into single lines of inquiry and excluded logistics, routine chairing, rhetorical questions during deliberation, and anything unrelated to the merits.

Wysong accounted for thirteen of the twenty-one — very nearly sixty-two percent of the Board’s substantive questioning, and more than the other four commissioners combined. His subjects ran from the Fuel B’s precedent and the Gas Station definition to pedestrian and bicycle connections, the boundaries of a neighborhood, traffic, impervious surface, drainage, the status of hypothetical development plans, the difference in scale between C-1 and C-2, and whether earlier county interpretations bound this Board. One of those questions produced the “small” finding the chair then used to decide the case against him.

Williams asked three: about Palmer Ridge High School students, about what “neighborhood” means geographically, and about the ownership and zoning of the excluded CC corner. Nelson asked two: why Buc-ee’s had not simply pursued a rezoning after its 2024 early-assistance discussions with the county, and what the later site-development process would review. Geitner asked one substantive question, on whether multiple restaurants or other principal uses could occupy the parcel.

The Seconder’s 195 Words

Over eight hours and twenty minutes, Commissioner Applegate spoke about 195 words on the merits of the application he seconded and voted for.

That is the whole of it. His total across the item comes to roughly 247 words: the 195, plus a procedural “Second” and a roll-call “Aye,” about 31 words of closing thanks to staff, law enforcement and participants, and about 19 of acknowledgment or filler.

The figure is easier to hold against something. Every member of the public was allotted ninety seconds. Benji Peters used his to deliver a complete argument — the promise, the rule, the consequence of classifying the project as an allowed use — in about a hundred words. Applegate, who sat through all 160 of those turns and had no clock on him at all, spoke roughly twice what the ten-year-old did.

The two subjects he did raise were both worth raising. The first was what share of customers would come from the immediate area — Dossey initially said she did not have the figure, then said on rebuttal that comparison-store data suggested about fifteen percent would come from the same zip code. The second was whether commercial development must satisfy the county’s 300-year water-supply rule; Herington answered that the rule attaches to subdivision and would not be triggered by developing this existing legal parcel without one. Between them they account for two of the Board’s twenty-one substantive question topics.

What he never did was give a reason. He did not explain how the project satisfied the convenience-store definition, or the similar-use criteria, or any provision of the Code. That matters beyond manner, because of what a quasi-judicial proceeding produces. The Board was not taking a poll; it was required to reach findings under stated criteria, on a record, in a decision a court could later review only by reading what the Board said. Four of the five set out a basis for their votes — similarity, the excluded corner, the deleted word, the burden unmet. The fifth seconded the motion, voted for it, and left no reasoning in the record at all.

What C-1 Caps

Much of the public argument has assumed that a building of this size cannot lawfully sit on this land. Read against the Code, that is not so, and the point is worth stating plainly because it explains why the classification question carried the whole hearing.

C-1 is an obsolete district. No land has been rezoned into it since 1991 and none will be, but land already carrying it remains governed by its provisions, and its stated purpose is simply to provide for “commercial activities.” Table 5-1 lists convenience stores, restaurants, general retail, stores, hotels, car washes, indoor amusement, bars and liquor stores among the allowed uses. Gas stations and truck stops are not listed at all, which under the Code’s own instruction means they are not allowed. That omission is precisely why the label mattered.

What the district does not do is cap floor area or lot coverage. Table 5-5 leaves both cells blank for C-1. The building would cover about 5.5 percent of a parcel of roughly 30.8 acres.

Three of those standards are worth drawing out.

Height. The Code caps C-1 structures at 30 feet, the lowest of any commercial district in the county — 40 in CC, 45 in CR and CS, 50 in C-2. The applicant’s elevation labels an overall high point of 38 feet 4 inches and does not identify the Code-measured roof height. For a flat-roofed building, height is measured to the highest roof surface, while cupolas, chimneys and similar features normally installed above a roof may be exempt. If the 38-foot element is such a feature above a roof no higher than 30 feet, the building complies. If it counts as building height, the Director’s administrative relief tops out at 20 percent — 36 feet — and the rest would have to come from a redesign or a dimensional variance from the Board of Adjustment.

The sign. The proposed freestanding sign is 30 feet tall with a face of 122.65 square feet, far short of the 75-foot pylons the chain uses elsewhere. The Code’s freestanding-sign allowance turns on the size of the lot, not on the number of tenants: a commercial parcel of 20 acres or more may carry a sign of 5 square feet per acre, or 1 square foot per 2 linear feet of frontage, up to a maximum of 120 square feet. Where the sign sits along an arterial or expressway identified in the county’s Major Transportation Corridors Plan, the allowance rises to 125 percent of that figure — 150 square feet. On height, a freestanding sign adjacent to or within 300 feet of a grade-separated intersection or an interstate highway may rise to the district maximum, which in C-1 is 30 feet. The proposed sign therefore sits exactly at the height ceiling and just above the base area cap, and the arterial designation is what decides whether it fits as drawn. A separate gate applies regardless: signs along the interstate system are prohibited unless they conform to Colorado’s Outdoor Advertising Act, and a state permit may be required before the county issues its own.

Lighting and hours. The Code holds on-site lighting to 10 foot-candles, illuminance beneath a fuel canopy to 20, and light at a property line adjacent to residential property or a public right-of-way to 0.1. Parking-lot poles may not exceed 20 feet. The applicant’s photometric concept is drawn to those numbers — 3,000-kelvin full-cutoff fixtures, a stated parking maximum of 9.4 foot-candles, about 17 under the canopies, no more than 0.1 at the line — though none of it has been reviewed. The Director may also approve an alternative lighting proposal that departs from the standards, administratively. C-1 sets no closing time, and Buc-ee’s says its stores run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. One provision is worth noting for what it will not do: the Code requires exterior lighting to be reduced, put on motion sensors or switched off during a use’s non-operating hours. A business with no non-operating hours never reaches the requirement.

Noise is governed not by the Land Development Code but by county ordinance 02-1, which sets the same limits for a commercial area as for residential property — 55 dB(A) between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., 50 dB(A) overnight — measured at or within the boundary of the property from which the complaint is made. Violation is a Class II petty offense: $30 for a first offense, $60 for a second within thirty days, $300 for each one after that.

Near the Top of the Chain’s Own Scale

The proposal is not merely larger than a neighborhood convenience store. It is within two percent of the largest one that exists.

Buc-ee’s identifies its store in Luling, Texas, as the world’s largest convenience store, at 75,593 square feet. The County Line Road proposal is 74,000 square feet — 1,593 square feet smaller, or 97.9 percent of the record holder. It is also, very nearly to the foot, the chain’s built Colorado prototype: the approved plan set for Buc-ee’s #60 in Johnstown records a 74,000-square-foot building, 116 fueling positions and a high point of 38 feet 5 inches, against 74,000 square feet, 120 fueling positions and 38 feet 4 inches here. Johnstown’s approved impervious cover, 58 percent of its lot, sits just above the 56.8 percent proposed on Monument Hill.

Set against the county’s own history the comparison is starker. The staff exhibit attached to the July determination catalogued 26 convenience-store and gas-station approvals countywide. The largest carried 5,550 square feet of floor area; the highest pump count was 18; and, as the determination stated, there are no previous convenience-store approvals within the C-1 district on record at all.

Analysis: Where the Decision Is Exposed

The Board has wide latitude to interpret its own Code, and the absence of a size cap is a genuine argument, honestly made. Four features of Thursday’s decision are nonetheless likely to draw scrutiny.

The motion did not name a comparator. Nelson moved to allow the project as similar to permitted commercial use. Section 5.3.6(C)(1) asks whether an unlisted use is compatible with, and similar to, the uses a district specifically allows. Commercial activity in the abstract is not one of them. Which allowed use the integrated operation resembles is the question the criterion poses, and the motion did not answer it.

Absence of a cap is not a finding. That the Code sets no floor-area or pump limit disposes of one objection. It does not discharge the affirmative requirement to examine function, performance characteristics, location requirements and operational effects. Scale can matter through traffic, parking, noise, glare and intensity even where it is not independently prohibited — and Section 1.6.7 makes “character, descriptor, and intensity” part of the classification test by its own terms.

Later compliance is a different question from present similarity. Every project must eventually satisfy lighting, drainage, parking and noise standards. Section 5.3.6(C)(1) asked the Board to decide whether this use’s effects resemble those of allowed C-1 uses before any of those reviews happen. An assurance of future compliance answers a question that was not being asked.

The traffic comparison does not say what it was cited for. The applicant’s own trip-generation memorandum reports approximately 22,150 total weekday trips for the project against 20,812 for its hypothetical supercenter — that is, 1,338 more trips, not fewer. The project performs better only in the PM peak hour it emphasizes: 1,679 against 1,763. The same study reports 3,322 modeled net-new roadway trips after diverted-link assumptions, which measures something different from total activity at the site. Meanwhile comparison-store data put more than 85 percent of customers outside the local area, and the study assigns roughly 93 percent of the site’s modeled traffic to Interstate 25. None of that is disqualifying. It does sit awkwardly beside a definition written around an establishment that exists to sell “to the neighborhood in which it is located.”

The written findings will matter more than the tally. As of Aug. 28 the posted approval resolution was unsigned and carried bracketed alternatives. The certified Decision 26-260 will show whether the Board adopted the literal convenience-store reading, the similar-use reading, or both — and a reviewing court would be confined to what that document and the hearing record say.

Where the Water Goes

Two water questions ran through Thursday, and only one of them now has an answer.

The first is supply. It was answered from the dais: Herington told Applegate that the county’s 300-year rule attaches to subdivision, so a project built on this existing legal parcel does not reach the test. That is the answer a ten-year-old was told, in effect, four and a half hours after he asked for it.

The second question is where the water goes once it lands on the site, and it has not been answered at all, because the document that would answer it does not yet exist.

The parcel today sheds rain into grass. The submitted concept puts roughly 17.5 acres under building, canopy and pavement — 56.8 percent of the site. Johnstown’s built lot, for comparison, runs at 58 percent.

The applicant’s own ecological assessment traces the existing route. Runoff crosses the site in an ephemeral channel and swales, passes beneath Interstate 25 through a 24-inch culvert, and enters an unnamed tributary that runs to Carpenter Creek, then East Plum Creek, and eventually the South Platte. The county reached a compatible finding reviewing the neighboring Monument Ridge East plan, where flows were recorded passing under County Line Road into Douglas County. The same assessment found no wetlands or jurisdictional waters on the Buc-ee’s parcel and predicted no downstream effects on species — conclusions of the applicant’s consultant, not determinations by any agency.

This is the landscape the conservation argument has been about, though not quite in the way the shorthand suggests. Greenland Open Space, the public portion, lies principally west of the interstate; the drainage east of it appears to enter the privately owned and permanently conserved Greenland Ranch. Carpenter Creek and East Plum Creek have long been identified as wetland and habitat corridors, and a wildlife assessment in the appeal record places a Colorado Parks and Wildlife aquatic High Priority Habitat roughly a quarter of a mile downslope, naming stormwater runoff and fuel-related pollutants as the mechanism of concern. Establishing that any particular reach crosses any particular protected parcel would take an engineered drainage report and a mapping overlay. Neither exists in the public record, and this newspaper makes no such claim.

What the appeal file holds is conceptual detention ponds. A drainage report is a different document, and it is not there yet: no proposed legal outfall, no release rates, no downstream culvert and channel capacities, no emergency overflow routing, no erosion control, and no water-quality treatment for the petroleum, sediment and deicing chemicals a fueling facility of this size sheds. The county’s Drainage Criteria Manual and Engineering Criteria Manual require an adequate legal outfall and a showing that development will not create adverse downstream effects.

That showing will be made. Under the process the county described on Thursday, it will be made to staff — not to the Board, and with no appeal to the Board.

What Happens Next

The appeal file now shows the matter closed and approved. No Buc-ee’s site development plan had been filed with the county as of Aug. 28.

The next step is that plan, and the county has been unusually direct about how it will be handled. Staff will review lighting, landscaping, parking, traffic, required roadway improvements and other technical design requirements, and “if the site development plan satisfies all applicable technical design requirements, it will be approved administratively.” Then the sentence that answers the question residents have been asking since June: the plan “does not return to the Board of County Commissioners for approval, and there is no appeal of that administrative approval to the Board of County Commissioners.”

That is a change in the record. Through August, opponents argued the remaining approvals were effectively administrative and would give the public no further hearing, and the county declined to adopt the characterization. It has now adopted it in writing.

A further public hearing would require Buc-ee’s to ask for something staff cannot grant: a dimensional variance beyond the Director’s 20 percent administrative relief, a rezoning or planned unit development, a subdivision, or another approval the Code routes to the Board of Adjustment or the commissioners. A Master Sign Plan is a possible route to greater sign latitude and one that can reach the Board — though the Code also lets the Director approve one administratively where the underlying application is administrative. On water, Herington’s answer stands: the 300-year supply rule attaches to subdivision, and the applicant says none is needed.

Two outside processes could open doors, but only if triggered. A federal Clean Water Act permit affecting jurisdictional waters would produce a public notice from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. A major interstate or federally funded transportation action could carry public participation under CDOT’s environmental review. Neither follows automatically from a county site plan.

And there is the route Wysong pointed at on his way out. El Paso County is rewriting its land development code, and the draft is open for public comment. Nothing in that process touches this decision, which attaches to this property. But the definition that decided Thursday — an establishment offering goods “to the neighborhood in which it is located,” with no stated size, the word “small” deleted at the last revision — is a legislative product, and the county is legislating again now.

For anyone intending to keep watching, the useful documents are specific: a new Buc-ee’s file in the county’s development-review portal; the certified Decision 26-260 and the record behind it; a dimensioned building-height calculation; the county’s written treatment of the 122.65-square-foot sign and any CDOT outdoor-advertising permit; revised parking and landscape calculations; the complete traffic impact study with CDOT referral comments; preliminary and final drainage reports, including downstream culvert and channel capacity; stormwater treatment for petroleum, sediment and deicing chemicals; and utility and water-supply commitments.

Comment at that stage is not a vote and is not weighed like one. What staff can act on is a specific numerical standard, a conflict between drawings, a missing analysis or an unsupported engineering assumption. General objection will not move an administrative review; a drawing that fails a rule might.

A Rule 106 Challenge, and Its Limits

The conventional route to challenge a quasi-judicial land-use decision in Colorado is an action under Rule 106(a)(4) of the Colorado Rules of Civil Procedure, filed in district court. The Independent is not a law firm and none of the following is legal advice; anyone contemplating it should retain Colorado land-use counsel immediately, because the first constraint is a clock.

Rule 106(b) requires the complaint within 28 days of the final decision. In Brown v. Walker Commercial, Inc. the Colorado Supreme Court reaffirmed that the period is “a strict jurisdictional limitation,” not subject to equitable tolling and not extendable for excusable neglect; the court’s own precedents include a complaint dismissed for arriving one day late. If Aug. 27 is the operative date, Sept. 24 is the conservative outside limit — though what counts as the final decision, when the written resolution is still unsigned, is exactly the sort of question that needs a lawyer rather than a newspaper.

Standing is the next hurdle. A plaintiff needs a particularized injury — effects on nearby property, access, drainage, flooding, light, noise, value — and Rule 106 does not supply standing on its own. A Colorado Court of Appeals decision this year cautions that proximity or generalized concern does not by itself establish an injury sufficient to sue. An organization would ordinarily need at least one member who could sue individually.

The merits would then be reviewed with substantial deference. In Langer v. Board of County Commissioners — itself a use-classification appeal, over whether a mountain coaster was a park facility — the Supreme Court held that a board abuses its discretion only where it applies an erroneous legal standard or where no competent evidence supports its decision, and that the evidence test fails only where a decision is “so devoid of evidentiary support that it can only be explained as an arbitrary and capricious exercise of authority.” The court added a line that describes the standard better than any summary: “we might have reached a different conclusion than the BOCC were we deciding this case in the first instance” — and declined to.

Langer cuts both ways, and both edges were argued at Centennial Hall. The same opinion holds that applying the classification criteria a code supplies is “not only proper but also … mandated by the Code,” and that a reviewing body may not add words to a provision or subtract them. A challenge would therefore aim at the standard rather than the outcome: whether the majority treated the absence of a size cap and the promise of later compliance as substitutes for the findings Section 5.3.6 requires.

Even success would be modest. The usual remedy is vacatur and remand for proper findings, not an injunction against the project, and a lawsuit does not by itself pause county processing — that takes a stay.

The chair’s handling of the room would be politically salient and legally secondary. A due-process claim ordinarily needs evidence of actual bias, prejudgment, unequal treatment, exclusion of material evidence or another procedural defect causing real prejudice. Tone is not that.

What the Room Built

The people who filled Centennial Hall were told in advance that their number would not decide anything. The county published it on the participation page, the chair repeated it from the dais, and the release afterwards restated it: in a quasi-judicial hearing the Board weighs evidence, not headcount. The county did not hide the rule, and nobody in that room can say they were surprised by it.

They came anyway, and they came with evidence, because that is what they had been told the Board would weigh.

Twenty-five of them took a single argument about one clause of the zoning code and cut it into twenty-five numbered pieces, one each, rehearsed to fit ninety seconds and delivered in sequence across a lunch break. Four drove to Johnstown in July and spent three hours photographing a store. Somebody went into a planning department map printed in July 1999 and came back with five place names — Meirs, Beacon Heights, Varner, Colorado Estates, Wakonda Hills — that no party to the appeal had used. Somebody checked the applicant’s most-quoted figure and worked out that for 33 of those 68 years of commercial zoning, fuel sales on that land were prohibited outright. A ten-year-old learned what a 300-year water rule was, stood on a wooden box and asked the chair to keep a promise about it.

That is roughly 160 people, four hours and fifty-six minutes, ninety seconds apiece — against a deliberation that ran thirty-one minutes. The Board’s own account of those thirty-one minutes is that the weighing was real. “We have weighed this very carefully,” Geitner said. “I believe you all came here in good faith, and I came here today in good faith as well.”

What the testimony bought is not nothing, and it is not what most of the room wanted. It is a record. A court reviewing a quasi-judicial decision under Rule 106 is confined to the record made before the Board — it takes no new evidence and hears no new witnesses. Every written comment filed before Wednesday noon, every exhibit handed up in six printed copies, every segment of the neighborhood presentation is now inside the only document a judge would be permitted to read. The people who did that work built the thing any challenge would have to be built from.

What closes is the forum. The county has now said in writing that the site development plan will be decided by staff, will not return to the Board, and carries no appeal to the Board. Comment at that stage is still possible and still useful, but it is a different exercise: it moves a technical review only where it identifies a number that fails a standard. Passion is not a defect in that setting. It is simply not the currency.

One door is open, and the dissenting commissioner was the one who pointed at it on his way out. El Paso County is rewriting its land development code, and the draft is out for public comment now. Thursday’s decision attaches to this property and will not be reopened by that process. But the sentence that decided it — an establishment offering goods “to the neighborhood in which it is located,” no size stated, the word “small” struck at the last revision — is not a fact of nature. It is a sentence the county wrote, and the county is writing again.

Thursday may prove to have been the last occasion on which residents addressed decision-makers about this project directly. What follows will be quieter and more technical: a roof-height calculation, a sign application, a drainage model, a CDOT referral — or a complaint filed before a 28-day clock runs out. The 160 people who gave up a working Thursday to say so in ninety-second increments will not get another day like it on this application. They did, however, get the definition into the public argument, and the definition is the part still in play.

Editor’s note: The editor of The Monument Independent submitted written comment on this appeal in an individual capacity as a resident of El Paso County, and that comment was published on this site as an opinion piece. The Independent has taken no institutional position on the appeal. The section above headed Analysis is labeled as such and assesses the decision against the Code and the record, not against any position of this newspaper.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage: Commissioners Grant Buc-ee’s Appeal, 4-1 — the initial report, filed the evening of the vote · Residents Will Ask the Commissioners to Name the Neighborhood — the 25-segment community presentation, previewed the morning it was delivered · Thursday’s Buc-ee’s Hearing: Time, Place, and How to Take Part — the county’s participation rules as published · The Last Line of Defense: How Greenland Ranch Keeps Denver and Colorado Springs Apart — the 2000 Malone purchase and the conservation easement behind the open space Mr. Suthers invoked · Buc-ee’s Hearing Set for Aug. 27 · Opposition Groups Put a Number on Buc-ee’s · Monument Council Asks the County to Reject Buc-ee’s Zoning Claim · Buc-ee’s Appeals — and the Question Lands with the Commissioners · Is a Buc-ee’s a “Convenience Store”? The County Says It Cannot Tell · Buc-ee’s Tries the Back Door

The hearing: El Paso County Board of County Commissioners, Aug. 27, 2026 — meeting recording · official meeting record, AgendaSuite meeting 2707 · agenda item APP-26-001 · staff hearing presentation · applicant hearing presentation · principal appeal packet (338 pp.) and supplemental memos · draft approval resolution and draft denial resolution · public correspondence, parts 1–6

County record and statements: El Paso County, “Board of County Commissioners Determines Proposed Buc-ee’s Use Qualifies as Allowed Use,” Aug. 27, 2026 · Buc-ee’s information page, Planning and Community Development · EDARP files APP261 and ADM264 · Public Hearing Participation, Clerk to the Board

Code and standards: El Paso County Land Development Code — §§ 1.6.6, 1.6.7, 1.15, 4.1.4, 4.4.1, 5.1.3, 5.3.6, 5.4, 5.5.1, 6.2.3, 6.2.10, Tables 5-1 and 5-5 · El Paso County Noise Ordinance 02-1 · Drainage Criteria Manual · Engineering Criteria Manual · Site Development Plan Requirements checklist

Comparative development: Buc-ee’s #60 Johnstown, approved plan set (Town of Johnstown) · Buc-ee’s world-record page (Luling, Texas) · Buc-ee’s frequently asked questions

Judicial review: Brown v. Walker Commercial, Inc., 2022 CO 57 · Langer v. Board of County Commissioners, 2020 CO 31 · Keep Airport Parking, LLC v. Board of County Commissioners, 2026 COA 5 · Colorado Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 106

Methodology

The account of the hearing is drawn from the county’s published recording of the Aug. 27 meeting and from the automatic captions accompanying it. Those captions are generated by automatic speech recognition rather than written by a person. Machine transcription misrenders names, garbles figures and carries no speaker labels — this recording’s captions render the applicant’s name as “BIES” and the dissenting commissioner’s as “Weissong” — so speaker attributions here were checked against the agenda, the county’s published record and the recording itself rather than taken from the transcript, and figures come from the underlying documents wherever the documents carry them. Quotations were verified against the recording before publication. The names of members of the public are not printed from the caption text. Where a speaker is described but not named, it is because the caption spelling could not be confirmed against the county’s published speaker list.

Three counts in this article are The Independent’s own analyses of the recording rather than figures published by the county.

Questions. The tally of twenty-one substantive question topics consolidates repeated follow-ups into single lines of inquiry and excludes logistical questions, routine chairing, rhetorical questions during deliberation and questions unrelated to the merits. A different set of inclusion rules would produce a different total; the distribution among commissioners is the durable finding.

Words. The word counts attributed to Commissioner Applegate are taken from the transcript and carry a small margin of error where speakers overlapped. They total approximately 247 words while the item was active: about 195 on the merits, two procedural, about 31 in closing thanks and about 19 in acknowledgment or filler.

Photographs. The images in this article were supplied to The Independent by the residents credited in each caption and are used with permission. One is a screen capture of a KKTV 11 live broadcast rather than a photograph taken by the contributor, and is credited as such. Members of the public are named in this article only where the name was established independently of the machine transcript — Mr. Dunston from The Independent’s own reporting on the day, and Benji Peters from the family that supplied his photograph. Other speakers are described but not named, because the only spellings available to us are the transcript’s and they have not been checked against the county’s published speaker list.

Chair interventions. This article quotes only instances that are unambiguous on the recording: a rebuke delivered over rising noise before the lunch recess, one shouted over the room’s reaction to a speaker during testimony, one during the applicant’s rebuttal, and one following the dissent. Descriptions of volume and delivery are the editor’s, from the recording, not inferences from the transcript, which carries no such information. An earlier working count treated two further moments as admonishments; on review of the surrounding audio, both are procedural rather than corrective — the “count to three” remark explains the rotation between three microphones, and the reference to an R-rated film is addressed to anyone who entered the building without the required badge after it reached capacity. They are not counted here as rebukes of the audience, and no aggregate figure is published.

Elapsed times are measured between locators in the recording: the item was called at 20:43 and the result announced at 8:41:17, a span of eight hours, twenty minutes and thirty-four seconds; public testimony ran from 2:00:04 to 6:56:04, including an hour’s lunch recess. An interval of thirteen minutes and forty-five seconds between the close of testimony and the start of the applicant’s rebuttal is not characterized in our locator set and is shown separately in the timeline rather than assigned to either.

Code provisions cited here — the C-1 dimensional standards in Table 5-5, the 20 percent administrative relief in Section 5.5.1, the on-premise sign standards in Section 6.2.10 and the lighting standards in Section 6.2.3 — were read directly in the current Land Development Code, not taken from a summary. Section 6.2.10 was read in full; so was county ordinance 02-1. The Johnstown building area, fueling-position count, impervious share and 38-foot 5-inch elevation come from the site data table and elevation sheets of the approved Johnstown plan set; that document runs to many sheets and the extraction used here covered the site data table, the exterior elevations and the landscape sheets rather than every page. The Luling floor area is Buc-ee’s own published figure.

Project figures for the County Line Road proposal — 74,000 square feet, 120 fueling positions, 812 parking spaces, a ±30.8-acre parcel, 56.8 percent impervious cover, a 38-foot 4-inch high point and a 122.65-square-foot sign face — are as stated in the applicant’s exhibits in the appeal record. They are drawings submitted with an appeal, not approved development plans.

A correction to our own working assumption. An earlier draft of this article treated the county’s larger freestanding-sign allowance as a “commercial center” provision available only to a development with two or more tenants, and concluded the proposed sign would likely require a variance. Section 6.2.10 contains no such tenant threshold. The allowance turns on the acreage of the lot or parcel; the operative question is instead whether the frontage is an arterial or expressway identified in the Major Transportation Corridors Plan. The text above reflects the Code as read.

Drainage and the ecological assessment. The available records support a general downstream route from the parcel beneath County Line Road into Douglas County drainageways and ultimately the South Platte system. They do not establish that flows cross any particular named public parcel or mapped sensitive-resource area. A parcel-level claim would require the engineered drainage report, a legal outfall location and a mapping overlay, none of which yet exists in the public record. This article makes no such claim, and the words “appears to enter” in the text above are doing real work.

The ecological assessment’s account of the channel, the 24-inch culvert and the route to Carpenter Creek, and its findings on wetlands and species, are taken from the project record as compiled in the course of this newspaper’s reporting; the assessment was not re-read for this article, and its conclusions are its authors’ rather than any agency’s. The quarter-mile figure for the Colorado Parks and Wildlife aquatic High Priority Habitat, and the identification of stormwater and fuel-related pollutants as the mechanism of concern, come from the wildlife assessment in the APP261 record as cited in the open letter The Independent published on Aug. 27; The Independent has not examined that assessment directly. The impervious-cover figures for both the proposal and the built Johnstown lot are from the respective site plans.

Outreach. No one was asked for comment for this article, and none is claimed. Every statement attributed to the county, the applicant, a commissioner or a speaker is taken from a public document, a public filing or the public hearing record.