The Town of Monument sent its own tax question back for rewriting, raised water rates for the first time since 2020, voted to leave the regional water project it helped found, and approved a powersports dealership praised from the dais — a full evening of consequence at which no one offered public comment.
Mayor Mitch LaKind was back in the chair on August 3rd after missing the previous meeting, and all seven members were present. The council opened the floor three times — general public comment and two public hearings, including the hearing on a tax increase bound for the November ballot — and got silence each time, in the room and online. Nearly everything that followed passed 7-0. The night’s most argued item, a lease with the local chamber of commerce, passed 4-3; one item died without a motion; and after two closed sessions the council voted to enter the county’s Buc-ee’s fight directly, signing a letter that is covered separately by the Independent.
The words, again
The biggest thing on the agenda was put off, unanimously. Ordinance 19-2026 would refer to November’s ballot a question raising the town’s use tax from 2% to 3.5% — matching the sales tax rate, with the draft ballot title pegging the first full year’s revenue at $2,272,500, dedicated to capital projects. The council’s own survey research shaped the measure as a tax on growth: developers buying construction materials would bear most of it.
What stalled it was cars. The use tax also applies to certain vehicles registered in Monument when the applicable sales tax has not already been collected — the discussion cited leases and out-of-state purchases as examples — and that piece, council members said, had never been part of the survey or the public conversation. Finance director Jennifer Phillips told the council the vehicle portion is collected not by the town but by El Paso County, under an agreement dating to 1982, and remitted monthly; the construction portion is collected at the permit counter on an estimate, then audited. Four completed audits found $75,375 due to the town, $27,169 of it passing through to the Triview Metropolitan District.
Council member Laura Kronick put the political problem plainly: “If the survey didn’t mention vehicles, this appears to be a bait and switch.” Others argued for keeping the tax uniform and exempting vehicles later by ordinance if the data warranted. The mayor’s solution was to hand the language to what he called the two opposites: Mayor Pro Tem Steve King and council member Marco Fiorito, who will work with the town attorney to rewrite it. The deadline is real — revised language must reach the packet by August 10th to be voted on August 17th, and staff floated a special meeting as the fallback. A town hall on the measure is planned for September or October.
The price of water
Water rates are going up for the first time since 2020. Resolution 57-2026, passed 7-0, leaves the first 3,000 gallons a month untouched, raises the next band — 3,001 to 24,000 gallons — by 10%, and everything above that by 15%. The base charge is unchanged. By the town’s arithmetic, an average residential customer using about 5,000 gallons a month will see the bill rise from $96.36 to $99.25. Ms Phillips’s warning was less gentle than the increase: at current rates, the town’s water fund would “basically be in the negative by the end of 2029.” Even with the new rates the reprieve is temporary; a Water Master Plan is underway, and she promised to return next year.
The fee schedule got a genuine rebalancing rather than a simple ratchet. The late fee rises from $12.50 to $20, a $90-a-month backflow non-compliance fine arrives for commercial customers, bulk-water users will post a refundable deposit and pay a monthly billing fee of $5 for residential accounts and $10 for commercial, construction meters pick up a $10 monthly billing fee, and a previously approved $3 service fee will now appear on every utility bill. In the other direction: the escalating shut-off fee — $50, then $100, then $150 — was flattened to $50 flat, on the reasoning that a household already failing to pay its water bill is not doing so on purpose; the lien fee was cut to $73, full cost recovery and no more; the $125 meter-test fee is gone, so residents who suspect a faulty meter are not penalized for asking; and so is the $40 after-hours trip charge, which staff worried was persuading people to let weekend leaks run until Monday. Customers in difficulty are referred to Tri-Lakes Cares.
The council’s one amendment came from the dais: staff’s proposed $500 bulk-water deposit was split — $250 for residential customers, $500 for commercial — after a debate that wandered from $250 to $1,000. “I think we’re just grabbing numbers out of thin air,” council member Chad Smith observed, cheerfully. “We are,” came the reply. The council also heard, in passing, a small mystery of municipal plumbing: a member described watching a contractor fill a tank from a town fire hydrant, and asked what the fine was for stealing town water. Staff said there is no specific hydrant penalty on the town’s fee schedule, though the town attorney noted ordinary theft law could apply if the taking were knowing. The town has five construction hydrant meters, two currently checked out, and Triview — which has no bulk-fill station — issues its own hydrant meters to contractors who do not always know which side of the district line they are drawing from. No action was taken.
Leaving the Loop
Two weeks after directing staff to withhold a payment to the El Paso County Regional Loop Water Authority, the council finished the thought: Resolution 60-2026, passed 7-0, votes Monument out of the roughly $200 million regional water project — a 2025 estimate — that it helped found in 2022. The exit is begun rather than finished: the authority’s agreement ordinarily requires 180 days’ notice, which the town will ask to have waived, along with payment of Monument’s remaining share of costs.
Town manager Madeline VanDenHoek laid out the arithmetic of a shrinking club. Cherokee Metropolitan District withdrew in December 2024, and the town has “reason to believe” Donala Water and Sanitation District will follow this month — though, she was careful to say, Donala has “not officially made any decisions yet” and is expected to take up a formal resolution at its board meeting on the 12th or 13th. That would leave Monument and Woodmoor as the last members of a four-party project whose design plans are, by the withdrawal resolution’s own account, “not more than 50% complete.”
The money is not settled and may not return. The authority is still doing an accounting, Ms VanDenHoek said; contracts were stopped in late July, bills remain for final design work, and the town “could still have some financial obligations” — which “might mean that we aren’t reimbursed the funds that we have put into that.” The mood was rueful rather than triumphant. “The problem is we just wasted $4 million in ARPA funds to kick this thing off,” Mr LaKind said. Council member Laura Kronick offered the other ledger entry: “I wouldn’t say it was a waste. It was a feasibility study.” The council directed its attention to water options closer to home; nobody suggested the underlying problem — a town on declining wells — had gone anywhere.
The chamber’s rent
The only divided vote of the night was over rent. The Tri-Lakes Chamber of Commerce has occupied the town-owned Old Town Hall at 166 Second Street — a 1976 building — for roughly twelve years at $1 a year. The new lease, negotiated by a committee of Mr LaKind and Ms Kronick with the chamber’s board, phases in real rent: nothing more in 2026, then $500 a month in 2027, stepping up to $1,500 a month in 2031 — roughly $60,000 over the term. Ms VanDenHoek told the council that by the final year the rent should cover the building’s typical maintenance, though the town has never done a full condition assessment and the plumbing is a known question mark.
For three members that was not enough. “I do not like exhibit A,” Mr Smith said, matter-of-factly. “I think that the rent is not close enough to market value.” The chamber’s answer was that it is a nonprofit running on, in its chair’s words, “a zero budget,” staffing the visitor center and donating meeting space; asked for numbers on how many people the visitor center actually serves, the chamber said it does not track usage — counting visitors would take staff time it cannot spare, and perhaps half its walk-ins are residents rather than tourists. The lease passed 4-3.
A dealership, redesigned
The evening’s happiest business was Ordinance 21-2026, approving the final development plan for Karl Malone Powersports on Terrazzo Drive, north of Baptist Road: a 3.29-acre plan area with a two-story building of roughly 30,000 square feet, fifteen service bays, 71 parking spaces, and a screened yard for recreational vehicles awaiting repair. The planning commission had recommended it 6-0 in July. David Hicks, the company’s representative, told the council the dealership should produce “somewhere in the 25 to 35 million dollar” range in annual sales, and that Honda has designated it a “powerhouse” flagship — by his count one of 58 in the country and only the second in Colorado.
What charmed the council was the architecture’s backstory. The project began as an all-metal building; the applicant then watched a recording of the council arguing about metal buildings on another project. “I don’t think I slept much that night after listening to that meeting,” Mr Hicks said. The redesign came back in stone, timber and stucco, praised from the dais. The approval carries two conditions: the adjacent vacant lot must return with its own development plan, and pylon signs are restricted — the building’s wall signs will glow along I-25 at night, but no 30-foot pole sign will. It passed 7-0.
Continued, died, and settled
Three land-use items moved to August 17th without discussion. The Falcon Commerce Center and Santa Fe Meadows applications wait on a meeting with the Air Force Academy — council members want the Academy’s view of a residential development roughly 1,500 to 1,600 feet from its aircraft, helicopter and drone operations, and the meeting has not yet happened owing to Academy scheduling. The Hillpointe project on Old Denver Road was continued at its own applicant’s request. A fourth item simply died: a resolution authorizing a new water tap for two out-of-district commercial buildings on Highway 105 drew no motion at all. Council members objected that the January 2023 memo behind the original connection had not mentioned the two commercial buildings — staff answered that the buildings were nevertheless part of the public water system approved at the time — and pressed for separate taps and meters. Staff will bring it back a third time.
The consent agenda — approved 7-0 in under two minutes, without discussion — carried the July 20th minutes, the quarterly budget and sales-tax reports, and Resolution 62-2026, approving a $37,500 settlement with former town employee Tom Tharnish, whose resignation or retirement in lieu of termination took effect July 17th. The finance memo reported sales tax collections up 2% over its 2024 comparison, although the accompanying quarter-only figures show April-through-June collections down 3.8% from the same months in 2024; the packet does not reconcile the two. The water fund spent $180,839 more than it took in for the quarter — one sign of the financial pressure behind the evening’s rate increase.
Around the dais
The evening opened with a changing of the guard at Monument Fire District: chief Andy Kovacs, departing after six years, was thanked for a partnership that gave the town and district a shared emergency manager neither could fund alone, and introduced his successor, Colin Fitzgerald, for whom August 3rd was literally his first day. Mr Kovacs, who moved into town two months ago, invited everyone to a touch-a-truck event at district headquarters on Mitchell Avenue on August 15th. Officer Paul Nyman was recognized for five years of service. And Emma Beery, the town’s summer finance intern — Palmer Ridge class of 2024, now a political science senior at Loyola University Chicago — presented a summer’s work that included helping build the town’s first Capital Improvement Plan, before heading to a congressional internship in Washington. Asked what she had learned: “I am leaning towards local government now.”
In comments, council member Kenneth Kimple explained for the record his lone no votes on July’s Monument Lake parking measures: he worried the permit scheme lacks enforcement teeth, would pull police from higher priorities, and would push parking, congestion and vandalism risk into adjacent neighborhoods. Residents 60 and over were invited to a regional aging-services planning session at Town Hall on August 27th, 10 a.m. to noon; a Creek Week proclamation is set for September 8th.
Sources & further reading
The Independent’s own coverage: Monument Council Asks the County to Reject Buc-ee’s Zoning Claim — the letter the council signed after executive session, reported in full · Monument Town Council, July 20, 2026 — the withheld Loop payment that preceded this meeting’s withdrawal vote · Monument Town Survey: What the Words Are Worth — the polling behind the use-tax measure now being rewritten.
Meeting record: Agenda and packet, August 3, 2026 (CivicClerk) · meeting recording.
The Loop: Loop Water Authority · Our Community News on Donala’s July 16 meeting · Colorado Public Radio on the project’s scale (June 2025).
Methodology
This account is drawn from the recording of the meeting posted to the Town of Monument’s YouTube channel, working from a machine-generated transcript of that recording, and from the 232-page agenda packet. Transcripts of this kind are imperfect — they misrender names and garble phrases — and the Independent’s reporting process uses AI tools that can make mistakes; if we have gotten something wrong, we will correct it, via the Independent’s corrections page. The recording carries no speaker labels, so quotations attributed by name — Ms Kronick, Ms VanDenHoek, Ms Phillips, Mr LaKind, Mr Smith, Mr Hicks and Ms Beery — were individually verified against the recording itself rather than taken from the transcript; Mr Kimple’s attribution follows from his explaining votes only he cast. Dollar figures, rate tiers, fee amounts and settlement terms come from the packet’s ordinances, resolutions and staff memoranda; the use-tax revenue figure is the draft ballot title’s own estimate. The finance memo’s 2% sales-tax comparison to 2024 conflicts with its own quarter-only table, which shows a 3.8% decline for April through June; both figures are reported above and the discrepancy is noted rather than resolved. Donala’s status is as the town manager stated it on August 3rd; its board was expected to act the following week. The Loop project’s roughly $200 million scale is Colorado Public Radio’s 2025 estimate. Where the recording left a speaker unidentifiable — the fire-hydrant account, the reply to Mr Smith — this article says so rather than guessing. No one was asked for comment, and none is claimed; every statement here is taken from a public document or a public meeting.