Monument’s Draft 2040 Plan Is Out. Here Is How to Weigh In.

The Town of Monument published two draft plans for public review on August 26: a 256-page comprehensive plan meant to guide the next decade and more of growth, and a 74-page downtown master plan. The town will present both at an open house on Wednesday, September 9, from noon to 4 p.m., where residents can see them and put questions to the planners who wrote them. The Planning Commission takes them up in a public hearing at 6 o’clock that same evening, and the Town Council is scheduled to adopt the comprehensive plan on October 5. The Independent has read both drafts in full.

Monument has been working on this document since 2024. The town’s project page records the sequence: a joint council and planning commission study session in September 2024, a request for proposals that October, and Resolution 01-2025 in January 2025 hiring The Lakota Group to write it. Public engagement began in March 2025 and ran through a community workshop that October.

The drafts are the result, and they are now online.

What Is in the Comprehensive Plan

The draft runs to five chapters. “About the Plan” sets out its purpose, the state requirements it answers to, the process behind it and the plans that came before. “Monument in the Mirror” is the portrait of the town — a community profile and a section titled “The Community Speaks.” The third chapter, beginning on page 42 and the longest of them, carries the plan proper: the community vision, seven community pillars, and the goals and strategies attached to them. Chapter four is implementation, including an implementation matrix and a section on strategic growth. An appendix begins on page 242.

Its own statement of purpose is a policy framework for “land use, transportation, economic development, housing, and community character,” built from an analysis of existing conditions and from public comment. The document lists five objectives, among them integrating the town’s existing plans into one vision and setting priorities and responsibilities for improvements.

A comprehensive plan is not a zoning code and does not by itself permit or forbid anything. It is the policy document that land-use decisions are measured against, and the one applicants and opponents alike cite at hearings. Monument’s current plan dates from 2017.

The second document, the Downtown Master Plan, is a separate 74-page draft covering the historic core. The town describes the two together as a framework for growth, housing, economic development, stormwater and the future of downtown.

What Would Actually Bind

Read end to end, the comprehensive plan is less a set of commitments than a long list of intentions. It carries 50 goals and 141 strategies, each with its own numbered action steps, and marks about half of them high priority. It attaches a cost estimate to none of them. Every dollar figure in the document is either demographic context or an example of what some other town paid for something.

Four things in it do bind, and all four come from outside Town Hall. State law requires Monument to adopt a housing action plan by January 1, 2028 — a deadline that will fall to whoever wins in November. Adoption also starts a clock: under state statute the plan’s strategic growth and water supply elements must be updated every five years from the date it is adopted. The plan says it contains all six elements state law requires, though distributed through its chapters rather than set out as their own. And once adopted it can be amended only the way it was adopted — a Planning Commission hearing, then a council vote.

The rest is aspiration, and the plan is honest about what it would take. Most of the tools it reaches for are ones Monument does not have: a business improvement district downtown, tax increment financing, a restructured impact fee, and a parks district whose feasibility study is directed to examine “tax implications, and potential pathways for voter approval.” Responsibility for carrying it out lands almost entirely on two offices — the town’s planning department is named as lead on 91 separate strategies, its administration on 33 — in a town that cut staff and spending last year to close a structural deficit. The town’s own description of the documents matches. They “are intended to serve as long-range policy guides,” planning director Dan Ungerleider told the Independent, “and many of the recommendations will require additional discussion, evaluation, and public engagement before they are carried out.”

What the Town Says About Itself

The sharpest passages in the draft are the ones Monument wrote about its own rules. Fifty-seven percent of the town’s land — 2,366 acres — is zoned Planned Unit Development, a designation the plan says “is not defined in the municipal code” and whose intended use “is not discernible from the zoning map alone.” Its conclusion is blunt: this “suggests the current body of land use and development regulations does not adequately address the needs of commercial and residential development.” The remedy, ranked among the highest priorities and shortest timelines in the book, is to put a real base zoning district under every parcel in town and treat PUD as an overlay on top of it.

Phil Stuepfert, the professional land planner on the plan’s steering committee, told the Independent the finding matches what he sees from the development side. “The Code has been outdated for a very long time,” he said, calling the rewrite “long overdue” and something he agrees with “100%.” He also supplied the explanation the plan leaves out — how the town got to 57 percent in the first place. “Part of the reason there was so many PUD’s in the past,” he said, “is because the Town didn’t have good codes and ordinances so developers had to use the PUD districts.” The code updates, he added, “will be starting soon.”

Housing gets similar treatment. The only district in Monument that permits multifamily housing outright covers 30.94 acres, under one percent of the town. Downtown, multifamily is a conditional use and the code sets no density at all — not in the Downtown Business district, not in the Commercial Center district next to it. The plan describes what that means for anyone who tries: an applicant “may have to go through a lengthy application and review process only to be told no.” The regional housing assessment it relies on puts Monument’s shortfall at 824 units now and 691 more within ten years, against a stock that is 76 percent single-family detached.

Stuepfert is less troubled by that gap than the plan is, and it is worth hearing the dissent. “Across the U.S. it is common for zoning districts to not set a density,” he said. “In many cases that is set in a Comprehensive Plan with ranges of density. So developers will still propose a project, even if no densities are set.” He also cautioned against reading too much into the number itself: “density alone does not guarantee a good, quality development for any community.” He has seen low-density projects that are unappealing, he said, and high-density ones that look fantastic.

Laura Kronick, one of the two councilmembers on the steering committee, described the limit as it looks from the dais. She said she “absolutely” supports a wider range of housing types, but that “it is imperative that people understand Council doesn’t have the ability to direct how previously zoned land is to be developed.” Sitting as a quasi-judicial body, the council is “obligated to assure that these decisions are made legally,” she said, and “more often than not, zoning — established years and perhaps decades ago — is a driving factor that Council does not have the ability to change without the landowner’s request.” On her account much of what the plan hopes for waits on developers choosing to bring it forward. She pointed to the council’s unanimous approval on August 17 of 354 apartments and townhomes on Old Denver Road as the example to follow: “The developer listened, worked with a builder, and acted with integrity and thoughtfulness. This is what it will take to get us ‘there.'”

One number in the draft was chosen rather than measured, and it is worth understanding before the hearing. The National Recreation and Park Association recommends 10.8 acres of parkland per 1,000 residents, which for Monument’s roughly 11,000 people would mean about 119 acres. The plan says the town is “adopting a more locally relevant benchmark of 5.0 acres per 1,000 residents,” which sets the target at 55. Monument has 93.38 acres. Measured against the national figure the town is short by about 26 acres; measured against the one the plan picks, it has a 38-acre surplus and “appears to be well served.”

The downtown plan is more concrete because it is smaller. It records that no new retail has been built in downtown Monument since 1995, that the district contains ten apartments, and that only about 14 percent of the roughly 823,000 annual visits downtown come from people who live in Monument. It draws two redevelopment concepts — a three-story, 60-unit mixed-use building at Front and 3rd streets, and a 4.5-story, 140-unit apartment building at the 2nd Street gateway, which it concedes “received mixed feedback.” And it names a third site without drawing anything: the 30 acres Lewis-Palmer School District 38 owns in the middle of downtown, which the plan calls a rare opportunity while noting that redeveloping it would mean relocating the district’s bus fleet and the town’s two baseball fields.

What the Town Is Asking Residents to Do

The town issued an expanded release about the open house on August 26, and it is unusually specific about the kind of comment it is looking for. “The purpose of the September 9 events is not to restart the planning process,” the release says, “but to ensure that the final draft accurately reflects the vision that residents have helped shape throughout the past two years.” It puts the question to residents plainly: “Does the Monument 2040 represent the future you want for Monument?” Ungerleider, quoted in the release, frames the evening the same way: “The opportunity before the community and the Planning Commission is to confirm that the vision, goals, and implementation strategies contained in the draft accurately reflect what residents have told us is important about Monument and where they want the community to be in the coming decades.”

Asked by the Independent what the Planning Commission would find most useful on the night, Ungerleider gave the same answer: “the most valuable feedback will be whether residents believe the Monument 2040 Comprehensive Plan and Downtown Master Plan accurately reflect the community’s vision and the extensive public input received over the past two years.” He said he could not speak for Chair Egley or for the Commission itself. The release lists five things it says commissioners want to hear about — whether the plan reflects Monument’s character and identity, sets an appropriate vision for growth, aligns with community values, gives clear guidance for future decisions, and preserves what residents value while preparing the town for what is coming.

The town does not dispute that the hard part comes after adoption. “You are also correct that the implementation sections of both plans represent a significant amount of future work,” Ungerleider wrote. Achieving the goals in them, he said, “will require commitment and dedication from Town staff, the Planning Commission, Town Council, residents, property owners, and the business community. In many respects, the implementation strategy reflects the idea that ‘it takes a village.'” The release is more specific about the first step, and it matches what the plan itself ranks highest: “Town leaders anticipate that one of the first priorities following adoption will be aligning the Town’s regulatory framework with the policies and vision established by the new Comprehensive Plan” — the zoning map, the Land Development Code and the development review procedures.

One recommendation the town is keen to talk about is a small one: adding a non-voting Town Council liaison and a Lewis-Palmer student representative to the Planning Commission. The liaison, Ungerleider said, is meant to keep the elected and appointed bodies aligned, since both “play important roles in shaping community policy and guiding future development.” The student seat is the one he made a case for. “As a community planning for the year 2040 and beyond,” he said in the release, “it is important that we include perspectives from those who will inherit the Monument we are building today.”

Who Wrote It

The plan’s acknowledgments name a steering committee drawn from the council, the Planning Commission and local institutions: Chad Smith and Laura Kronick as council representatives, Planning Commission chair Ray Egley, Terri Hayes of the Tri-Lakes Chamber of Commerce, Haley Chapin of Tri-Lakes Cares and Phil Stuepfert of HR Green, the engineering and land-planning firm. The consultant team is led by The Lakota Group with SB Friedman Development Advisors, V3 Companies, Rollins Consult and Radian.

The acknowledgments also record that the work was supplemented by a State of Colorado Energy and Mineral Impact Assistance Grant, the same state fund the town has tapped elsewhere — it applied to the program in February for a master transportation plan.

A Planner on the Committee

Of the seven people the Independent wrote to, Stuepfert answered at the greatest length. He is a resident of the area with about 30 years in urban planning who has written comprehensive plans for municipalities across the country, and he was direct about what he pushed for.

He is unambiguously in favor of growth. “While some residents of the area are against growth, I am for positive, well-planned growth,” he said. “I do strongly believe if you are not growing you are dying.” He argued that opposition has damaged the town’s planning rather than protected it: “Some of the anti-growth sentiment in the [Town of Monument] has caused poor planning in the past. Just saying ‘no’ to growth in a Town that is growing usually does not turn out well,” because a town that fights expansion puts little time or money into planning for the growth it gets anyway. He also made the case that higher density in buildable areas is a way to protect the land worth keeping, not a threat to it.

On two points he is at odds with what the plans themselves record residents saying. He wants national retailers alongside independent ones — “to be healthy, a community like the [Town of Monument] needs a lot of diversity with retail development” — where the downtown plan reports that residents “do not want chains or big-box retail.” And he rejects a familiar local argument against new housing. “Our school district is losing enrollment rapidly,” he said, and the fear of overcrowded schools “is just not factual, as the school district needs more students to maintain funding levels which will ensure the quality of education remains at a high level.” On that, the Independent’s own reporting broadly bears him out, though the picture is more particular than “rapidly” suggests. Lewis-Palmer District 38’s 2026-27 budget projects the funded pupil count, which includes the charter, falling by 158 to 6,040. The loss is concentrated in the district’s own schools, where enrollment is projected at about 5,015 — roughly 880 below the 2018-19 peak of 5,895. Monument Academy is moving the other way: the charter now educates about 1,166 children, 19 percent of the district against 14 percent a decade ago, and expects to add more. Because Colorado funds schools per pupil, the net loss cut total program funding by about $1.74m and roughly 35 positions from the payroll.

His warning about what happens after adoption is blunter than anything in either document. “Now the real work starts,” he said. Implementation “takes time, and most of all financial backing in the Capital Improvement Plan budget. Too many plans like this sit on a shelf, so I really hope the [Town of Monument] leadership, staff and its residents take this plan seriously.”

A Councilmember on the Committee

Kronick’s account of the steering committee is a more modest one than Stuepfert’s. It was assembled, she said, “to address, from multiple perspectives, the various ‘visions’ for the Town,” and its members agreed that “hearing the voices of the citizens is paramount.” Their own views were heard “with the caveat that more opinions were necessary. By pushing the ultimate input to the citizens, I feel the group allowed the final draft to be ‘shaped’ as it should have been, by the people.”

Asked whether she had pushed for any particular part of the plan, she said she had not. “Personally, I was not focused on a specific piece of the plan, rather on generating a useable document that reflected Monument in general and the desires of those living in 80132.” The consultants “listened intently and let the plan formulate from the grassroots,” she said, and the direction “was allowed to morph as responses were processed.” She thanked the residents who came to the focus groups, pop-up events, meetings and surveys, and allowed that she would have liked more of them: “We had good participation and I would have liked even more.” The plan, she said, “is the beginning and is a living document that is used by the Planning Commission and Council.”

Why the Timing Matters

The adoption date puts the plan on the desk of the council now sitting rather than the one voters choose. Five of the council’s seven seats are on the November 3 ballot, including the mayor’s, and Mayor Mitch LaKind is not seeking re-election. Asked last week what he thought the next mayor would face, he named growth management second only to water: Monument “will continue to attract development, and the next mayor needs to understand both the tools available and their limitations.” The plan is one of those tools, and it is being finished now.

October 5 is also the day El Paso County begins mailing ballots to active registered voters. The council elected in November inherits the January 2028 housing deadline, the 36 short-term strategies the plan defines as beginning within one to three years, and the five-year statutory clock that starts the day the plan is adopted.

What the plan will govern is not hypothetical. In a single meeting on August 17 the council refused 205 homes beside the Air Force Academy and approved 354 apartments and townhomes on Old Denver Road, and left in place, on the land it refused, an existing entitlement for 500 apartments and 205,000 square feet of industrial space.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage: Monument Town Council, August 17, 2026 — the subdivision denial and the 354-unit approval that show what the plan will be applied to, and the November ballot it precedes · LaKind Will Not Seek Re-Election as Mayor of Monument — the departing mayor on growth and water, and the open seat the plan’s adoption precedes · Three Governments, One Map — the Independent’s tracker of what is actually being filed across Monument, Palmer Lake and the county · Right-Sizing the Rolls — the D38 budget built around a shrinking district, and the enrollment figures behind the schools argument.

The documents: DRAFT Monument 2040 Comprehensive Plan, dated August 26, 2026 · DRAFT Downtown Master Plan, same date · Existing Conditions Report, July 2025.

Town record: Comprehensive Plan — Monument 2040, the town’s project page and schedule · the open house on the town calendar · monument2040.com, the project site and comment form · “Monument Invites the Community to the September 9 Monument 2040 Open House and Planning Commission Hearing,” the town’s expanded release dated August 26, 2026, provided to the Independent by the planning department on August 28; the release directs readers to townofmonument.org/m2040.

Methodology

The event details, the schedule and the adoption date come from the Town of Monument’s own comprehensive plan project page and its calendar entry, both read on August 27, 2026. The Independent downloaded both drafts the same day and has read them in full: all 256 pages of the comprehensive plan and all 74 pages of the downtown master plan, both dated August 26, 2026 on their title pages. Two pages carry no machine-readable text — the back cover of each document — and were examined as images to confirm nothing was missed. Page references above are to the printed page numbers in the drafts. The counts of goals, strategies and priority designations were tallied from the implementation matrix rather than estimated. This article is a guide to the open house and to the parts of the drafts a resident would most want to know before attending; it is not a full account of what the plans propose, and a closer reading of the implementation chapter and the strategic growth appendix will follow.

Two inconsistencies inside the drafts are worth noting for anyone reading them. The overview on page 5 gives the plan’s horizon as “the next 10 to 20 years,” while the statement of purpose on the following page gives “the next ten to fifteen years.” The town’s website and the project site both say 10 to 15; the town’s August 26 release sides with page 5 and says the plans are meant to guide decisions “over the next 10 to 20 years.” The standfirst above therefore says “a decade and more” rather than picking one. And the draft dates the town’s Three-Mile Plan to January 2026 on page 9 and to April 2026 on page 47; the council adopted it in January, by Resolution 06-2026. The steering committee, consultant team and grant funding are as listed in the plan’s acknowledgments page, with two names corrected here against the records of the organizations themselves: the draft gives “Terry Hayes” and “Phil Stupfert,” while the Tri-Lakes Chamber names its president and chief executive as Terri Hayes and HR Green names its vice-president for business development as Phil Stuepfert. LaKind’s remarks are from written answers he gave the Independent on August 27. The October 5 ballot-mailing date is from the El Paso County Clerk and Recorder’s September 2026 election calendar.

On August 28 the Independent emailed questions about the drafts to seven of the people named above: Mayor LaKind; councilmembers Chad Smith and Laura Kronick, the two council representatives on the steering committee; Planning Commission chair Ray Egley, through the town’s planning department; Terri Hayes of the Tri-Lakes Chamber of Commerce; Haley Chapin of Tri-Lakes Cares; and Phil Stuepfert of HR Green. Each was asked to reply by September 4. Planning director Dan Ungerleider replied the same day on behalf of the planning department, saying he could not speak for Chair Egley or the Planning Commission; his answers and the town’s expanded release are quoted above. Phil Stuepfert replied at length on August 29 and Councilmember Laura Kronick on September 3; their answers are quoted above as they wrote them, with the abbreviation “TOM” expanded in brackets. Mayor LaKind and Terri Hayes of the Tri-Lakes Chamber each acknowledged the questions on August 28 and said they expected to answer by the deadline; their responses will be added when they arrive. Chair Egley did not reply personally, and Councilmember Chad Smith and Haley Chapin of Tri-Lakes Cares had not replied at all, when this article was filed.