Palmer Lake’s trustees will hold a special workshop on bears and trash, tentatively on Oct. 12, after four residents raised the subject during public comment on Sept. 24. Earlier the same evening, the town’s new administrator told the board that at current spending its reserves would last about two years.
Bears were not on the agenda, and they took up most of the last hour anyway. By the end of the Sept. 24 meeting the Palmer Lake Board of Trustees had agreed to a special workshop on the subject, tentatively set for Monday, Oct. 12, and to invite the Planning Commission if enough of its members can attend. Town Administrator Patrick Davidson said he would bring a proposal for a single town trash hauler with guaranteed collection days, under a franchise agreement that would also bring the town revenue, and that staff would again ask Colorado Parks and Wildlife to take part.
Public comment
Gene Kalesti, the resident who has pressed trustees on the issue for a month, answered a line in Davidson’s memo that criticized “repeatedly elevating individual concerns as urgent.” “Yes, I elevated that issue,” he said. He told the board that Corey Adler, the CPW district wildlife officer, had offered to attend but would not make the drive without a confirmed agenda item, and would come once invited. He summarized written testimony from Sen. Janice Marchman, the Senate sponsor of HB26-1342, read aloud a reply in which Mayor Dennis Stern had told him he would not be following through on his requests, and asked for a timetable, a responsible staff member and a formal invitation to Adler. Stern reminded him to address the board as a whole. “Accountability is answering the problem,” Kalesti said.
Three more residents followed. Marne Kendrick, who lives on Oakdale Drive, described bears on her deck and trash strewn by short-term rental guests, and said the messes she had found all came from rentals. Brian Novak, a resident of 11 months, said he had taken down his bird feeders, asked his hauler for a bear-resistant can and waited until collection morning to put out trash. “The bears are not in our neighborhood. We’re in theirs,” he said. A third described someone else’s food waste turning up in her business’s trash.
Enforcement
Police Chief Glen Smith, who said he handles code enforcement, told the board that officers have written bear-related citations and can cite under the new state law without a town ordinance. He said enforcement covers grills, bird feeders and other attractants everywhere in town, not only short-term rentals, and asked residents to send complaints through the town’s code email so repeat offenses can be tracked. “I don’t think we’re at a crisis about it,” he said. “We are addressing the bear issue.”
Town Clerk Erica Romero said she had invited CPW to the board’s August discussion of bears and that the officer, coming from Fort Collins, emailed on Aug. 26 that he could not make it.
The agenda request
The subject reached the board earlier, during Davidson’s staff report. Trustee Atis Jurka asked why his written request to put bears on the agenda had not been granted, and said another trustee had asked too. Romero said his email “did not meet the standards of the agenda setting policy.” Davidson read the policy aloud: an urgent item requested between meetings needs the support of a second trustee, received by the clerk by 9 a.m. on the Wednesday deadline. He said trustees coordinating agenda requests by email, even through staff, risks violating the state’s open meetings law. Trustee Roger Moseley called a four-week wait for an agenda item “ridiculous” and asked for a future item on the agenda-setting rules themselves. Town Attorney James Godbold said any new rule should keep email out of trustees’ coordination.
The budget
At a 4 p.m. workshop, Davidson, a month into the job, gave trustees a first look at the 2027 budget. General-fund spending in every department has risen at least 41% in four years, he said, while revenue from property and sales taxes has been flat for at least three years and is projected to dip. He called the town’s spending “streamlined” and in line with towns of its size, and the gap “a revenue issue, not an expense issue.” In what he described as his own estimate, he said the town has “about two years before you run out of money at the current spending rate.” Joining the Monument Fire District would extend that, he said, but would not close the gap.
Department heads meet the board Sept. 30, a draft budget is due Oct. 15, and a public hearing is set for Nov. 12, with adoption expected Dec. 10.
Other business
- Annexation. On a 6–0 roll call, with Trustee Michael Beeson absent, trustees directed Davidson and Godbold to draft ballot language clarifying the voter-approved rule that annexations require an election, including when that vote takes place, for a possible special election next spring. Staff said it could be paired with any vote on joining the Monument Fire District.
- Fee schedule. Resolution 34-2026, updating the master fee schedule, passed 5–1, with Moseley opposed. Asked about the citation section, Romero said some of those fees predate current staff, are still being researched and would require the municipal judge’s input.
- Lawsuit. Godbold said the town had been named that morning in a new lawsuit over open-records requests, and that its insurance pool’s adjusters had warned the town is nearing the limits of its coverage.
- Code of ethics. Trustees continued a proposed code of ethics to their next meeting and agreed to send Davidson edits within a week.
- Legal invoices. Godbold will provide itemized invoices to trustees privately; the public packet will continue to carry summary statements.
Sources & further reading
The Independent’s own coverage: Bears, Trash and a Town Hall: What to Know Before Palmer Lake’s Meeting Tonight · Palmer Lake Board of Trustees, August 13, 2026 · Palmer Lake’s November Ballot Is Set
Town record: Board of Trustees workshop and regular meeting video, Sept. 24, 2026 · Revised Sept. 24, 2026 agenda and packet
Methodology
This account is built from the meeting video’s captions. Those captions are generated by automatic speech recognition rather than written by a person. Machine transcription misrenders names, garbles figures and carries no speaker labels, so names, quotations and attributions in this article were checked against the video.
