Projects that failed to get into Colorado Springs, Monument or Palmer Lake keep reappearing before El Paso County, where the answer is nearly always yes. Voters in Colorado Springs and Palmer Lake have claimed a say over annexation. A bottling plant that, fully built out, could use as much water as the development Colorado Springs voters rejected never had to face them.

Buc-ee’s asked twice to be annexed into Palmer Lake. In September 2025 the town’s voters approved an ordinance putting annexations to a public vote. On Feb. 4, 2026, before its request ever faced one, Buc-ee’s withdrew. On June 19 it asked El Paso County’s planning director to rule that its 74,000-square-foot travel center was a use the land’s existing zoning already allowed. Ten weeks later the county commissioners agreed, 4-1.

The Monument Independent’s diagram of the Buc-ee’s site development plan, redrawn from the engineer’s drawings, north at the top. The 30.8-acre site lies between Beacon Lite Road on the west and Interstate 25 on the east, just south of County Line Road and the Douglas County line. The 74,000-square-foot store sits toward the east side facing west, with two long fuel canopies between it and Beacon Lite Road and parking all around. A retaining wall and a pond run along the east edge, a detention pond fills the northwest corner, and the water tank, wells and chlorination building are at the south end. A proposed roundabout sits where County Line Road meets Beacon Lite Road; two full-access drives open onto Beacon Lite Road and an exit-only drive onto County Line Road. A separate parcel in the northeast corner is not part of the plan. A locator map shows the site on the county line at I-25 between Palmer Lake and Monument.
Buc-ee’s site development plan as filed with El Paso County in October, redrawn by The Independent from the engineer’s drawing files. (Graphic: The Monument Independent)

It is not the only project to have found that route. Flying Horse East, a plan for up to 5,000 homes on the northern edge of Schriever Space Force Base, first sought annexation into Colorado Springs. When those talks fell through it went to the county, whose commissioners approved its sketch plan 4-1 in August 2025, over their own planning commission’s recommendation. Karman Line, 6,500 homes a few miles to the south, was annexed by Colorado Springs and then rejected by 81.9% of those voting in June 2025. Three months later its developer filed with the county.

Closer to home the route is well worn. In July 2023 Monument’s town council voted 2-5 against annexing Monument Ridge, 161 acres at Interstate 25 and County Line Road; the mayor, by the account of Our Community News, wished the developers luck with the county. In December 2024 the commissioners approved houses and attached homes on the eastern 60 acres, 4-0. Part of the western half is now the Buc-ee’s site. In Palmer Lake a church withdrew its bid to annex land on Ben Lomand Mountain in March 2024, after trustees asked for changes it would not make. It sued, and that October the town agreed to let its in-town land go. In April 2025 the commissioners rezoned 341 acres there for 2.5-acre lots, 5-0, on their consent calendar. By the Independent’s count, five projects since 2018 have failed or withdrawn from an annexation in El Paso County and then gone to the county. The commissioners approved all four that reached a vote. The fifth is Karman Line.

The Monument Independent’s map of the Monument Ridge East preliminary plan, north at the top. Multifamily lots fill the western 40.5 acres along Interstate 25, and single-family lots run northeast along Monument Hill Road, with detention ponds, wetlands and a trail. The Buc-ee’s site lies west across the interstate, and the Misty Acres neighborhood lies to the east and south. Side notes: Monument’s council voted 2-5 against annexation in July 2023; the commissioners approved the plan 4-0 on Dec. 12, 2024; 59 lots on 59.48 acres; Woodmoor Water and Sanitation District committed to serve it. A locator shows the site on the county line at I-25, near Palmer Lake and Monument.
The Monument Ridge East preliminary plan the commissioners approved in December 2024, redrawn by The Independent from the engineer’s drawing files. The Buc-ee’s site lies across Interstate 25. (Graphic: The Monument Independent)

What they have in common is where the public gets a say. Karman Line could be put to a vote because Colorado Springs annexes land by ordinance, and ordinances can be petitioned onto a ballot. Palmer Lake’s voters had made every annexation a ballot question. Nobody petitioned Flying Horse East or Buc-ee’s onto a county ballot. Buc-ee’s opponents, with no appeal open to them at the county, are now in district court. And inside city limits a different kind of project never meets the voters at all. Swire Coca-Cola’s new bottling plant, approved by a land sale on a consent calendar and a staff signature, could draw about as much water as the 6,500-home development the city’s voters turned down. That is at a full build-out Swire calls theoretical.

The one door with a ballot

Karman Line was to sit northwest of the corner of Bradley and Curtis roads, tied to Colorado Springs by a roughly three-mile “flagpole” of Bradley Road. Its owners, Norris Ranch Joint Venture, and its developer, O|NE La Plata, pitched it partly as housing for Schriever.

Water was supposed to be the easy part. In 2023 the council had adopted, 5-4 after three votes, a rule requiring Colorado Springs Utilities, the city-owned utility, to hold 128% of the water needed for existing demand plus any new development before the city annexes it. Utilities told the council that Karman Line, at 1,672 acre-feet a year when fully built, fit within the rule. Critics had noted when the rule passed that it applies only to land coming into the city. Development already inside faces no equivalent test.

The council approved the annexation 7-2 in January 2025. Opponents gathered 19,863 valid signatures. Rather than reverse itself, the council called a special election at an estimated cost of about $500,000. More than $1 million in campaign money followed:

  • Defend Colorado, a nonprofit that does not disclose its donors, put about $490,000 into the opposition, most of it in-kind.
  • Norris Ranch put $550,000 behind a committee called Stand Against Monopolies.

The opponents’ case was distance, emergency response and water. City police had put response times in comparable eastern areas at 15 to 50 minutes. The Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District, which represents farm counties downstream, opposed any annexation that would raise the city’s water use, on the ground that the water would come from farms. Voters sided with the opponents by better than four to one.

The door marked staff

Swire Coca-Cola’s route into the city ran through three offices, and none of them, so far as the records show, held a public hearing.

The first was the council. On Feb. 10, 2026, it voted to sell about 50 acres of airport land at Peak Innovation Park to a buyer identified only as “Project Manitou.” It was item 4B.F on the consent calendar and passed 8-0, with Dave Donelson and Nancy Henjum, the two council votes against Karman Line, among the ayes. At the work session the day before, the minutes record that “there were no comments on this item.” The staff presentation ran to six slides, none of them about water. Anyone could have asked to pull the item for discussion; the agenda says so. Nobody did.

The second was the planning department. Swire’s site plan, file DEPN-25-0153, was approved on March 5, 2026, by a route the city’s own record marks “Administrative.” Its public-hearing step carries no entries. Gov. Jared Polis attended the groundbreaking three weeks later.

The Monument Independent’s map of the Swire Coca-Cola plant’s development plan at Peak Innovation Park, north at the top. The 566,207-square-foot main plant fills the center of a 50.5-acre lot between Integration Loop on the north and South Powers Boulevard on the south, with entrances and employee parking on the north, truck docks on the east side, a guardhouse on the west, a wastewater treatment building on the east edge and proposed water lines looping the site. Side notes: approved by city planning staff March 5, 2026, with nine conditions, none about water; Utilities required a large-load study. A locator shows the site south of the Colorado Springs airport.
The Swire Coca-Cola plant’s development plan, approved by city staff on March 5, redrawn by The Independent from the engineer’s drawing files. (Graphic: The Monument Independent)

The third was the utility. Under its published rules, any customer expecting 250,000 gallons a day or more must enter a “capacity queue” and pay for a large-load study. The water study fee is $2,000. Eligible customers are served in the order they applied, “subject to availability” and to the study’s results. The council approved those rules in October 2025, which is to say it voted on the rule and not on the customer.

The utility’s answers to the project’s engineers, given after a Sept. 17, 2025 meeting with city reviewers, show how open the water question was. The engineers noted that Utilities had told them water capacity in the area was “limited” until a new main, the Highline extension, was finished. Utilities replied that the extension was due “by mid-2026 (conservative estimate).” A study, it said, was “currently required for Water, Wastewater, and Electric,” and “the determination of adequate capacity based off phasing will be determined during the Water Large Load Study.” The city approved the site plan on March 5 with nine conditions, none of them about water. One says the utility lines drawn on it “are illustrative only, and are not approved with this development plan.” Whether the study has been finished, and what it found, has not been made public. The Independent put those questions to Utilities on Oct. 9. The city’s communications office answered on Oct. 19 that they must go through an open-records request, which the Independent filed with Utilities that day, for the study, the capacity determination and any service agreement. A response is due Oct. 22.

What the plant will use comes from Utilities records that KRDO obtained under the state’s open-records law:

  • Projected demand: about 402,000 gallons a day at first, then about 770,000, and about 1.57 million in what Swire calls phase two. That is roughly 450, 860 and 1,760 acre-feet a year. The last figure is a little more than the 1,672 Utilities projected for the whole Karman Line development.
  • Consumption: a Utilities water planner estimated that about 80% of what the plant draws would be consumed rather than returned as wastewater. “It may warrant a larger discussion,” the planner wrote, “if that is how Colorado Springs wants to allocate its water resources supplies.”

Asked five questions, Swire replied with the statement KRDO published in June, a few sentences longer and with its replenishment figure trimmed from 329% to 319%. It says phase two “represents theoretical demand” and “is not planned or approved.” It says its own “comprehensive hydrological study” found the plant would need nothing “beyond the existing infrastructure and water allocations provided by Colorado Springs Utilities.” On whether Utilities had reserved capacity for the plant, Swire replied that Utilities “is best placed to respond to questions about reserved water capacity.” On whether it would share its study, it did not say. “Most of the water we use leaves the manufacturing facility as finished product,” the company added, which is the planner’s point put more cheerfully.

Utilities’ own papers answer the capacity question, at least through August: no, for Swire or anyone else. Its board instructs it not to reserve water “for any person, organization, property or development,” military bases excepted. The chief executive’s annual report on that instruction, on the board’s Oct. 21 agenda, says Utilities reserved none from September 2025 through August 2026.

A Utilities planning document says “there are water supplies available to serve this demand.” Swire credits the 319% to projects such as beaver-dam restoration on Soda Creek. By Utilities’ own count, the system uses about 60 million gallons on an average day, so even the theoretical plant would take about 2.6% of it. The case for the plant is real: 170 permanent jobs, about 1,190 during construction, a $475 million investment and a mayor who said at the announcement that “every investment in this city will ultimately help this city’s budget shortfall.” It is simply a case the public was never asked to weigh.

The larger discussion came later, and not from the city:

  • The records request. KRDO reported the figures in June, along with viewers’ complaints.
  • The petition. In late August, former councilmember Joel Miller, Anita Miller and Adriane Nau won approval of ballot titles for four citizen initiatives. One would require voter permission for new nonresidential projects using more than 200,000 gallons a day, with exceptions for recreation and medical facilities. By the Gazette’s account, the cutoff would have caught the Swire plant. The petitions need more than 25,000 signatures by Dec. 7 to reach the April 2027 ballot. The water petition, Anita Miller told the Independent on Oct. 13, has “several hundred signatures.” Its sponsors have put more effort into other petitions, she said, and there is “a possibility” it makes the deadline.

The door that stays open

El Paso County’s commissioners say yes, as a matter of record and of principle:

  • The record. By the Independent’s reconstruction, the board ruled on 357 land-use matters from November 2021 through June 2026 and denied two: a homeowner’s lot split and a power line. It has approved at least six applications since 2023 over its planning commission’s recommendation of denial. Flying Horse East was one. The board’s first denial of a developer’s rezoning in that span, by the Independent’s count, came on July 23, 2026, when it rejected two requests for multifamily zoning at Highway 83 and Walker Road, each 3-2. The landowner refiled in September with a less dense pair. It goes to the planning commission on Nov. 5 and back to the commissioners on Dec. 10.
  • The principle. “We cannot afford to take this property from the owner,” Holly Williams said in voting for Flying Horse East. Lauren Nelson calls herself “a huge private property rights advocate” and says “it’s up to the property owner to determine what kind of properties they would like to build on their land.”
The Monument Independent’s map of the Flying Horse East sketch plan, north at the top, on the north edge of Schriever Space Force Base, bounded by Enoch Road on the west and State Highway 94 on the north. Urban high-density housing sits in the northwest, suburban densities across the middle, an 89.9-acre institutional site in the northeast and a small commercial area at Highway 94, with mixed use across the southern third and a drainage way crossing diagonally. Side notes: up to 4,973 homes; the commissioners approved it 4-1 on Aug. 28, 2025, over their planning commission’s recommendation of denial; Cherokee Metropolitan District is to provide water.
The Flying Horse East sketch plan the commissioners approved in August 2025, redrawn by The Independent from the developer’s land-use map. (Graphic: The Monument Independent)

The rules suit applicants as well:

  • Who may appeal. At the county, the “aggrieved party” entitled to appeal an administrative determination is the owner of the land, and neighbors only where the code required notice to them. The county said Buc-ee’s determination required none. That is why Buc-ee’s could appeal its July non-decision and its neighbors could not. Buc-ee’s filed its next step, a site development plan, and the county accepted it for review on Oct. 12. County staff will decide it without a public hearing. In August the county said 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.”
  • Water. The county’s 300-year groundwater rule, stricter on paper than the state’s 100-year standard, attaches to subdivision. A project that never subdivides, as the Independent noted in June, can argue that only the weaker state standard applies.
  • Money. The commissioners’ campaign money comes from where the board’s applications come from. Cory Applegate, who moved to approve Flying Horse East, and Carrie Geitner, who voted for it, have taken contributions from people associated with Classic Homes, the builder behind Flying Horse. Nelson drew about 71% of her money in her last race from development-industry donors, by the Independent’s analysis. All of it is lawful and disclosed, and no commissioner has been found to have traded a vote. What the record shows is a board financed in good part by the people whose projects it approves, approving them.

The board can say no, narrowly. Williams, Bill Wysong and Applegate made up the Walker Road majority. Wysong was also the lone vote against Buc-ee’s and against Flying Horse East. “We’re basically now giving Schriever the middle finger,” he said of the latter, “and I don’t appreciate that being a veteran.”

The margin is on the ballot. Williams is term-limited and leaves in January, after the Dec. 10 Walker Road hearing. Her District 1 seat, which takes in Woodmoor, Gleneagle and Black Forest, is open. The candidates are Ryan Graham, the Republican nominee; Gavin Rainey, the Democrat; and Matt Grubesic, a registered write-in. Nelson faces a challenger, Yolanda Avila, a former Colorado Springs councilmember who voted for Karman Line’s annexation. Ballots are due Nov. 3.

Karman Line comes back

The land under Karman Line has been to the county before, and water is why it left.

  • 2021. A prospective buyer brought the ranch to county planners as a development of up to 4,000 homes. Its water would have come from a metropolitan district treating eight wells already producing on the property.
  • October 2021. The buyer’s water attorney sent its planner, Bill Guman, a former Colorado Springs councilman, what he called “very preliminary findings.” “Unfortunately the property does not appear to have sufficient water to support the desired level of development as we understand it,” he wrote. Under the county’s 300-year rule, he estimated, the aquifer beneath the whole ranch could serve “a maximum of 266” single-family homes. The email surfaced in November 2024, when Karman Line’s applicants filed it with the city in answer to a Utilities request for the ranch’s water rights. White boxes cover its header, its opening and its last three points; the words beneath them remain in the public file.
  • December 2021. Guman told the county the client would seek annexation instead. Of “a couple of specific reasons,” he named one: “the findings and recommendation report prepared by our water attorney and hydrologist made a very strong case for annexation.”
  • 2023. Applying to bring the ranch into the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District, a condition of city water, Karman Line’s owners wrote that the plan “requires centralized service” and that “there are no other utility providers that can meet the water demand.” The annexation agreement later listed the ranch’s groundwater as two permitted wells of one acre-foot a year each and left the space for decreed groundwater rights blank.
  • 2025. The water case for the city ran into the voters.
  • Sept. 17, 2025. O|NE La Plata filed an early-assistance request, the county’s pre-application step, for a 1,835-acre master-planned community on the same land. The one-page description does not mention water. The site map attached to it is a sheet from the 2023 city application. Its park table still assigns the community park to the City of Colorado Springs, whose voters declined to annex it.
  • June 2026. FOX21 reported that the filing does not say how the project would get water or power without the city.
  • Today. No formal application has followed. The county said on Oct. 13 that the developer has not filed a sketch plan and that the 12-month window in its early-assistance checklist “has passed without a formal project submittal.” The file has not been closed. Utilities, asked for comments before the Sept. 30, 2025 meeting, said they would come “during and after” it. The county’s public file shows none. When the Independent asked whether any had been sent, the county replied on Oct. 20 that any such records would have to be sought through a formal open-records request. O|NE La Plata, asked on Oct. 9 and again on Oct. 15 how a county version would get its water, has not answered.
The Monument Independent’s map of the Karman Line land-use plan, north at the top, northwest of Bradley and Curtis roads and west of Schriever Space Force Base. Homes in five densities fill the west and center, with a school site and community park in the middle, light industrial and office in the east, and commercial and mixed use along Bradley Road in the south. Side notes: 81.9% of those voting rejected the annexation on June 17, 2025; the plan caps homes at 6,500; Utilities projected 1,672 acre-feet a year at full build-out; a 2021 attorney’s estimate put what the aquifer under the ranch could serve, under the county’s rule, at a maximum of 266 homes.
Karman Line’s land-use plan, dated November 2024, redrawn by The Independent from the developer’s land-use map. (Graphic: The Monument Independent)

Outside Colorado Springs Utilities, water in this county mostly means groundwater. The county’s 2019 water master plan found that water providers other than Utilities and its partners rely on Denver Basin and designated-basin groundwater for 85% of their supplies. The Denver Basin aquifers in that figure are the ones Tri-Lakes water systems depend on.

David Leinweber, an at-large city councilmember, voted for Karman Line. In a February column he argued that it would put “housing within minutes of a major employment center,” meaning Peak Innovation Park, where Swire is now building. The plant got a consent calendar and a staff signature. The homes went to the county, where the answer is usually yes and the water is still an open question.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage:

City of Colorado Springs:

Colorado Springs Utilities:

El Paso County:

Reporting:

Methodology

The pattern. The count of five is the Independent’s. It searched the Gazette’s archive since 2014, Our Community News, its own coverage, 441 annexation matters in Colorado Springs’ council records and the county’s agenda system for projects that failed or withdrew from a town or city annexation in El Paso County and then sought county approval. The county votes are from the roll calls in its agenda system: Monument Ridge East, decisions 24-487 to 24-489 (Commissioner Longinos Gonzalez absent); Ben Lomand Mountain Village, P-25-002; Flying Horse East, SKP-24-002; Buc-ee’s, APP-26-001. The town side of Monument Ridge and Ben Lomand is from Our Community News’s meeting reports. The same search found five other failed or withdrawn annexations that did not go to the county, among them Amara, which Colorado Springs’ council rejected in August 2024. Three of the five county cases had been at the county before they tried a town. Coverage of Fountain and the smallest towns is thin, so this is the record found, not a census.

The county’s record. The 357-matter tally and the planning-commission overrides are the Independent’s reconstruction, published June 17, 2026, and run through June 2026. The Walker Road denial came after it.

Reservations. The board instruction and the chief executive’s compliance report are in the Utilities Board packet for Oct. 21, 2026 (Water Supply Management, I-7, reporting period Sept. 30, 2025 to Aug. 31, 2026, pp. 33–40, read in full). The large-load terms are from Utilities Rules and Regulations § I.J, effective Jan. 1, 2026.

Swire’s statements. Swire’s answers are from its Oct. 14 statement to the Independent. The comparison with the statement KRDO published on June 3, 2026 is the Independent’s, line by line.

Water figures. Swire’s figures are Utilities projections as reported by KRDO from records the Independent has not seen. KRDO describes the 1.57 million gallons as the plant’s potential use “at full build-out,” and the Utilities email’s 450 and “up to 1,800” acre-feet match the first and last phase figures read as totals, so they are read that way here. Whether the middle figure is the Phase 1 total is unconfirmed. Karman Line’s 1,672 acre-feet is the figure Utilities gave the council. Utilities’ first published figure, 1,665 in a Nov. 7, 2024 letter, was “based on the proposed land uses provided in the revised Land Use Plan”; it gives no per-unit basis. The developers’ own 2023 estimate was 2,784; Utilities has not explained the difference. The comparison is of projected demand, not consumption: a Utilities planner expected about 80% of the plant’s water to be consumed, and what share of Karman Line’s would have returned as wastewater is not known. Acre-feet are converted at 325,851 gallons each. The 2.6% share is the Independent’s calculation.

The 2021 email. It is in the city’s public file for the Karman Line annexation (Accela record ANEX-23-0014), in a response the applicants filed in November 2024 to a Utilities review letter. White boxes cover parts of the page. The text beneath them remains in the PDF’s text layer, and the Independent read it there, along with the visible part of the page. The email calls its findings “very preliminary” and was written for a 2021 prospective buyer, not for O|NE La Plata. The 2023 conservancy-district application is in the same record; the annexation agreement’s groundwater exhibit is in the council’s records. On Oct. 15 the Independent told O|NE La Plata it planned to report the email and asked whether it had a more recent assessment; it has not answered.

Maps. The five maps are the Independent’s. Buc-ee’s, Swire and Monument Ridge East are traced from the drawing layers in the engineers’ own files at each sheet’s stated scale; their property lines and areas were checked against the plans (Monument Ridge East’s multifamily area measures 40.52 acres, as its letter of intent says). The Flying Horse East and Karman Line land-use maps are images, so their land uses were traced from the plans’ colors and fitted to the county’s parcel lines; their edges are approximate, and areas measured from them run below the plans’ own acreage tables, by as much as a quarter for some uses. The figures in the maps’ side panels are the plans’ tables, not the tracing. Context and locators are from El Paso County GIS.

Palmer Lake. The September 2025 result is KOAA’s report of the certified count, 780 votes in favor; the Independent reported the unofficial tally as 765 to 375.

Approvals. The council vote is from the city’s Legistar records. The site-plan history is from the city’s Accela log, captured Oct. 9, 2026. Utilities’ 2025 answers on capacity and the March 5 approval letter are from the public site-plan file, DEPN-25-0153, which the city pointed the Independent to in answer to a records request; both were read in full on Oct. 13, 2026.

The county file. That no formal application has followed the Karman Line early-assistance request is from El Paso County’s communications office, which checked with the planning department on Oct. 13, 2026. The Utilities exchange is from the file’s public review comments and event log, read in full on Oct. 13. The county says notes of the Sept. 30, 2025 meeting are in the file; they do not appear in its public view. When the Independent asked for them on Oct. 15, the county’s communications office replied on Oct. 20 that records must be requested under the Colorado Open Records Act.

Campaign money. Campaign figures for Karman Line are the Gazette’s, from city filings. The commissioners’ donor figures are from the Independent’s June analysis of state filings.

Who was asked. On Oct. 9 the Independent sent questions to Colorado Springs Utilities, Swire Coca-Cola, O|NE La Plata, El Paso County’s planning department, Yolanda Avila and Joel Miller. The county answered through its communications office on Oct. 13, Anita Miller answered for the initiative’s sponsors the same day, and Swire answered on Oct. 14. For Utilities, the city’s communications office replied on Oct. 19 that the questions must go through an open-records request; the Independent filed one with Utilities that day, and a response is due Oct. 22. O|NE La Plata, asked again on Oct. 15, and Avila had not answered by publication. Their answers, and Utilities’ records, will be added when they arrive.

Using this reporting? Credit The Monument Independent and link to this article: https://monumentindependent.com/government/city-says-no-try-the-county-karman-line/. Our guidelines are at Using Our Reporting.

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Michael Christensen is the editor of The Monument Independent. He holds a BA in history and an MS in statistics, and has spent 30 years in marketing — the last 15 focused on digital marketing, data analytics,...

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