Monument’s council refused a 205-home subdivision beside the Air Force Academy’s busiest training ground, sent a construction-materials use tax to the November ballot without the vehicle tax that had stalled it, approved 354 apartments and townhomes on Old Denver Road, and adopted a fee schedule that in places charges many times what the town’s own consultant recommended. Across five formal opportunities to speak, the only member of the public to take one was the developer of the project then under consideration.
Two residential developments came before the Monument Town Council on August 17th, and the council split them. It rejected 205 single-family homes on the south edge of town, next to land the United States Air Force Academy uses for helicopter operations, parachute drops and military drone flights. Ninety minutes later it approved 354 apartments and townhomes on Old Denver Road, unanimously. The public session ran nearly four hours before the council went into executive session, and took in a ballot measure, a new fee schedule, the first look at the 2027 budget and a second, overlapping order of duty handguns. The floor was opened five times. No resident spoke at any of them.
The Academy’s Objection
The application had been in front of the council since July 6th. Elite Properties of America wanted to amend the Falcon Commerce Center Phase 2 preliminary plan for the south 43 acres known as Area D, cutting the approved density by 59% and swapping multifamily housing for single-family attached and detached homes; Santa Fe Meadows, the final plan for those 205 homes, rode on the amendment. The planning commission had recommended both 4-0 in June.
Council members balked in July over the Academy. Senior planner Jenna Gorney’s memorandum records what worried them: whether the town had coordinated with the Academy over the Department of Defense’s Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration program, which cost-shares with state and local governments and private land trusts to head off land-use conflicts near military installations; and whether a proposed conservation easement would draw birds and wildlife into the path of aircraft, helicopters and unmanned aircraft operating 1,500 to 1,600 feet from the site. Council members Kenneth Kimple and Chad Smith were appointed to meet the Academy, the developer and staff. The hearings were continued twice to allow it.
The meeting never happened. Planning director Dan Ungerleider told the council that scheduling with the Academy had defeated it, though he and the developer had spoken with Academy representatives separately. The substance was worse than the scheduling: the Academy could not, he said, “identify a funding source or get approvals for creating a conservation easement or purchasing property.” It had not, in other words, found an approved way to pay for the buffer it wanted. “We are back where we started,” Mr Ungerleider said.
What the Academy did send was a statement, which Mr Ungerleider read into the record at the request of Amy Kelly of the Academy. Since February 2026, it said, training in Jacks Valley and at the Academy’s airfield has “significantly increased to support the national defense strategy,” through “culminating combat exercises, helicopter operations, parachute drops and military sUAS flights,” and the Academy expects that tempo to keep changing. “The proposed development directly borders this active high-intensity training environment, introducing significant safety, infrastructure and operational concerns.” Civilian housing, it went on, “can introduce civilian drones that will trigger military counter-sUAS or jamming protocols adjacent to residential backyards,” while commercial Wi-Fi clutter “threatens military drone control frequencies” and proximity raises the risk of trespass into live training areas, which stops the training. The statement closed on stormwater: runoff the Academy’s degraded creeks cannot absorb, worsening erosion on training land that it said has already required more than $15m in federal repairs.
Mr Ungerleider declined to argue with it. “It’s their statement,” he said, adding that the town had reviewed stormwater, setbacks and open space against its own code and its own hearings.
The developer’s answer, delivered by a representative of the property owner and a representative of Classic Homes, the builder, was that the plan before the council existed because a previous council had asked for it. The owners have held the land some 35 years; a few years ago, during the platting of Terrazzo Drive, council members asked them to find an alternative to the 500 apartments and 205,000 square feet of industrial space already approved for the south 43 acres. Lower-density owner-occupied houses were the answer. On the Academy’s objections, the builder offered covenants that would run with the property through resale, disclosures to buyers about training activity, perimeter fencing and signage worked out with Ms Kelly.
Covenants prohibiting drones drew immediate skepticism from the dais — homeowners’ associations do not regulate airspace, the federal government does — and the builder’s answer was that its counsel believed the covenants could restrict residents’ own drone use. Council member Kimple, who described current work with counter-drone systems, said unregistered drones flown near installations should expect to be shot down “in the very near future,” and noted that the Academy’s accident potential zones extend into the property. The airspace itself is federal, and already closed. The FAA prohibits drone flight from the ground to 400 feet over designated national-security-sensitive facilities, a list that includes military bases, and the restriction applies to every type and purpose of flight. The exchange on the dais turned on what a covenant could add to that. It could restrict what residents launch and land from their own lots, which is not nothing. It could not regulate the airspace above them, and it would not reach anyone who does not live there.
The most concrete objection was noise. Council member Marco Fiorito described being woken at about three in the morning by an exercise in Jacks Valley, several miles away at Promontory Point, with a clear line of sight. It gave him flashbacks, he said, to Iraq and Afghanistan. He had lived beside the artillery ranges at Fort Bragg and knew what he was buying; buyers here would not. “Probably the first year it’ll be a novelty thing and cool. Second year, yeah, all right. Third year, you’re going to start seeing and hearing complaints.” His worry ran past the residents to the Academy: complaints from a new subdivision could push training somewhere else. “I’ve seen it in the past.”
Council member Laura Kronick was blunter about the mitigation on offer. “The minute you say HOA — people break HOA rules all the time,” she said. Her third objection was Mr Kimple’s: government moves at a snail’s pace, and the effort to bring the Academy in should have been continuous rather than late.
Council member Sana Abbott, who has worked at Schriever and Peterson, put her position without hedging. “I am not on the fence. I am not for this at all,” she said. “There’s a reason these places are isolated. For us to make that decision… to have a family community so close to that area is wrong in my opinion.”
Mayor Mitch LaKind went further, and said in advance that it would not come out nicely. The Academy’s airfield, he said, is “the Air Force’s most active runway they have. It does more sorties than any other runway in the entire Air Force.” To put housing in line with it “is a non-starter for me.” His next point was about the applicant: this was the second time, he said, that this applicant had tried to establish a residential neighborhood near an Air Force installation, and for someone claiming to be pro-Air Force, “it sure to me does not have that optic.” He raised the money spent on erosion control along Monument Creek, said Colorado Springs had been sued over it, and was not willing to move Monument nearer the same exposure. His last word was for the council itself: “I think council made a mistake by approving the modification to the zoning originally and not just leaving it industrial.”
The defense of the project came from the members who preferred it to what is already permitted. Council member Chad Smith reminded the room that the applicant holds an entitlement for high-density apartments on the same ground. “I like this project a lot better,” he said. Mr Kimple, who did not, raised a different worry anyway: evacuation. Everything on that site leaves by way of Baptist Road and I-25, past the truck stops and whatever Forest Lakes is doing at the same moment.
Mr Kimple closed on what the evening might have produced instead. He had hoped the Academy would appear, and understood why it could not — such presentations, he said, are constrained by risk-averse military lawyers. He too preferred houses to a warehouse or 500 apartments. What he had wanted from the Academy was an answer to a narrower question: whether apartments or industrial space could be confined to part of the 43 acres while keeping a clear zone to the landing strip. “What is there that can be done that is a win-win for both sides?”
Both motions failed, and the same member made both of them. Mr Smith moved to approve Ordinance 15-2026, the density reduction, and then Ordinance 16-2026, the final plan. Each drew a second. Each failed 1-6, with Mr Smith the only member voting in favor of either — which means that on both motions the member who seconded went on to vote no.
The practical effect is that Area D keeps the entitlement it had: 500 multifamily units and 205,000 square feet of industrial space. A council that spent the evening worried about noise, drones and stormwater beside a military installation has left in place a denser use than the one it turned down. Whether the owners build it, or return with something else, is theirs to decide.
There was one durable result. Mr Ungerleider told the council that the planning department and the Academy had agreed to work with land trusts on other properties adjoining Academy land, to consider easements before the next application arrives rather than during it. “There is a positive to the end of this,” he said: a relationship that did not exist in July. Asked whether more time would help, he was direct — the Academy would not come to the table soon, and other priorities had its attention.
Money was the other obstacle, and a council member put a name to it: Palmer Land Trust, he said, had just spent a great deal by Pikes Peak, so cash flow was unlikely. The reference is to Palmer Land Conservancy’s purchase of the 674-acre Pinestone Ranch above Woodland Park, reported by this newspaper on August 12th. The conservancy has not disclosed what it paid; the ranch was listed at $5.9m, and the conservancy has given itself three years to raise half the price.
The Tax, Minus the Cars
Ordinance 19-2026 came back in two versions, as the council had asked when it sent the language away for rewriting on August 3rd. Both would raise Monument’s use tax from 2% to 3.5%, matching the sales tax. One kept vehicles in; the other did not.
Mayor Pro Tem Steve King, who had objected on August 3rd and worked on the rewrite with Mr Fiorito, argued for the narrower version on grounds of clarity rather than principle. Construction materials are the larger share and the easier case to make: a homeowner buying lumber at a hardware store in town already pays 3.5%, while a developer importing materials pays 2%. Vehicle use tax, by contrast, is genuinely hard to explain — as the dais demonstrated at some length, working through leases, out-of-state purchases and reciprocity between states before arriving nowhere in particular. “That’s a hard thing to educate the public on,” one member said. Another observed that the narrower version removes “an obvious avenue for opponents to say that we’re increasing a car” tax.
One detail sat unresolved in the packet. Both drafts carry the same first-year revenue estimate, $2,272,500 — the figure that appears in the ballot title and that TABOR requires. Finance director Jennifer Phillips said an updated estimate had arrived after the packet was assembled, and that the number depends on what gets built.
The council adopted the construction-materials version 6-1. If voters approve it on November 3rd, collection begins January 1st 2027 and the tax on vehicles stays at 2%. Revenue is restricted to capital projects “including: streets, roads, bridges, and sidewalks; and stormwater improvements.”
That last clause is worth marking. The town’s own polling found the single most persuasive argument for the tax — moving 68% of voters toward yes — was that the money could be used only for roads. The adopted ballot title dedicates it to capital projects, of which roads are the first named category and stormwater the second. The town’s stormwater master plan carries roughly $35m of projects, and the budget presented on August 17th funds none of the nine the town calls high priority.
Evidence that the existing tax is under-collected arrived from a different direction. The town manager’s July report records four completed use-tax audits recovering more than $75,000 in unpaid use tax from developers.
The tax will share a ballot with an unusually full election. Five of the council’s seven seats are up on November 3rd: the mayor’s, two at-large seats and the two district seats. The mayor and the two district members serve four-year terms; of the at-large pair, the candidate with the most votes takes four years and the runner-up two, which is how the town’s charter keeps those terms staggered. The town has published the ballot title, word for word as the council adopted it — construction and building materials and construction equipment, with no mention of vehicles.
Workforce Housing, Without the Lock
Ordinance 22-2026 approved the final plan for Conexus Lot 1 Filing 2, known as Hillpointe, on 19.06 acres between the realigned Old Denver Road and Interstate 25: 312 two-bedroom apartments and 42 three-bedroom townhomes, 354 units in all. Nearly every number is below what the 2022 preliminary plan permits. Density is 18.57 units to the acre against 20.89 allowed, and 45 units fewer than the 399 permitted. The apartment buildings stand under 42 feet against a 75-foot limit. Parking is 727 spaces against 552 required. An eight-foot solid noise wall runs the I-25 frontage, and about 7.2 acres, 38% of the site, is landscaping, open space and amenities. The traffic study puts the development at 2,214 weekday trips, 475 fewer than the approved plan assumed.
The planning commission had recommended approval only 3-2, over density and the absence of publicly accessible park space on the site. The master development agreement dedicates 27.5 acres of parks and open space for Conexus as a whole, so individual lots owe nothing further.
Hillpointe sells itself as the country’s largest developer of workforce housing. Marcus Wiedower, its vice-president of external affairs, made the pitch in those terms: “Gone are the days of knowing where your teacher lives.” The company builds for police officers, firefighters and the people who serve a community daily — the households earning too much for subsidized housing and too little for new luxury product.
A council member asked the question that matters: will any of the units be legally restricted by income or rent? They will not. Mr Wiedower’s answer was that 100% of Hillpointe’s national portfolio rents between 80% and 120% of area median income, and that renting outside that band puts the company “out of compliance internally with our own investors.” That is an internal investor requirement as the company describes it, not a restriction the town can enforce, and nothing in Ordinance 22-2026 binds the project to that range. The company’s own slide puts 80% of area median income for El Paso County at $83,840 and 120% at $125,760. Mr Ungerleider said the town would report the new housing type and its affordability measures once approved, in the planning department’s housing report, and fold the figures into the data behind the Monument 2040 comprehensive plan.
Brock Chapman, the Conexus master developer, spoke in support and reminded the council what the site was zoned for before: about 1.4m square feet of distribution centers, and a metro-district hearing six years ago that drew a thousand people. He asked the council to remember what the record showed. “When was the last time a final PUD came before you that met not only all the final PUD approval criteria but also exceeded the minimum requirements of the preliminary PUD to such a large extent?” The packet bears him out, with one exception he was careful about and this newspaper initially was not: every Board of Trustees and Town Council vote in the Conexus entitlement history was unanimous, though the first planning commission vote, in August 2020, was 4-1.
So was this one. Ordinance 22-2026 passed 7-0 — including Ms Abbott, who ninety minutes earlier had called a subdivision on the town’s southern edge wrong in her opinion. “The design’s beautiful. I don’t think we need more apartments,” she said. “However, it’s better than the alternative.”
A Fee Schedule That Outruns Its Study
Resolution 64-2026 adopted a new town fee schedule, effective October 1st, on a 7-0 vote after about six minutes of discussion. It is the product of a study by Willdan Financial Services, which the town put out to bid on April 9th 2025 and which followed a cost allocation plan the same firm completed during 2025. The study calculated what each service actually costs the town to provide, and reports the results plainly, including where the town is furthest from recovering them: the parks department overall, it found, operates at around 1% cost recovery. Willdan set out the principle it was working to — that a subsidy has to be paid for by someone else, so “the general taxpayer will potentially help to fund private benefits” — and left the level of recovery to the council.
The interesting part is where the adopted schedule and the study part company, because they are printed twenty pages apart in the same packet. There is an explanation for the gap, and the packet gives it in one line. A draft schedule went to the council on June 1st; finance director Jennifer Phillips’s memorandum records that council “provided feedback to staff which has been incorporated into this final fee schedule,” and her slide puts it as council providing “direction on certain fee amounts.” What that direction was, and which members asked for it, is not reproduced in the August 17th packet.
Police records are the clearest case. Willdan calculated the full cost of a local background check at $95.36 and recommended keeping the fee at $5 — a 95% subsidy. The adopted schedule charges $95. It recommended holding sex-offender initial registration at $30 and annual registration at $10 against a full cost of $121.61; the schedule charges $120 for each. It recommended $15 for body-worn camera footage; the schedule charges $95. It recommended leaving additional record pages at 25 cents; the schedule charges $9. Ms Phillips’s presentation described the police changes as three fees increased and two added, which is what the study proposed, not what the schedule adopts.
Planning fees rise steeply on any reading — the study puts the average planning increase at 94%, holding a 20% subsidy. Most of the adopted figures follow it. A final plat goes from $1,500 to $4,351 against a recommendation of $4,351.20; a pre-application meeting, currently free, is set at $368 against $368.82. Three do not. The permit for a new residential lot, currently $150, was recommended at $597.60 and appears at $6,017. A conditional-use permit, which the study left unchanged at $500, appears at $7,300. A final planned unit development, recommended at $7,024, appears at $7,624.
The schedule also disagrees with itself. Annexation of 10 acres or less appears as $5,725 in the zoning table and $5,125 in the planning-fees table nine pages later; annexation over 10 acres appears as $9,142 and $6,009. A temporary sign permit is $65 in one table and $59 in another. A right-of-way permit is listed with no amount at all.
Not everything rises. Business license renewal falls from $75 to $40, the small-cell facility fee from $270 to $100, the four-hour park use fee from $50 to $30, and the Saturday cemetery open-and-close fee from $150 to $41. The subdivision retainers — $2,000 and $3,000 deposits on plat and PUD applications — disappear.
The only question from the dais was how Monument’s fees compare with neighboring jurisdictions. The answer given was that the town is “pretty similar,” and still less expensive than Triview on planning fees. No figure in the schedule was discussed.
On police records, the comparison runs the other way. The Colorado Springs Police Department’s published schedule charges $10 for a police report — the first five pages and fifteen minutes of staff time — and 25 cents for each page after that. A background check is $10. Registering a sex offender is $20, initial or annual. Monument’s new schedule charges $95 for a case report, $95 for a background check and $120 for sex-offender registration, initial or annual. Its line for additional documents reads simply “$9,” with no unit given; the study’s corresponding line is 25 cents for each additional page. The Colorado Springs schedule carries the note “Revised January 2017,” so it is nine years old and its own department may be undercharging; Monument’s takes effect on October 1st.
| Record | Monument, from Oct. 1 | Willdan recommended | Colorado Springs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Case report | $95 | $10 | $10 (first 5 pages) |
| Local background check | $95 | $5 | $10 |
| Crime analysis or statistics | $95 | $32 | $22.50 |
| Body-worn camera footage | $95 | $15 | not on the schedule |
| Records research and retrieval, hourly | $37 | $32 | $30 max |
One line in the schedule sits at a limit set in statute rather than by the council. Monument keeps its records research-and-retrieval charge at $41.37 an hour after the first free hour, which is precisely the maximum the Colorado Open Records Act allows — a figure the Legislative Council Staff raised from $33.58 on July 1st 2024, with the next scheduled adjustment in 2029.
Ms Phillips told the council the town now owns the schedule and will bring an update next year — “see how these are working, see if we missed anything, see if we miscalculated anything.”
A Status Quo Budget, and a Five-Year Slide
Ms Phillips presented the first look at the 2027 budget, with a warning about what it does not contain. “This is a status quo budget. It is about as status quo as you can get. There are no new positions. There’s no new programs. There’s no new services.”
The general fund projects $14.95m of revenue against $14.79m of operating expenditure — balanced, as town policy requires — plus $772,000 of capital, which comes out of reserves. Assumptions include 2% growth in sales tax and property tax, a 2% salary increase against the 2% to 5% other Colorado agencies are budgeting, a 10% rise in health-care costs and another 10% in town insurance. Sales tax revenue is up on 2025 but flat against 2024.
The unfunded list is longer than the budget. Three new police officer positions. A second human-resources position. Another in information technology. A permit and licensing specialist. A part-time mechanic for a two-man shop that performs about 700 repairs a year. A space-needs assessment for a police department Ms Phillips described as bursting at the seams. The asset-replacement fund, seeded with $500,000 of pandemic relief money, would need $966,634 in 2027 to catch up at today’s values; it is not funded.
The capital list is longer still. The town’s first capital improvement plan, due in draft on September 21st, runs to 144 projects and $99,270,051 over five years. The capital projects fund has nothing for a new public works facility, put at $25m, a new police facility at $30m, the $7m southbound lanes of Jackson Creek Parkway, or improvements to Old Denver Road. The northbound lanes are designed to 90%, go out to bid in October and should finish in spring 2028. Of nine high-priority stormwater projects worth about $21.7m, none is funded; the town is applying for a federal grant for one of them, $2m of rehabilitation and erosion repair at the Mount Herman Road bridge, and will come back in September asking the council to commit $200,000 in local match against a $1.8m ask.
Public works got an unusually plain account of its working conditions. The Jefferson facility, Ms Phillips said, “is absolutely unacceptable… those crews have a porta-potty, for heaven’s sakes.” The department will ask for $220,000 for a modular office and $100,000 to run a sewer line to it, and has cut a planned equipment-storage project from $1.2m to $600,000.
The long-range forecast is the part that will matter in a year. It shows the general fund spending more than it earns in every year from 2027 to 2031, the annual gap running from about $607,000 in 2027 to $1.9m in 2031. Over those five years the unreserved fund balance falls from $9.07m to $3.69m — from 58.27% to 20.14%. The forecast labels 20% the minimum required. The council’s adopted financial policy, reproduced eleven slides earlier in the same presentation, calls 20% an “upper goal” for the operating reserve. The packet does not reconcile the two, and the difference matters: on one reading the town arrives at a floor in 2031, on the other it arrives at its target. A third slide puts the 2027 unrestricted reserve at $8.06m, or 53%, rather than the $9.07m the forecast shows. Ms Phillips presented this as an improvement, and by comparison with last year it is: the town went through layoffs in 2025 to close a structural deficit, and the forecast no longer runs the balance to nothing.
Asked what to prioritize, the council’s answer was staff. Keep the 20% reserve and spend above it, one member said, but do not go below to balance the budget: “It’s a bad look.” Another asked for compensation first, at 4% if it could be found, and for the police positions — funded at two, or two and a half, if three were unaffordable — on the reasoning that recruiting, training and overtime cost more than the salaries do. Ms Phillips warned that anything ongoing must be funded from ongoing revenue, of which there is roughly $100,000 spare, so new positions mean cuts elsewhere. A draft budget arrives September 21st; adoption is set for December 7th.
Two Handgun Orders
The consent agenda, approved 5-1 with Mr Fiorito not yet arrived, carried Resolution 63-2026: $26,912.53 for 37 Shadow Systems duty handguns and accessories from On Target Solutions of Monument, paid from the police department’s restricted 2F reserve. The memorandum from police chief Patrick Regan explains how the town came to buy two overlapping sets of duty handguns.
The department ran a comparative bid earlier this year, selected On Target Solutions and issued a purchase order. Concerns then arose about compliance with the town’s new procurement procedures, and the chief directed that the purchase be stopped and re-run as a formal competitive bid. Believing it had been stopped, the department completed the second process and the council approved substantially similar firearms from a different vendor. Only afterwards did it emerge that On Target Solutions had already acquired the equipment under the original order. Because the vendor acted in good faith on a purchase order the town issued, staff recommended paying for it and taking delivery; the guns will go toward the department’s five-year replacement plan and future hires. The item stayed on the consent agenda and passed without discussion.
Also on the Agenda
A print contract with no ceiling. Resolution 56-2026, awarding managed print, mailing and document services to All Copy Products, was pulled from the consent agenda for discussion. The town received seven proposals; the incumbent won on total value rather than lowest price. At $2,043.33 a month, or $24,520 a year before usage charges, it undercuts the $2,744.63 monthly average the town has paid since January 2024, while adding two printers and a postage meter. It carries no not-to-exceed amount: staff asked for one, and the memorandum records that usage cannot be forecast. Ms Kronick, named by staff as the source of the objection, wanted the fixed and variable components separated so the town knows what it is committing to. The council approved the award with direction to fix the contract before the town manager signs. One inconsistency survives in the packet: the resolution authorizes a 36-month agreement, while the vendor’s own master services agreement runs five years, to August 31st 2031.
A bid that left something out. Resolution 65-2026 approved a $21,148 change order to National Pavement Partners for the Heart of Monument parking lot. The invitation for bids omitted any pay item for removing and excavating the existing alleyway and dirt lot — work the plans require. Assistant public works director Andrew Archuleta’s memorandum calls it an oversight in bid preparation, found at the pre-construction meeting. The contract rises from $71,355 to $92,503, still inside the $100,000 community development block grant funding it, so no town money is added.
A festival permit. Goat Patch Brewing Company received a festival permit for Pours in the Park at Limbach Park on September 19th, with a list of participating licensees attached to the application.
A neighbor. Mr Fiorito proposed a joint meeting between the council and the Triview Metropolitan District, covering the transportation master plan, stormwater and targeted commercial recruitment. The two governments signed an intergovernmental agreement on August 3rd to develop a joint area transportation plan; a joint meeting would have to be noticed publicly.
Trucks. Several members reported on the town’s first Touch-a-Truck on August 15th, held with the fire district and police department. People were queuing by 8.30 for a 9 o’clock start. Mr Fiorito, who called it a petting zoo in the military sense, said he had expected a couple of fire trucks.
The council went into executive session for legal advice on pending legal matters, and said it would adjourn from there. The published recording ends as it does so.
Sources & further reading
The Independent’s own coverage: Monument Town Council, August 3, 2026 — the meeting that sent the use-tax language back for rewriting and continued all three land-use items to this one · Monument Town Survey: What the Words Are Worth — the town’s own polling on the use tax, including the roads-only message that tested strongest · Acquired for the Public: Palmer Land Conservancy Now Owns 674 Acres Below Pikes Peak — the purchase a council member cited as the reason conservation money was unavailable here · Monument Town Council, July 20, 2026 — the parking permits and daily lake fee that now appear on the adopted fee schedule.
Meeting record: Agenda and 373-page packet, August 17th 2026 · meeting recording · the town’s elections page, carrying the adopted ballot title and the five seats on the November 3rd ballot.
The fee documents: the Independent has posted the two documents behind the fee story, extracted from the August 17th packet: the Town of Monument User Fee Study by Willdan Financial Services, dated August 5th 2026 (34 pages, including the appendix tables giving full cost, recommended subsidy and suggested fee for every fee reviewed), and the fee schedule adopted by Resolution 64-2026, effective October 1st 2026 (27 pages, with the finance director’s memorandum and the existing schedule for comparison).
Drone rules: Critical Infrastructure and Public Venues, Federal Aviation Administration.
Methodology
This account is drawn from the town’s 373-page agenda packet for August 17th, which was read in full, and from a machine-generated transcript of the meeting recording. Dollar figures, vote thresholds, densities, fee amounts and the two ballot titles come from the packet’s ordinances, resolutions, staff memoranda and presentation slides rather than from the transcript. The long-range financial forecast and its reserve percentages were read from the budget presentation slide itself, which carries no text layer.
The recording carries no speaker labels, and machine transcripts misrender names and garble figures. Attributions to Ms Abbott, Mr LaKind, Mr Smith, Mr Kimple and Mr Fiorito were confirmed by watching the recording, in two cases against the members’ nameplates. Mr Ungerleider, Ms Phillips, Mr Wiedower and Mr Chapman identified themselves on the recording or were named by the person handing off to them. Ms Kronick’s remarks on covenants are attributed on the strength of her naming two colleagues in the same passage, and have not been confirmed on video. An earlier draft of this article attributed the exchange on affordability reporting to Ms Phillips; it was Mr Ungerleider, and the error was caught in fact-checking before publication. The applicant’s two representatives are described by their organizations rather than by name because the transcript renders both surnames inconsistently. One council member named a family member while describing the Jacks Valley exercise; the transcript renders the name unreliably, so it is omitted rather than misspelled.
The clerk announced Ordinance 15-2026 as failing “six to one” and Ordinance 16-2026 as failing “one to six”; the ordering differs between the two announcements, and the individual votes are not recoverable from the audio. Both are reported here as 1-6, with Mr Smith the lone vote in favor, on a check of the recording. That the seconder of each motion then voted against it follows from those two facts and is stated as such. The Air Force Academy statement is quoted as read into the record; one figure in it, the year from which more than $15m of federal erosion repairs is counted, is garbled in the transcript and is therefore omitted rather than reported. Mr LaKind’s statements that the applicant has previously sought housing near an Air Force installation, and that Colorado Springs has been sued over creek erosion, are reported as his assertions; the Independent has not independently verified either.
The comparison between the adopted fee schedule and the Willdan study is a comparison of two documents inside the same packet: Attachment 1 to Resolution 64-2026, and Appendix C of the user fee study. Both are posted above as standalone files, extracted page-for-page from the packet and otherwise unaltered, so readers can check the comparison themselves. Where the two disagree, both figures are given. The study’s slide summary describes the police changes as three increases and two new fees, which matches its own recommendation rather than the schedule adopted; that is reported as it appears. The Colorado Springs police fees were read from that department’s own published schedule, which is dated January 2017; no more recent edition is posted. The drone restriction described here is taken from the FAA’s current guidance on national-security-sensitive facilities. An earlier draft of this article relied on the Academy’s own published airspace guide, which dates from 2018 and states a five-mile tower-notification requirement the FAA replaced in 2019; that document is no longer cited, and the claim drawn from it has been removed. Parking at the Hillpointe site is given as 727 spaces, the figure in the applicant’s final plan and presentation; the staff memorandum says 728. The open-records ceiling was read from the Legislative Council Staff posting that Section 24-72-205(6)(b) requires — the figure in the statute text itself, $30, is the frozen 2014 base and is not the operative number. The internal inconsistencies in Attachment 1 — annexation and temporary sign permits appearing twice at different amounts, and a right-of-way permit with no amount — are reported as printed and were confirmed against the page images.
No one was asked for comment and none is claimed. Every statement here is taken from a public document or from a public meeting.
