The Monument town council voted unanimously on August 3rd to send El Paso County’s commissioners a six-page letter urging them to uphold the county’s refusal to classify Buc-ee’s proposed travel center as a convenience store. A press release issued alongside it goes further, asking them to deny the company’s appeal and to require “the appropriate rezoning or other comprehensive land-use review” before the project advances. The determination the town is defending decided only that the question could not be decided.
The letter appeared nowhere on the agenda by name, though the agenda noted the council could act in open session on matters from its two closed sessions — one of them held for legal advice on “planning matters currently before El Paso County on appeal.” When the council returned, it voted 7-0 to sign a six-page position letter to the El Paso County Board of County Commissioners and to approve an accompanying press release. Council member Chad Smith moved it. The town made both documents public by August 4th; the letter is dated August 3rd.
The letter’s subject line is not coy: “Support for Administrative Determination ADM264 and Opposition to Classification of Buc-ee’s as an Allowed Convenience Store Use.”
What the town is defending
The document at the center of this is stranger than either side’s shorthand suggests.
In June, Buc-ee’s EPCO, LLC asked El Paso County for an administrative determination — file ADM264 — that its proposed development at the Interstate 25 and County Line Road interchange is a “convenience store,” a use already permitted by right in the parcel’s C-1 commercial zoning. A favorable ruling would have let the company pursue the project under its existing zoning — no rezoning, no public hearing, no vote by the elected commissioners — though administrative site-plan, traffic, drainage and related reviews would still have followed.
On July 1st Meggan Herington, the county’s executive director of planning and community development, answered that she could not answer. Because it was unclear whether the proposal met the code’s definition of a convenience store, she wrote, she could not determine whether it was similar enough to an allowed use to qualify as one. The county has since been at pains to say what that was not. “Did the County deny Buc-ee’s?” its own public update asks. “No.”
Buc-ee’s appealed on July 2nd, opening county file APP261. Under the Land Development Code the commissioners are “the ultimate interpreter of the meaning and application of this Code,” and the appeal is confined to a single question: whether the proposed use is allowed in C-1, or similar enough to an allowed use to be treated as one. The commissioners are deciding a label, not a project. No board meeting date has been announced.
That posture was noticed at the council table. Asked to approve a letter of support, Laura Kronick put the obvious question — “Well, it’s not really support, is it?” Marco Fiorito answered that it supports the planning department’s decision, “which was a non-decision.” Mayor Pro Tem Steve King added the part that matters: “But it also takes it another level. This letter does.”
It does — though the sharpest demands sit in the press release rather than the letter. The letter asks the commissioners to uphold Ms Herington’s determination, reject the convenience-store classification, and give the project “the comprehensive public review it warrants.” The press release’s “Requested County Action” goes further: deny any appeal, and if the company wants a travel center at that location, “the County must require the appropriate rezoning or other comprehensive land-use review — with full public notice and participation — before taking further action.” “A regional travel center of this scale should not be approved through an expansive interpretation of an obsolete zoning category,” Mayor Mitch LaKind said in the release.
The argument
The letter runs to six pages and seven numbered sections, addressed to the chair and members of the board at Centennial Hall and signed individually by all seven members of the council. Its central contention is a matter of category. A convenience store, in the code’s contemplation, serves the neighborhood around it, with fuel sales as an accessory. The proposed Buc-ee’s, the council writes, “is not designed to serve a neighborhood market. It is a regional travel center intended to attract customers from throughout Colorado and beyond.” Its business model, customer draw, operational intensity, site design and scale are, in the town’s account, substantially different from the convenience stores the county has previously approved — facilities “generally significantly smaller in commercial floor area, range of uses, and fueling operations.”
From there the letter widens. Granting the classification, it argues, “raises concerns similar to those commonly associated with spot zoning” — a “special entitlement unavailable to similarly situated properties” — and it notes that the county’s own determination “acknowledges that no previous convenience store approvals exist within the C-1 district.” It warns that the development could substantially affect County Line Road, Beacon Lite Road, State Highway 105 and the Interstate 25 interchange, and “redirect significant traffic through the Town of Monument and its historic downtown core”; that a regional destination of this scale would place additional demands on law enforcement, emergency response and fire and medical services; and — a section heading in its own right — that the C-1 district is obsolete.
That last adjective is not the town’s invention — El Paso County’s own explainer describes C-1 as “an obsolete zone district intended for general commercial uses” — and the letter’s final section builds its most technical argument on it. No property has been eligible for rezoning into C-1 since 1991, the letter notes, and the district’s convenience-store definition was written for neighborhood-scale retail: it “specifically provided that such uses ‘shall not include gasoline filling stations.’” Fuel-oriented commerce belonged to the old C-2 district. By seeking the convenience-store label for “a large-scale travel center whose primary draw is fuel sales and interstate traffic,” the council argues, Buc-ee’s “is effectively attempting to establish a use characteristic of the former C-2 district without undergoing a rezoning or legislative review process.”
The limits of the letter
Monument has no vote here. The parcel lies in unincorporated El Paso County, and the town’s letter enters the record as the position of a neighboring municipality. It was docketed in the county’s public file for the appeal on August 4th, alongside the appeal itself and seven batches of public comment.
A ruling in the town’s favor would close the as-of-right route — the argument that a Buc-ee’s can be built there under the zoning as it stands — but it would not deny any development application, and the county says it cannot determine the next procedural step until the appeal is resolved. What the town seeks is the front door: a rezoning or comparable review, decided by elected commissioners after full public notice — the review that the administrative route, by design, does not require. An administrative determination needs no notice to adjacent owners and no public hearing.
The commissioners have not announced when they will take up the appeal. Until they do, the town’s letter waits in the county’s file, one more document in a case that has now generated a great many.
Sources & further reading
The Independent’s own coverage: Buc-ee’s Tries the Back Door — the ADM264 filing, why an administrative determination skips the public hearing, and the C-1 use table that makes the label decisive · Monument Town Council, July 20, 2026 — the previous meeting, including the executive-session practice this letter emerged from.
The town’s documents: Town Council position letter, dated August 3, 2026 · Town press release, August 4, 2026 · Town News Flash summary.
County record: El Paso County’s Buc-ee’s Update page — the July 1 determination, the appeal, and the county’s own account of what the decision does and does not do · EDARP file ADM264 (the determination) · EDARP file APP261 (the appeal, where the town’s letter was docketed August 4).
Other reporting: Our Community News, “Buc-ee’s appeals ‘non-approval’” (John Heiser, July 29, 2026) — the July 2 appeal filing and its contents.
Methodology
The account of the August 3rd meeting — the two executive sessions, the return to open session, the motion, its mover and the 7-0 vote — is drawn from the recording of the meeting. Attributions to Ms Kronick, Mr Fiorito and Mr King were confirmed against the recording; it carries no speaker labels, so quotations were verified individually rather than inferred from context.
The letter and the press release were both read in full — the letter’s six pages include two preserved in the town’s PDF as scanned images, which were read from page renderings. Every quotation is drawn from the document it is attributed to. The procedural history comes from El Paso County’s published update and the county’s development review files for ADM264 and APP261, consulted August 4th; the July 2nd appeal date is the county’s own docket date, also reported by Our Community News. Buc-ee’s appeal argument itself has not been read by this newspaper, and its contents are not characterized here.
No one was asked for comment for this article, and none is claimed. Every statement attributed to the town, the county or a council member is taken from a public document or a public meeting.