Buc-ee’s lost a public vote in Palmer Lake, then bought the land anyway and turned to El Paso County — where a citizen never gets to vote, where the Board of County Commissioners has denied just two of 476 land-use decisions since 2018 — neither a housing or commercial development — and where the company is now trying to avoid even that board. An examination of eight years of votes, two decades of campaign money, and the small circle of people who keep electing one another.
In September 2025 the voters of Palmer Lake did something their county almost never gets to do. Given a direct say over a Buc-ee’s travel center, they took it: they recalled the two trustees who had advanced the project and, by roughly two to one, passed an ordinance requiring any future annexation to win a public vote — even as the pro-Buc-ee’s side outspent its opponents by more than fifteen to one (KOAA). The annexation application was withdrawn in February 2026 (KOAA). Two months later it bought the 53-acre parcel and its water rights for more than $10m and pointed itself at unincorporated El Paso County instead (KRDO).
Buc-ee’s would not be the first to find refuge in the county. In June 2025, three months before Palmer Lake’s revolt, Colorado Springs voters rejected the annexation of Karman Line — a 6,500-home development east of the city proposed by La Plata Communities and the O’Neil Group — by roughly four to one; rather than abandon the plan, its developers began work on a revised version aimed at county jurisdiction, where no such vote exists (Colorado Sun; FOX21). The county is where a project goes when it would rather the public not be asked.
In the county there is no annexation, and so no vote. There is a five-member Board of County Commissioners. And there is now a quieter route still. On June 19th Buc-ee’s EPCO, LLC asked the county’s planning director to decide, administratively, that a 74,000-square-foot travel center with more than a hundred fueling positions is a “convenience store” — a use permitted by right in the parcel’s commercial zone. The request, file ADM264, carries no public hearing, no notice to neighbors, no commissioner vote, and a right of appeal that belongs only to Buc-ee’s. This newspaper called it the back door when the filing appeared (our earlier reporting).
The back door is the natural destination of a county government that, on the record, does not say no.
It is, in miniature, the Grail Knight’s test. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the knight set to guard the Holy Grail gives the hero one instruction as he surveys a table of cups: choose wisely, for the true grail gives life and the false one takes it. On June 30 El Paso County’s voters choose among their own vessels — candidates for two commission seats, some plain, some gilded with developer money — and what lives or dies by the choice is the county’s land, its water and its own plans.
What follows is the documentary case for that claim, and for who benefits from it.
A board that approves
Since the county created a dedicated land-use board in late 2021, and across the regular board’s calendar before that, the commissioners have ruled on 476 land-use matters between September 2018 and June 2026 and denied two: a two-lot rezoning on Summit Drive in April 2023, opposed 4–1, and Xcel Energy’s regional power line in July 2025. Neither was a housing subdivision, a commercial development, or a master-planned community. Those, without exception, were approved. (The figures come from this newspaper’s reconstruction of every recorded decision from the county’s agenda system; the method is described at the end.)
The board approves even when its own Planning Commission says no. In August 2025 it endorsed the Flying Horse East sketch plan — up to 4,973 homes on 1,821 acres beside Schriever Space Force Base, a project that had first sought annexation into Colorado Springs before those talks collapsed — by 4–1, over the Planning Commission’s recommendation of denial. Commissioner Cory Applegate moved to approve; Commissioner Lauren Nelson seconded (Colorado Politics; county AgendaSuite minutes).
This matters because the county’s own plans counsel restraint. “Your El Paso Master Plan,” adopted in 2021, and the 2018 Water Master Plan ask that growth track the resources to serve it (Master Plan; Water Master Plan). The county’s subdivision rules require new development to demonstrate a 300-year water supply, three times the state’s 100-year groundwater standard (Land Development Code §8.4.7). Buc-ee’s is the test case: opponents argue a travel center on that scale fits neither the water plan nor the master plan. The “convenience-store” determination would let it past the question entirely, because a convenience store is allowed by right in the parcel’s C-1 zone, while a project of that size and intensity would otherwise invite scrutiny (LDC Table 5-1).
The money
Why does the board approve? The most direct answer is in its campaign-finance filings.
Across their commissioner committees, the members who form the reliable majority are funded heavily by the development industry. By this newspaper’s classification of every itemized contribution in Colorado’s TRACER system, developer, real-estate, construction and lending money supplied 68% of Carrie Geitner’s donor funds, 63% of Cami Bremer’s, 61% of Holly Williams’s, and smaller but substantial shares for the rest (TRACER). A short list of donors recurs across nearly the entire board. Of the fourteen people who have served as commissioner over the past two decades, the Colorado Springs Housing & Building Association’s political committee has given to ten; the family of Doug Stimple, chief executive of Classic Homes, to twelve; the Jenkins family of Nor’wood Development to eleven; and the Realtors’ candidate committee to twelve. Mr Stimple’s company is the developer of Flying Horse East — the 5,000-home project two of his donees moved and seconded to approve.
The Buc-ee’s project sits inside the same web. Maria Larsen, who owned the Buc-ee’s parcel, filed the annexation petition and sold the land and water to Buc-ee’s, gave $1,250 — then the legal maximum — to Commissioner Bremer and $1,250 to Commissioner Williams on the same day in October 2021 (TRACER). Weeks earlier, the same two commissioners had each received a prohibited $5,000 corporate check from Colorado Springs Forward, a business group; the state fined the group and the commissioners returned the money (Gazette).
A caution is owed here, and it strengthens rather than weakens the point. The money does not appear to buy votes outright (see “the defector,” below). What it does is mark a remarkably consistent alignment: the commissioners who approve everything are the commissioners the development industry pays for.
Electing their own
Money explains the votes. It does not explain why nothing changes. For that, look at who runs.
The board has been entirely Republican for decades, so the June primary, not the November election, decides who governs; and when a seat falls vacant between elections, a party committee fills it. Commissioner Nelson owes her seat first to such a committee, which chose her in June 2025 — deadlocked 20–20 three times before she prevailed with 21 votes on the fourth ballot (Colorado Politics); she then won that November’s off-year election as the incumbent it had installed.
The class that wins is also closely related to itself. Commissioner Williams sits on the county board that decides land use; her husband, Wayne Williams, has held nearly every office around it — county commissioner, county clerk, Colorado secretary of state, and city councilman and chair of the Colorado Springs Utilities board, which sets the city’s annexation-water rules — and in April 2026 he became chief of staff to the Colorado Springs mayor, the man who had beaten him for the job three years earlier (CPR). Commissioner Bremer succeeded, in effect, a family seat: her father-in-law, Duncan Bremer, was a commissioner in the 1990s, and her husband Eli’s 2022 U.S. Senate bid was endorsed by 71 current and former county commissioners (Colorado Politics). Commissioner Geitner is married to a former state representative.
The doors revolve, too. Amy Lathen left the commission to run Colorado Springs Forward — the group later fined for the checks to her former colleagues — and then to manage a water district. And the official who would decide the Buc-ee’s back door, planning director Meggan Herington, had been a vice-president at Nor’wood Development before joining the county; the man she succeeded, Craig Dossey, now runs the consultancy that has represented Buc-ee’s in the county. Mark Waller’s path runs the same way: a former state legislator who held the District 2 commission seat Carrie Geitner now occupies, he is today a consultant for Buc-ee’s, running the company’s Palmer Lake community meetings through his own firm (CPR) — the man hired to press Buc-ee’s’ case once sat on the board it now needs. The applicant’s world and the county’s are the same world.
Two kinds of maverick
The pattern has exceptions, and they are instructive because there are never enough of them: three reliable votes are a majority of five.
Bill Wysong, who holds the Tri-Lakes seat, is the refuser. He pledged to take no developer money and largely kept to it — development money is about 9% of his donor funds, and he self-financed roughly a third of his campaign — and he is the board’s lone, regular “no.” His votes and his money point the same way.
Longinos Gonzalez, who held a southern-county seat until January 2025, is the more revealing case: the defector. He took the standard developer package — about 57% of his donor money, from the homebuilders’ committee, the Stimple family, the Realtors and the developer Matthew Dunston among others — and dissented anyway, sixteen times, seven of them on actual developments, including the Lazy Y RV Park rezoning, which the board approved 4–1 over its own Planning Commission’s recommendation of denial (Modern Campground). One commissioner could take the industry’s money and still vote no. That the majority does not is therefore a choice, not an inevitability — which is the strongest evidence that the board’s record reflects who sits on it.
The choice on June 30th
Which returns the story to the back door, and to the ballot.
The administrative route is designed to avoid the commissioners. But they remain the only check: the planning director can be pressed to refer the determination to a public hearing; the board sits at the downstream gates of water and site plan; and the political temperature of the board it forms decides whether a quiet maneuver draws scrutiny or a shrug. On June 30th, voters choose the people who will hold those levers.
The field divides along the pattern this investigation describes. In District 1, which covers the ground nearest the Buc-ee’s site, Ryan Graham, a real-estate agent, has run a campaign that is 53% developer-funded, with the Blue Line committee his largest single donor, and he did not answer the Integrity Matters land-use survey or say how he would treat Buc-ee’s (Integrity Matters); his Republican-primary opponent, Lindsay Moore, has taken almost no developer money — about 1% — and opposes the project as written; the Democrat, Gavin Rainey, has raised about $50 and also opposes it. In District 5, the incumbent, Lauren Nelson, is the most developer-funded candidate in either race — 74% — with the Blue Line committee again her largest donor and a perfect record of approving land-use applications; her Republican-primary opponent, Vickie Tonkins, a former county party chair, has taken far less developer money — 23% — and campaigns on serving “the people, not the developers” (Gazette voter guide); Democrats Christian Seale and Yolanda Avila also seek the seat.
On the documented pattern, a Graham-and-Nelson board is the outcome most favorable to Buc-ee’s; a Moore-and-Tonkins board the one most likely to force a 74,000-square-foot travel center into a hearing rather than wave it through a side entrance. The voters of Palmer Lake got their say and used it. In the county, the nearest thing to a say is the choice, on June 30, of who guards the door.
Choose wisely.
Sources & methodology
- The vote record. Counts derive from a reconstruction of every recorded El Paso County land-use decision from September 18th 2018 to June 25th 2026 — 476 matters — read from the county’s AgendaSuite agendas and minutes (regular Board of County Commissioners through 2021; the Board of County Commissioners (Land Use) thereafter). Each “BOCC ACTION … MOVED … SECONDED TO APPROVE/DENY … MOTION CARRIED” line was captured with mover, seconder and disposition. “Denials” are limited to the board’s own final motions; appeals of code enforcement, variances, continuances and withdrawals are recorded separately. The two denials are Resolution 23-131 (1825 Summit Drive, April 18th 2023) and Resolution 25-214 (Xcel “Colorado’s Power Pathway,” July 24th 2025); neither was a housing subdivision, commercial project, or master-planned community.
- Campaign finance. Figures are from the Colorado Secretary of State’s TRACER bulk contribution data (2001–2025) for each commissioner’s candidate committee, and from reconciled itemized reports for the 2026 candidates. “Developer/real-estate/loan” counts contributions from developers, builders, real-estate and construction firms, mortgage/title/lending interests, and the industry’s political committees; police, party and other non-industry committees are counted as other special interest; candidate self-funding is excluded from the percentages. Classification is by employer, occupation and donor name and is the newspaper’s own; individual rows can be requested.
- Land use & water. Your El Paso Master Plan (2021); El Paso County Water Master Plan (2018); Land Development Code and Table 5-1, Principal Uses; county water-reliability evaluation. Buc-ee’s file ADM264.
- Palmer Lake & Buc-ee’s. KOAA (election and spending); KOAA (withdrawal); KRDO (land and water purchase).
- Elections & candidates. Integrity Matters 2026 survey; Gazette voter guide, District 5.
- This newspaper’s related reporting (context, not primary sources): Permission granted; Follow the money; Buc-ee’s tries the back door.
