Palmer Lake has spent a year showing what becomes of a small town when the ordinary machinery of self-government goes missing — an ethics code, a permanent administrator, a clean line between the police and the town’s payroll, and minutes that match the recording. Local watchdog groups have published a heavily documented dossier arguing that an elected trustee is being run out of office by improper means; the town’s own record and the region’s reporting fill in the rest. The striking thing is not who is right. It is how little now works in Palmer Lake to decide it.
Late last month Integrity Matters, the Colorado Springs accountability group, and Tri-Lakes Preservation published a public dossier — headlined “No one should be tried in a medieval town square,” on its Palmer Lake Accountability page — a long, heavily footnoted account of a year inside Palmer Lake’s town government. Its charge is blunt: that an elected trustee, Roger Moseley, has been investigated in secret and marched toward removal on charges that name no statute, while more than $19,000 in public money was spent on the effort with no vote of the Board — part of a legal and investigative bill the group puts north of $85,000 — even as the water, finance and code workshops residents asked for went unscheduled. This newspaper shares the good-government instincts behind that document. We also went back to the record ourselves. What emerges is both more complicated than a morality play and, in one respect, more troubling: Palmer Lake is not simply a town with a villain. It is a town that has mislaid the rules that would let it settle an argument at all.
Two speeds, one board
The dossier’s central exhibit is a contrast, and the contrast holds up. Since Dennis Stern took the mayor’s chair in June 2025, the agendas that residents were promised — a water-rate workshop first raised in the summer of 2025, a finance workshop, a review of the municipal code, the hiring of a permanent town administrator — have slid from meeting to meeting without resolution, as the town’s own meeting records show. The most recent regular agenda, on June 25th, carried three business items and none of those. Over the same stretch, the machinery aimed at Mr Moseley advanced steadily: an outside investigation, formal charges in April, executive sessions, and an instruction to draft a removal ordinance that the then-town attorney estimated would take “months.” Our Community News, the volunteer paper that has covered nearly every meeting, records the same rhythm — legal turmoil crowding out the business of running a town.
That a board can be consumed by one fight is not, by itself, scandal. The question the record raises is why this fight, and why on these terms. The answer, over and over, is that the town had no settled rule to reach for — so it improvised one.
One official, two offices
Start with the sharpest structural fact, which is not in dispute. Glen Smith is at once Palmer Lake’s Interim Town Administrator and its Chief of Police. He holds the town’s senior civilian job and commands its armed force, and has for a year.
The hazard of that arrangement stopped being hypothetical in the case of Jeremie Dunda, a water-plant operator of nearly a quarter-century. Mr Smith, wearing his administrator’s hat, put Mr Dunda on notice with a disciplinary letter in July 2025 and fired him the following January — about two weeks before the probationary period that letter set would have expired; wearing his police chief’s hat, he was involved in a criminal referral against him. A neutral tribunal has since taken Mr Dunda’s side — twice. A state hearing officer found him not at fault in April, and on June 2nd the Colorado Industrial Claim Appeals Office affirmed the award and denied the town’s appeal. The hearing officer’s decision, quoted in the final order, found that Mr Dunda “was intimidated during the meeting because Smith is the Chief of Police, and he had a lieutenant police officer in the meeting with him, armed, while he questioned the claimant about the meter removal.”
This is the one corner of the story a neutral authority has actually adjudicated, and it points at the design flaw rather than the man: when the same person can discipline an employee as a boss and pursue him as a policeman, the employee has no way to tell which authority is in the room. A town that wanted to avoid that would keep the offices apart. Palmer Lake combined them and left them combined.
A search that never ends, a mayor whose title is contested
The dual role persists because the second office is “interim,” and has been for a year. The town is on its latest attempt to hire a permanent administrator; by late June it had 27 applicants under review, a search that has been, in the trustees’ telling, started, stalled and “re-engaged” more than once. Every month the permanent job stays vacant is a month more power pools in the official who fills it — and who also brought the conduct charges against the trustee asking the hardest questions about the town’s money.
The town’s highest office is unsettled too. Mr Stern was elevated from the Board to the mayoralty in June 2025 on a 5–1 vote, after former mayor Glant Havenar resigned amid the Buc-ee’s furor. Mr Moseley contends the elevation was improper — that Mr Stern resigned only as mayor pro tem, not as a trustee, and so held two elective offices at once in violation of state law, a defect the trustees say was never cured — and in December he filed a quo warranto suit challenging Mr Stern’s right to the office. The court has not resolved it: in March, an El Paso County district judge, David Prince, denied Mr Moseley’s motions for a restraining order and an injunction to suspend Mr Stern in the meantime, calling that an overreach of judicial power into a town’s legislative affairs — but the suit itself remains active, with no final decision reached. Mr Stern is, for now, the mayor. But “for now” is the operative phrase, and a town whose leader governs under an unresolved challenge to his title is a town missing another guardrail — a clear answer to the simplest question of all: who is in charge.
The record that does not match itself
A government’s minutes are supposed to be the load-bearing account of what it did. In Palmer Lake, by the watchdog groups’ documentation, they repeatedly are not. Integrity Matters filed a formal notice of errata in January listing a dozen transcript-verified discrepancies across five meetings — places where the written minutes record decisions the recordings show the Board never made. The Town Clerk, Erica Romero, acknowledged on the record the next day that the terminology needed review. By the group’s count the errata has been placed before the Board five times in six months without a correction entered.
The most consequential example concerns an annexation election date. For months the administration treated the date as settled; the resolutions that would have set it — numbers 65 through 68 of 2025 — were continued in November and never adopted, and the town’s compiled resolutions skip from 64 to 69. The only document that says an election was “set” is a single October minute entry the groups call mistaken. A record that cannot be trusted to say what a board decided is not a clerical problem. It is the erosion of the thing every other check depends on.
This newspaper can speak to the town’s handling of records first-hand. On June 17th The Monument Independent filed two requests under the Colorado Open Records Act with Ms Romero’s office — one seeking the town’s communications with Mr Waller and any vendor about the pro-Buc-ee’s website buceespalmerlake.com, the other seeking former mayor Havenar’s campaign-finance filings from her 2022 and 2024 town races. The Act obliges a records custodian to respond within three working days, or to give written notice of a brief extension. As of publication, more than two weeks on, the town has produced nothing and sent no reply to either request — no records, no denial, no notice. It is a modest data point, but a telling one: the same office at the center of the disputed minutes is also, in this newspaper’s own experience, one a routine records request does not reliably reach.
Spending without a vote — and a counterweight the dossier underplays
The money is where the dossier is most pointed, and where a reader should be most careful to separate what is documented from what is asserted. By Integrity Matters’ accounting of the town’s own invoices, two outside retentions tied to the Moseley matter — the Employers Council investigation ($16,109.50 across three checks) and an employment lawyer, Liza Getches ($3,334.50) — were engaged with no Board vote, for $19,444 in all. About $172 of the Employers Council billing was for unrelated background checks, leaving roughly $19,272 spent on the Moseley matter itself. The group further reports that $12,000 went to a public-relations firm, CBK Consulting, in three payments each kept below the $15,000 threshold that would have forced a Board vote — after the Board had tabled the very contract, 6–0, the previous summer. It sets the outside legal and investigative billing for the period at roughly $85,500, of which it attributes more than $53,000 to the removal effort, including $5,160 blacked out on the town’s invoices.
This newspaper went to several of those underlying records directly — the town’s own invoices and minutes, which Integrity Matters posts alongside its tally — and the raw figures hold. The town attorney’s May invoice, No. 51227, does bill $26,785 for 84 hours, and its line items run overwhelmingly to two tasks: drafting “ordinance[s] for removal of a town official” and researching “code provisions for investigation, censure or removal,” and beating back the residents’ and trustees’ open-records requests. One entry bills the town to research “whether the descriptions of the invoices between [the firm] and former counsel should be redacted” — that is, between the current town attorney, JVAM, and its predecessor, Scott Krob of Krob Law: the town’s lawyers charging the public to work out how to keep the public from seeing what the previous lawyers had been paid to do. The Purchase Policy reserves outside legal and investigative hires to the Board; Integrity Matters’ compilation of the meeting record, which this newspaper has also reviewed, logs roughly three dozen such engagements approved by a Board vote between 2022 and 2026 — and none for the retentions aimed at Mr Moseley. This newspaper reviewed those invoices and confirms the rest. The blacked-out charges — work description hidden, hours and dollar amount left in plain view — total about $5,160, and every one falls on the time of the attorneys drafting the removal, not the lawyer answering records requests. Tallying the period’s line items the same way, more than $53,000 of the town’s outside legal and investigative spending is attributable to removing Mr Moseley and to the records fight it set off. The amounts are the town’s own; on our reading of its invoices, so is the conclusion.
Here, though, is what the dossier soft-pedals and a fair account cannot. The charge letter itself, which this newspaper has read, names no statute — exactly as the dossier says. But it is not empty. The investigator “finds there is sufficient evidence to substantiate” that Mr Moseley “raised his voice to staff in an intimidating tone” and “pointed his pen at a staff member in an aggressive manner.” Mr Moseley does not really dispute the core of it. “There’s probably no doubt that I raised my voice,” he told a June citizens’ briefing; “if you’re being resistive, I will raise my voice.” The town’s special counsel opined that “a prima facie case of hostile work environment based on sex/gender can be stated,” and KRDO and the Gazette, relaying the town’s account of the investigation, have reported that female employees said they were afraid to come to work. The record does not name them, and the trustees dispute the characterization.
One December episode shows how slippery even the agreed facts are. The letter alleges that on the 16th Mr Moseley “parked at and around the town hall for the duration of the workday and photographed employees’ vehicles and license plates,” “creating the perception that he was stalking the employees.” Mr Moseley says he only sat outside “watching the comings and goings,” that he “followed no one” and there was “no identified victim” — while owning the effect: “people were frightened by a trustee sitting outside watching the activity. I take a little blame for that.” Jennifer Wilde, a former town code officer, tells it a third way in a sworn declaration: that staff were photographing and filming him, and that a company-wide email went out that same day telling employees not to talk to any trustee. Which account is closest to the truth, no tribunal has decided.
That is the shape of the whole affair. Mr Moseley’s conduct was, on his own telling, not blameless: he can be abrasive, and he unsettled people. But that is not the question the town has to answer. A trustee who raises his voice is what a censure vote or a written ethics policy is for; he is not what a secret investigation, tens of thousands of dollars in unvoted outside counsel, and a removal court built inside Town Hall are for. “I can see why the staff want to get rid of me,” Mr Moseley said. “The question is are they trying to do it legally?” That is the right question — and on the record so far, the means have been at least as irregular as the conduct they are meant to punish. The town’s new rule that trustees schedule appointments and bring a third party to meet staff inside Town Hall — which the dossier files under retaliation — reads, from that vantage, as an employer protecting workers. Mr Moseley, for his part, is not only a defendant in this drama but a plaintiff: he has sued the town three times. And when the disputed legal bills finally reached a vote last month, the Board paid them, 4–1, to avoid running up interest.
None of that resolves the argument. It is the point. A serious workplace complaint against an elected official and an improper, ruinously expensive removal process can both be real at once — and the reason Palmer Lake cannot tell which is which is that it never built the thing that would adjudicate either. It has no ethics code and no ethics board. So a complaint that in most towns would go to a defined process instead went to improvised machinery: an investigation run under personnel rules written for employees, not elected officials; a closed session the town’s own later attorney conceded was “probably a mistake”; charges that borrow the criminal code’s definition of “official misconduct” while keeping the proceeding inside a Town Hall where the accusers would also staff the hearing.
Who is Roger Moseley
The man at the center is not a natural victim, which is part of why the fight has been so bitter. Roger Moseley is a retired Air Force colonel and Purple Heart recipient who was deputy director of the B-2 stealth-bomber program, and who later served as an expert witness in a long-running federal fraud case against Northrop that the contractor settled, for a reported $134 million, the morning he was due to testify. The trustee pressing hardest on where Palmer Lake’s money went has spent a career on the far side of government waste. Whether that makes him a diligent watchdog or a difficult colleague is, in a sense, beside the point this newspaper is making: a town with functioning rules would not need to decide the man’s character in order to handle either the complaint against him or his complaints about the spending. Palmer Lake, lacking those rules, has been forced to litigate everything at once.
That instinct is now itself a lawsuit. Mr Moseley alleges the town misspent restricted money — among it a $750,000 federal pandemic-relief grant and a $970,000 federal transportation grant — and commingled its water and general funds; the suit, which the town disputes and which no court has yet decided, is on appeal, with a hearing set for September. He is precise about what he is not alleging. “Nobody stole the money,” he told the June briefing. “They spent it on things that were good for the town… The problem is it violated the Appropriations Act.” Asked directly whether he saw any sign of theft, he said he did not. His charge is mismanagement, not corruption.
The bill, and the backdrop
The cost is no longer abstract. The town attorney’s firm resigned in June — its principal, Kent Whitmer, citing “ongoing conflict within town government” — after billing $64,684.50 over two months, much of it, by the invoice’s own line items that this newspaper reviewed, on drafting removal procedures and resisting records requests. The Board has now retained a fourth firm, Lyons-Gaddis, specifically to define how the removal should proceed. Carrying the matter to a hearing would add more still: the town’s own attorney estimated the hearing alone at $25,000 to $30,000 and warned the town would likely have to fund Mr Moseley’s defense as well. Mr Moseley puts the full cost on the order of $100,000 — his estimate, but nothing in the trajectory contradicts it.
All of this lands on a town still metabolizing the Buc-ee’s fight — the subject of this newspaper’s earlier reporting. The same government spent, by the reimbursable ledger, more than $412,000 of outside professional work advancing an annexation that residents moved by about two-thirds to send to a public vote — a vote the project never faced, because Buc-ee’s withdrew in February. Much of that sum was applicant-reimbursable and not, in the end, a direct charge to taxpayers. But the throughline is hard to miss: a town whose spending has repeatedly run ahead of, or against, the expressed preferences of the people paying for it. The referral the two trustees filed in May — to the state bureau of investigation, the attorney general and the district attorney, Michael Allen, who is himself running for attorney general — went, in Mr Allen’s response, back toward the very official it named. That is what accountability looks like in a town without a mechanism for it: it travels in a circle.
There is a fault line under all of this worth naming. The officials driving the case against Mr Moseley are, in the main, holdovers from the Buc-ee’s era: Mr Stern was part of the pre-recall leadership that advanced the annexation — mayor pro tem under Ms Havenar, alongside trustees Shana Ball, since recalled, and Amy Hutson, since resigned — and presided over the December 2024 eligibility vote; he sets the agenda today. Mr Smith, who signed the charges, and Ms Romero, the clerk, have run the administration throughout. Mr Moseley, who won his seat in the September 2025 recall the annexation provoked, and Mr Jurka, a trustee since the previous cycle, have been the ones pressing pointed questions about the money and the staff. The trustees say that is the motive — that the questioning is what made Mr Moseley a target. It remains their allegation, not a finding, and the town has not engaged it. But the alignment is not in dispute, and it is the uneasy subtext of a fight the town files as a personnel matter: the administration that carried Buc-ee’s is working to remove the trustee who keeps asking what it cost.
The fix is bigger than the ask
Integrity Matters ends its dossier with a modest, sensible request: adopt a written ethics policy and stand up an ethics board that applies the same rules to everyone and sends genuine crimes to a court. It is the right idea, and Palmer Lake plainly needs it. But set against the scale of what is missing, one ordinance is a small repair. A town that cannot say with certainty who its mayor is, whom its administrator answers to, or whether its own minutes are true has more to rebuild than a code of conduct. It has to separate the offices it has fused, fill the job it has left open, and make its record mean what it says.
Palmer Lake, at the moment, does not lack for accusations. What it lacks are the rules that would let anyone settle them.
Sources & methodology
Primary and public records: Integrity Matters and Tri-Lakes Preservation, “No one should be tried in a medieval town square” (its Palmer Lake Accountability page); the Town of Palmer Lake’s meeting agendas, packets and minutes and recent-meeting archive; the June 2, 2026 final order of the Colorado Industrial Claim Appeals Office (Docket 4691-2026) in the Dunda matter; the April 9 charge letter; the 2025 resolutions record (64 to 69); the removal-spending audit of the town’s invoices; the Buc-ee’s reimbursable ledger; and the June 22, 2026 citizens’ briefing held by Trustees Jurka and Moseley, with its full transcript. Quotations attributed to the June briefing are drawn from that recording and its transcript.
Independent reporting: Our Community News (June 11 and 25 board meetings); KRDO and the Colorado Springs Gazette (the harassment investigation and findings); the Gazette (the lawsuits); Colorado Public Radio (Mr Stern’s appointment); Colorado Politics (the quo warranto ruling); KKTV (the September 2025 special election) and KKTV (DA Allen’s attorney-general bid); and The Colorado Sun.
This newspaper’s own reporting: On June 17, 2026 The Monument Independent filed two Colorado Open Records Act requests with the Town Clerk (one for town communications concerning the buceespalmerlake.com website and Mr Waller; one for former mayor Havenar’s town campaign-finance filings). As of publication the town had not responded to either within the Act’s three-working-day window.
Statements of misconduct are alleged and, except where a court or tribunal has ruled, not adjudicated. The Dunda unemployment ruling is the only fully adjudicated outcome referenced; the quo warranto challenge to Mr Stern’s mayoralty and Mr Moseley’s grant-spending suit against the town both remain undecided, the latter on appeal. Independently confirmed via the reporting above: Mr Stern’s June 2025 appointment (5–1) and the denial of the emergency motions in the quo warranto suit, which remains active; the existence and findings of the outside harassment investigation and employees’ stated fears; the drafting of a removal ordinance under C.R.S. § 31-4-307; the retention of Lyons-Gaddis (3–1); the town attorney’s resignation; the Board’s 4–1 payment of the disputed invoices; and DA Michael Allen’s candidacy for attorney general. This newspaper independently reviewed several of the underlying town records that Integrity Matters posts — the May JVAM invoice (No. 51227), the June 30, 2025 Board minutes, the April 9 charge letter, and the group’s compilation of prior Board authorizations — confirming the $26,785 / 84-hour billing and the $64,684.50 outstanding balance, the removal-drafting and records-resistance line items (including the entry billing to research redacting the prior firm’s invoices), the 6–0 tabling of the public-relations contract, and that the charge letter cites no statute while substantiating the alleged conduct. The no-vote retention amounts ($19,444) and the CBK payments ($12,000) trace to the town’s own vendor check register. On its own review of the town’s invoices, this newspaper independently confirms the roughly $5,160 in redacted charges (work description withheld, amount left visible) — all on the removal drafters’ time — and that more than $53,000 of the period’s outside legal and investigative billing is attributable to the removal effort and the records fight. The ~$100,000 projection is attributed to Trustee Moseley. This piece treats the town’s position as reflected in the public record and prior reporting, and does not substitute for direct comment from the named officials, which this newspaper may seek before any expanded report.
