A retired Hewlett-Packard solution architect who served on the Monument Sanitation District board before joining the council, Laura Kronick has built her time in town government around reading the books line by line. As mayor, she says, she would bring the region’s water providers and outside experts together to find a renewable supply the town can afford, and spend her first years explaining to residents which districts serve them and why a regional answer makes sense. She supports the construction use tax on the ballot, and she still backs a stipend for council members, whose work, she says, takes far more time than residents see.
In March 2021, at a meeting of the Monument Sanitation District‘s board, one of its directors noticed that the district’s operating account at Integrity Bank held more than $400,000. “Why would we have that kind of money sitting in an operating account?” Laura Kronick asked. Two months later she objected that the district’s new manager had signed his employment contract the day before the board met to approve hiring him. “This isn’t the way the board works,” she said. By the following year, Our Community News reported, she “often takes the lead in asking detailed questions about the district’s financial reports.”
Five years later she sits on the Monument Town Council and is running for mayor, and the habit has stayed. “I go through every single line item,” she said in an interview. She and fellow councilmember Kenneth Kimple are competing in the only contested race on Monument’s Nov. 3 ballot, for the seat Mitch LaKind is leaving after six years in town government. Her platform puts water and infrastructure first, then fiscal responsibility and what she calls smart growth. In conversation she returned to the same two ideas: gather the facts before deciding, and explain the decision to the people it affects.
The candidate
Kronick was born in Indiana and lived in Illinois and New Jersey before moving to Littleton in 1981. She spent 24 years on five acres in Larkspur and moved to Monument in 2016. She worked for nearly a decade as a parametric estimator at Martin Marietta, later Lockheed Martin, then for more than 20 years at Digital Equipment Corporation and its successors, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard, retiring as a senior solution architect. She holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Columbia College and a master’s in systems management from the University of Southern California.
Since retiring she has volunteered with organizations that serve older residents, among them Silver Key Senior Services. She chairs the Regional Advisory Council of the Pikes Peak Area Council of Governments, on which she represents the town, and is enrolled in the Metro Mayors Caucus‘s Municipal Leadership Academy.
She came to the council from the audience. By her account she spent nearly six years watching the town’s board before joining it, and in 2018 she applied for a vacant trustee seat, as Kimple did; neither was appointed. By August 2020 she was a director of the sanitation district. In 2022 she became its treasurer and then president of the Joint Use Committee, the three-member board that runs the Tri-Lakes Wastewater Treatment Facility for the Monument, Palmer Lake and Woodmoor districts. That summer she argued that joining a regional wastewater project led by Colorado Springs Utilities would be financially irresponsible because its costs were uncertain, Our Community News reported, and the district stayed out. She worked on the 2022 campaign for the home-rule charter, which voters approved. The council appointed her to a vacant seat in February 2023, and in 2024 District 1 returned her unopposed.
She still goes to other boards’ meetings: the sanitation district’s, the Joint Use Committee’s, Palmer Lake’s. “I get firsthand information. I don’t get somebody’s filter,” she said.
Why now
She decided to run once LaKind decided not to seek another term, she said. She does not describe herself as a campaigner. “I am not a politician. I don’t kiss babies. I don’t shake hands,” she said. She is running, she said, “to work for the betterment of Monument. Period.”
In a letter in Our Community News’s October issue she put her case in the same terms. She has served on the council and, before it, the sanitation district board “not because I love meetings, but because I believe good government gets built one careful decision at a time,” she wrote. Before that came six years in the audience, “listening before I ever asked to participate as a councilmember, and that habit hasn’t changed.”
The job takes more time than residents see, in her account. The packet for a recent meeting ran past 400 pages, read over the weekend before a Monday meeting. “People don’t understand it’s not just two meetings a month,” she said.
Water
Monument has been working on its water supply for five or six years, Kronick said, and she watched much of it from the audience before she joined the council. “I’m not an analysis paralysis person, but I want the information, I want the data,” she said. “You only get to make it once,” she said of a decision of this size, and when about 1,700 residents depend on the town’s own system, the answer has to be one they can afford.
East of Interstate 25, much of Monument gets its water from Triview Metropolitan District, whose Northern Delivery System, a renewable-water pipeline, began operating in 2024. At one point, Kronick said, the town’s options came down to three: a connection to that system, the Loop, and a regional approach that was talked about but never worked out. “It’s commas and zeros,” she said of what any of them would cost. The council voted 7–0 in August to leave the Loop, on her motion; she called the roughly $4 million of federal relief money the town had spent on it “a feasibility study” rather than a waste.
She has never believed those were the only choices. “I am convinced, and have been all along, that NDS and the Loop were not the only two options,” she said. Her approach is to put the people who know water in one room, including some with no stake in either project. Castle Rock built a renewable system years ago, she noted, and Monument should be asking its neighbors what worked and what did not. What gets in the way, in her view, is turf. “It’s about the egos. It’s about the fiefdoms,” she said. “Can we be friends and business associates at the same time, and still live in different towns? I hope so.” She is working on bringing those people together, she said, and “it’s starting to happen.” She credited the town’s staff, including Town Manager Madeline VanDenHoek and Andrew Archuleta, whom the mayor introduced on Oct. 5 as the town’s newly named director of public works.
Her call for a water workshop goes back to the candidate forum the Tri-Lakes Chamber of Commerce held in September, where she proposed a public one that would bring residents together with municipal water experts and people from communities that have developed other approaches. “I firmly believe we need a water workshop,” she said there. “There are other options out there.” She sat on the committee that interviewed firms for the town’s new water attorneys, and in her letter to Our Community News she described the work as “digging into Monument’s current reusable and renewable water options, the kind of work that decides whether our taps still run in 20 years.” Her campaign site is direct about the cost: “Being upfront, this will take investment. I would rather get it right the first time.”
She would go further than water. Water and sanitation around Monument are split among neighboring providers, among them Donala, Woodmoor, the town and its sanitation district, and Palmer Lake, and she would like to see them work as one regional organization. “We’re all right here. You can put your arms around all of us,” she said. “Why aren’t we exercising some economies of scale?” It is an old idea for her. In 2022, when the town proposed merging its water department with the sanitation district, Kronick, then a director, offered to take notes at the district’s workshop on it; in 2023 she and LaKind put a similar proposal to the district’s leaders.
The money
The town’s use tax is the money question on Monument’s ballot. It would raise the tax on construction materials from 2 percent to 3.5 percent, matching the sales tax a homeowner already pays on lumber bought in town, and restrict the revenue to capital projects, including streets, roads, bridges, sidewalks and stormwater. The town estimates it would bring in $2,272,500 in its first year. Kronick voted to send it to voters in August, after warning on Aug. 3 that adding vehicles to the tax “appears to be a bait and switch”; the version on the ballot leaves vehicles at 2 percent.
“I understand that residents see the word tax and immediately think no,” she said. The builder pays it first and passes it on, so homebuyers and people remodeling pay it in the end, she said, but in a form most residents will never notice: “an invisible tax that doesn’t affect people directly.” The answer, in her view, is explaining it, and she pointed to the town’s police tax as the precedent. A half-cent sales tax for police failed in November 2020, 3,568 to 2,643, and passed a year later as Ballot Issue 2F, 2,061 to 1,252, once the town had narrowed the question. “Maybe it needed to fail the first time so that people understood that there was an issue,” she said. Growth adds people, people need services, “and somebody’s got to pay for that. It should be the developers.” Much of that should have been happening all along, she said, and she faults earlier councils and staff for not paying attention. Of the use tax, she said: “Here’s a resource for revenue that we should have been using all along. So we left a lot of money on the table.”
The draft 2027 budget the council saw on Oct. 5 is tight. The general fund takes in $16.31 million and spends $16.97 million, and the town’s five-year forecast shows spending running ahead of revenue every year through 2031. The town manager told the council on Oct. 5 that “this is not sustainable.”
“Every dollar the Town spends is a resident’s dollar,” her campaign site says. She credits the town’s staff with the improvement of the past few years, and she reads the budget the way she read the sanitation district’s. The council now sees individual line items, she said, where it used to see “lumps,” and when one looks wrong to her she calls staff and asks before the meeting. “There is nothing hidden. It’s completely transparent,” she said. Asking in private first means “I’m not asking questions in public that could make everybody look bad.” She treats the budget as “a living document” that changes with the town’s circumstances. Money, she wrote in answer to The Gazette’s voters guide, sits “at the cornerstone of every issue,” and balancing the budget, raising revenue and reducing expenses is “a continuing, not first and not only, priority.” She credits the Citizens Service Level Advisory Committee, the residents’ panel for which she is the council’s liaison, with identifying, “from a resident’s perspective, those areas where expenses might be shaved and/or revenues increased.” She has sat through lean years on the council. When the town laid off employees in 2025, she said, “We are having to make really difficult decisions across the board.” New commercial development can only carry so much of the load, in her view, because the town is running out of room for it: “We’re out of dirt.” Asked in the same questionnaire how the town should pay for new projects, she listed “economic development, grants, and expanding how fees are levied,” each weighed on its merits.
She still supports paying council members. In 2024 she led the push for a $500-a-month stipend, and asked whether she still holds that view, she said, “Yes, I do.” In 2025, when only one person applied for a vacant at-large seat, she said the position might draw more interest if it were paid. Her own hours go well beyond meetings. “I spend an inordinate amount of time, but I feel informed, and I get paid nothing for it, and you know what? That’s my choice,” she said. The finance memo for the draft budget says it adds stipends for the mayor, council members and planning commissioners, and the council’s own budget rises from $138,500 to $208,700.
The roads out
Asked in writing what she would do as mayor to prepare the town for a wildfire evacuation, Kronick pointed to work already under way between town staff, the regional emergency management office and the Monument Fire District. “I support staff’s continued work with the Pikes Peak Regional Office of Emergency Management and Monument Fire to assure that residents have effective access to information for safe evacuation in the event of a threat to life or property,” she wrote. “This is an ongoing effort and will continue to be so.”
Growth
Kronick calls the Monument 2040 comprehensive plan, due for a council vote on Nov. 2, a great starting point, and she was one of two council members on the committee that steered it. “I’m all in,” she said. She joined partly out of frustration with the 2017 plan. Whenever a project came before the council, she said, staff described it as in “substantial compliance” with that plan, and nobody could tell her what the phrase meant. The new plan, written with The Lakota Group, drew on residents in a way she does not think the 2017 plan did, and it sets out specific actions to reach its goals, which she counts as its biggest improvement. It is a guide, she stressed, not law. “This isn’t the law. This isn’t a piece of code,” she said. “This is a vision.” It will be “out of date the minute it’s published,” she added, which is why it can be changed. She went to the Planning Commission‘s continued hearing on the plan on Oct. 14, she said, because she disagreed with comments from people who had joined the process at the end.
On housing for teachers, first responders and town staff, she is blunt about the council’s limits. It can encourage a developer, “or discourage, but that’s it.” She made the same point in writing in September: she “absolutely” supports a wider range of housing types, but “Council doesn’t have the ability to direct how previously zoned land is to be developed.” She pointed to Hillpointe, the 354 apartments and townhomes the council approved in August beside Old Denver Road, as a project whose developer focuses on that market, and said it is not close to the number of homes needed. When housing costs climb anyway, she said, the council takes the blame: “We’re javelin catchers.”
On the council
As mayor she would need four votes, and she sees the chair modestly. “It’s one vote,” she said, “and you get a title.” She builds agreement one colleague at a time, she said, talking with council members individually, before an item she expects to be contentious, rather than at the dais, partly to learn where they stand: “Maybe they have an opinion that might change my mind. You never know.” She thinks the council’s closed executive sessions are appropriate, and credits Bob Cole, of Collins Cole Winn & Ulmer, the law firm that represents the town, with having “almost single-handedly dug us out of a hole and helped us to be better council members.”
Much of her council work has been in the details. In August the council approved a new printing contract on the condition that it separate fixed and variable costs, a change she had asked for, and with Councilmember Marco Fiorito she volunteered to draft the questions for the town manager’s evaluation. LaKind credited her with spearheading the council’s 2024 standards-of-conduct ordinance. In July she voted for the Monument Lake parking permits, which passed 5–1 with Kimple the lone vote against, and for the six-month moratorium on data centers, which passed 6–0.
With LaKind she negotiated the new lease for the Tri-Lakes Chamber of Commerce in the town-owned Old Town Hall, which moves the Chamber from $1 a year to $500 a month in 2027, rising to $1,500 a month in 2031; the council approved it 4–3 in August, with Kimple among the three against. She describes it as one piece of a wider review. Every town asset was listed as a possible source of revenue and handled accordingly, whether sold or rented, she wrote, with input from the residents’ advisory committee, and the Chamber’s rent under its original agreement was “significantly out of scale” with market value. The Chamber and its visitor center are “a viable use for the property,” she wrote, and that should count in their favor when the town decides the building’s future. Whether the town keeps Old Town Hall or sells it “will be a decision made in the future,” and either side can end the lease on 30 days’ notice.
Monument’s council has opposed a Buc-ee’s at the Interstate 25 interchange at County Line Road since early 2025. This summer the company asked El Paso County to rule that its travel center counted as a convenience store, a use the parcel’s zoning already allows. On July 1 the county’s planning director, Meggan Herington, found that she could not determine that it did, and Buc-ee’s appealed to the county commissioners. On Aug. 3 the town council voted 7–0 to send the commissioners a letter backing the director’s determination and opposing the convenience-store classification, along with a press release asking them to deny the appeal and require a rezoning or other full land-use review. When the letter came to the council described as one of support, Kronick questioned the label: “Well, it’s not really support, is it?” The commissioners granted the appeal 4–1 on Aug. 27. Residents of Woodmoor, outside the town’s limits, had wanted Monument to do more, she said, but the town had to follow its attorney’s advice. “You don’t even elect us, but we’re still here for you,” she said of them.
On data centers she would keep the council’s options open. The council chose a six-month moratorium, she wrote, because “things change and we didn’t want to lock in a path that might not be relevant in the future.” When it ends, renewing it and an outright ban are both possibilities, and “perhaps it would be prudent to write standards into the code”; she would welcome draft language “supported by other jurisdictions.” She is “not necessarily in favor of any decision that might hamstring future Councils,” she wrote. That fits what she told the Chamber’s candidate forum in September: the moratorium buys time, and any proposal should be judged on its size, location and effect.
The race
Monument’s mayor serves four years. Both candidates sit on the council in seats that run to 2028. The winner must resign that seat, and the council then has 90 days to fill it by appointment or by special election; an appointee serves only until the next regular election, in 2028. The loser keeps their seat. Ballots went out on Oct. 5, in-person voting centers open Oct. 19, and ballots are due by 7 p.m. on Nov. 3.
Whoever wins, both candidates keep their council seats for two more years, which Kronick counts as a good thing. Three newcomers are unopposed for council seats this year, and “you need a little continuity,” she said.
She is filing as a standalone candidate, which means she takes no contributions. She is running a quiet campaign by choice. “You won’t see any signs of mine. You won’t see any stuff in the mail. It’s just not me,” she said. Much of what she knows about residents’ concerns comes from one-on-one conversations and email, she told the Chamber’s forum. “I’m ready to lead Monument,” she wrote in her letter. “I’m asking for your vote on Nov. 3.”
What the winner inherits
The next mayor takes office in January with the 2027 budget already adopted. The final draft comes to the council on Nov. 2, the same night as its vote on the 2040 plans, and adoption is set for Dec. 7. The new council will have to decide how to pay for the southbound lanes of Jackson Creek Parkway, which the capital plan prices at $8 million with no funding source, and fill the seat the new mayor leaves behind.
Asked what would be different after two years, Kronick started with water. She wants residents to understand which district supplies their water and which treats their sewage, and why a regional answer would serve them, though she expects that to take more than two years: “Lord knows we’ve been working on it for at least seven that I’m aware of.” She also wants residents to understand how the town makes decisions, so that fewer feel those decisions are “done to them, not with them,” and she wants more of them taking part, though she does not yet know how to get them there. “It is a process,” she said. “It’s not just one voice, one time. That’s not going to cut it.”
Sources & further reading
The Independent’s own coverage: Kenneth Kimple Wants Monument Ready Before It Needs to Be, the profile of her opponent · Six Candidates, Five Seats, One Contested Race, the ballot, the terms and the charter’s vacancy rule · Monument Town Council, October 5, 2026, the draft 2027 budget · Monument Town Council, August 17, 2026, the use tax referral and Hillpointe · Monument Town Council, August 3, 2026, leaving the Loop, the vehicle question and the Chamber lease · Monument Council Asks the County to Reject Buc-ee’s Zoning Claim · A History of the Monument Police Department, the 2020 and 2021 police tax votes · Not an HOA: The Government That Runs Much of Monument, Triview and the Northern Delivery System · Monument’s Draft 2040 Plan Is Out.
Campaign: Laura4Monument, read Oct. 16, 2026 · The Gazette’s voters guide, Oct. 3, 2026 · her letter in Our Community News, October 2026.
Town record: the Town of Monument’s Elections page and her candidate affidavit · BoardWatch, Monument.
Other reporting: Our Community News on the Monument Sanitation District board, 2020 to 2022 (Allison Robenstein and Lisa Hatfield; Jackie Burhans and James Howald) · The Gazette on the Sept. 28 Chamber forum and on the council in 2025 · the Pikes Peak Area Council of Governments’ Regional Advisory Council roster.
Methodology
Laura Kronick was interviewed in person on the afternoon of October 16th, 2026, in a recorded session of about an hour, and answered further questions in writing that evening; those written answers are quoted as she wrote them. Quotations from the interview come from the recording, worked from a machine-generated transcript. Transcripts of this kind misrender names and garble phrases, and the Independent’s reporting process uses AI tools that can make mistakes. Where her spoken answer was hard to follow, the passage is paraphrased rather than quoted. If we have got something wrong we will correct it, via the Independent’s corrections page.
Her career, education and volunteer roles are her own account, from the interview, her campaign website and her answers to The Gazette’s voters guide; her chairmanship of the Regional Advisory Council is from the Pikes Peak Area Council of Governments’ roster. They have not been confirmed with her former employers or the universities. Her service on the sanitation district board is from Our Community News’s reporting of its meetings. Her votes are taken from contemporaneous reporting, the town’s records and this newspaper’s own coverage of the council. Her figure for the number of residents on the town’s water system and her account of the council’s work are hers and are attributed to her throughout. Budget figures are from the town’s draft 2027 budget as presented on October 5th.
Using this reporting? Credit The Monument Independent and link to this article: https://monumentindependent.com/government/laura-kronick-monument-mayor/. Our guidelines are at Using Our Reporting.
