Twenty-five Tri-Lakes residents are scheduled to address the Board of County Commissioners at Thursday’s hearing on the Buc-ee’s appeal, in a single coordinated presentation. It is built around one clause of the county code, and around a question the Planning Director said she could not answer: what is the neighborhood in which this store would be located? The residents intend to name it.
The document is titled The Neighborhood in Which It Is Located. It runs to 30 pages and divides into 25 numbered segments, one for each speaker. It was organized by Laurel Schow, a Tri-Lakes resident, with the help of 25 residents of Monument, Palmer Lake, Woodmoor and greater El Paso County who take a segment each. Schow speaks last. An appendix of photographs taken at the Buc-ee’s in Johnstown was filed separately as written evidence in the record for ADM264.
The presentation is narrower than most of what has been filed. It says so on its contents page: it addresses the Section 1.15 definition of Convenience Store, what the Code means by Neighborhood, and the first criterion under Section 5.3.6(C)(1). It does not address the second criterion or the wider similar-use analysis.
The clause the argument turns on
The Code defines a convenience store as “[a]n establishment for the purpose of offering for sale to the neighborhood in which it is located such items as groceries, ready to eat food, over the counter drugs, and sundries,” adding that it “may include retail sale of gasoline and other petroleum products.”
The residents split that sentence into three parts and argue only one of them defines anything. The goods list is illustrative — Section 1.6.3 says lists using “such as” give examples only. The final sentence grants a permission. That leaves the purpose clause as the only language identifying whom the establishment is for.
Their sharpest textual point concerns the applicant’s own filing. On page 2 of its request, Buc-ee’s quotes the definition in full, purpose clause included. On page 3, in the sentence concluding that the project satisfies that definition, the presentation says the clause is gone — both “for the purpose of” and “to the neighborhood in which it is located.” The presentation reproduces the two passages side by side.
What the 1991 code said
The presentation introduces a document that has not previously appeared in this record: the definition of Convenience Store as it stood in 1991, which the residents say was provided by the County’s Planning and Community Development department and carries a revision date of May 1, 1991.
1991
“A food service establishment contained within a building offering for sale to the neighborhood in which it is located such items as groceries and sundries. This would not include the sale of motor vehicle fuel.”
Current
“An establishment for the purpose of offering for sale to the neighborhood in which it is located such items as groceries, ready to eat food, over the counter drugs, and sundries. A convenience store may include retail sale of gasoline and other petroleum products.”
The comparison does two things at once. It establishes that in 1991 — the year the County closed C-1 to new land — a convenience store in unincorporated El Paso County could not sell motor vehicle fuel at all. And it shows that when the 2007 update added that permission and expanded the goods list, the neighborhood clause survived word for word, with a purpose statement newly added in front of it.
“The Code changed what a convenience store may sell,” the closing segment reads. “It did not change whom the store is for.”
Naming the neighborhood
Director Meggan Herington’s July 1 determination identified the neighborhood phrase as the language that made the classification difficult. The residents treat that as an invitation rather than an obstacle.
The Code defines Neighborhoods as “[p]rimarily residential areas unified by shared characteristics, functional connections and spatial perceptions.” The applicant’s filing, the presentation notes, reads the relevant neighborhood to include Interstate 25, County Line Road and Beacon Lite Road. The residents answer that the definition treats roads as something that unifies a neighborhood, not as part of one: “Interstate 25 is not a residential area.”
They then supply names, drawn from the County’s own adopted planning documents. The 1999 Tri-Lakes Comprehensive Plan 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 July 26, 1999 names the places inside it: Meirs, Beacon Heights, Varner, Colorado Estates and Wakonda Hills. The site sits at that boundary’s northeast corner.
The residents are careful about the weight those plans carry. Both are advisory and the Board retains discretion in applying them under Section 2.1.3, the presentation says; they are offered “as evidence of what this place is, not as authority binding this Board.” The applicant’s filing, it adds, uses the word neighborhood throughout and names none of these places.
An argument from the accessory-use table
One structural point in the presentation appears nowhere else in the record. Table 5-2 of the Code lists uses allowed as accessory — subordinate to the principal use on the same lot. Convenience Store appears in that table in exactly two districts, and both are mobile home park districts.
The Independent checked Table 5-2 against the current Code and confirms it: the Convenience Store row carries entries under MHP and MHPR and under no other district — not commercial, not industrial, not any other residential zone. Section 4.2.2 describes the Mobile Home Park district as intended to promote an acceptable living environment for its occupants.
“Where this code allows a convenience store to be subordinate to something else,” the segment concludes, “that something else is people’s homes.”
The applicant’s own words
Four segments rest on remarks by Stan Beard, speaking for Buc-ee’s at a community meeting held at Palmer Lake Elementary School on December 3, 2024. The presentation cites KKTV video of the meeting with timecodes.
- “Our purpose is to get them off and back on that freeway system as easily and comfortably as possible.”
- “Our customers, like I said, come from miles away. We are stopping the car that is already on the freeway.”
- “90% of our customers are visiting us from well outside of El Paso County, more than 70% of them are coming from outside of the state.”
- “Back in the day, we were just a little convenience store, neighborhood convenience store. We are now in seven or eight states. We have 32 travel centers.”
Alongside those, the presentation sets the applicant’s traffic study, which assigns more than 93 percent of the project’s trips to Interstate 25 and under 7 percent to local roads, and Kimley-Horn’s acknowledgment that more than 85 percent of customers at existing stores are not local.
A field trip to Johnstown
The appendix documents a three-hour visit to the Buc-ee’s in Johnstown on July 14, 2026 by four residents — Herbert Preslier, Rene Trudel, Leslie Hanks and Laurel Schow. Its six observations are photographic: a billboard identifying the exit from twelve miles out, a “TO I-25” message painted on the pavement, a motorcoach and a car hauler and a horse trailer in the circulation lanes, banks of outdoor ice merchandisers and pallets of firewood, a branded apparel department, staffed prepared-food and specialty-meat counters, and two dock-height loading bays with a tractor-trailer at the rear.
The packet is explicit about its own limits, noting that the photographs document vehicle types and the space in which they maneuvered and that “no turning-radius calculation is asserted.”
Where they fall in the order
Schow says all 25 speakers were registered in person on Tuesday, in the lobby at Centennial Hall, and that the County afterwards read the roster back to her and confirmed the group’s place in the speaking order. She expects the group to come early in the opposition lineup. Under the County’s published procedure, speakers are called in the order they register, beginning with those registered in support and followed by those in opposition.
What the group cannot control is length. The County’s rules say the Chair “has discretion to limit speaker time” and that a speaker “may be limited to one minute,” that each speaker speaks once, and that speaking time cannot be given to another person. Twenty-five segments at a minute apiece would run about twenty-five minutes; a tighter limit would compress the segments rather than shorten the roster. Speakers who are not present when called may lose the turn.
The document does not depend on delivery in any event. Written evidence submitted before Wednesday’s noon deadline is part of the record and reaches the Board whether or not it is read aloud.
The road home
Twenty months separate Thursday’s hearing from the December 2024 evening when Buc-ee’s first described this project to the Tri-Lakes in the gym at Palmer Lake Elementary. In between came a proposed annexation to the Town of Palmer Lake that did not proceed, and an argument that has since moved to the County and narrowed to a single question of definition.
The presentation is a particular kind of civic labor. Its authors went into a 1999 planning document to recover five names — Meirs, Beacon Heights, Varner, Colorado Estates, Wakonda Hills — that no party to this appeal had used. Four of them drove north and spent three hours photographing a store in Johnstown. Twenty-five of them intend to stand up in turn and read a paragraph each into a public record.
What the segments describe, in the end, is a place rather than a position. One sets the geography: communities strung along the Palmer Divide, Palmer Lake pressed against the Rampart Range, Woodmoor in ponderosa pine, Monument’s limits reaching both sides of the interstate. The next draws the distinction the whole argument rests on. Interstate 25 carries people to Denver, to Colorado Springs, to the airport and home again. County Line Road, the presentation says, “takes them to school, work, the trailhead, dinner and a neighbor’s driveway. County Line Road is the road home.”
The Tri-Lakes are not of one mind about Buc-ee’s. The County’s correspondence file for this appeal runs to five bundles and is divided between letters of support and letters of opposition, and Thursday’s speaking order begins with those registered in favor. But the residents in this group are not arguing about sales tax receipts or peak-hour turning movements. They are arguing that a definition written around a neighborhood has to mean something when a neighborhood is what is at stake, and that the County wrote the word down in 1991 and never took it out.
Their final segment reduces the case to three sentences. “This project does not exist to sell to that neighborhood. It exists to sell to people traveling on Interstate 25. And Interstate 25 is not a neighborhood.”
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. This article describes a presentation prepared in advance of the hearing; it does not report testimony as delivered.
Sources & further reading
The presentation: The Neighborhood in Which It Is Located: A community presentation on the Convenience Store definition and the first criterion, organized by Laurel Schow, 30 pp., including Exhibits A–H and a field-observation appendix. Provided to The Independent in advance of the hearing.
County record: APP261 project page, EDARP · ADM264 determination file · Public Hearing Participation, El Paso County Clerk and Recorder
Verified by The Independent: Table 5-2 of the El Paso County Land Development Code was checked directly; Convenience Store is listed as an accessory use in the MHP and MHPR districts only. The 1991 definition and the 1999 sub-area map are reproduced from the presentation and were not independently examined.
