Palmer Lake’s trustees have spent a year failing to settle an argument. On July 23rd they finally chose a method: an outside hearing officer who will weigh whether to remove Trustee Roger Moseley from office. It is the first orderly step in a disorderly year — and it arrives with the town’s procedural debts still unpaid.

The meeting began at four in the afternoon and did not finish its business until after six, most of it behind a closed door. When the trustees came back out, they took the only vote that mattered. By roll call, 5-0, they authorized James Godbold — the town attorney they had hired only weeks earlier — to select an independent hearing officer and put to him a single question: whether there is cause to remove Mr Moseley from office. The officer will hear the matter and return a recommendation. The decision itself stays with the board. Mr Moseley, the subject of the investigation, did not vote. Trustee Michael Beeson was absent.

The board was acting on a 28-page report by Employers Council, the Denver-based employment body that investigated complaints made by town staff. Mr Godbold told the trustees they had seen that report for the first time that evening, in closed session, and laid out three options: do nothing, write their own rules of conduct, or send the matter to a quasi-judicial hearing.

Doing nothing, said Trustee Beth Harris, who had read the report during the closed session, “is the most risky option for the town.” Her worry was that a middle course might not satisfy whoever had complained. A colleague corrected her on one point — there had been multiple complainants, not one — and made the sterner argument: the object was not to satisfy them but “to determine whether or not the allegations are true or not.” Mr Godbold’s case for a hearing officer was institutional. It would spare the board from sitting in judgment on a colleague, insulate the town on due process and, a point he returned to twice, bring an end to something that “has been hanging over the town’s head for a long time.”

He is right that it has. Whether the town has earned the right to end it this way is a different question.

The charge, and the year behind it

The allegations are serious and should be stated plainly. Glen Smith, Palmer Lake’s interim town administrator and chief of police, authorized the investigation after multiple complaints, and told the board in April that the inquiry found Mr Moseley had created a hostile work environment for female staff. “Multiple female employees are afraid to go to work and leave work,” Mr Smith said. Nothing that follows diminishes that. Employees are entitled to a workplace free of harassment, and to a process that takes their complaints seriously.

But a process that takes complaints seriously is precisely what Palmer Lake has struggled to build. Colorado law, at C.R.S. § 31-4-307, lets a board remove one of its own by majority vote after a written charge and an opportunity for a hearing. Palmer Lake has never codified its own rules under that statute. Kent Whitmer, the town attorney at the time, warned in April that a removal hearing would resemble a court proceeding, that the town would probably need a hearing officer, and that the whole thing would “realistically” take months. He was asked to draft the ordinance. He resigned in May, citing the “strife and turmoil” of the board and the toll it was taking on his health and his other clients, leaving 44 open legal matters behind him. The ordinance was never adopted.

Nor is Mr Moseley an ordinary defendant. He was elected in a recall election triggered by petition last fall — that is, by voters who wanted the board changed. He is the plaintiff in three active lawsuits against the town, one of them, filed in May, over the town’s refusal to give him information about the investigation into him. He is also, as this meeting made clear again, the trustee most persistent about where the town’s money goes. Opinion in Palmer Lake divides accordingly. A former mayor, Bill Bass, has told the board that Mr Moseley’s dealings with staff were “accusatory” and at times abusive enough that a police presence was considered. A resident, Grace Foy, told the same board that he “challenges people across the board, men and women alike, when he sees issues or incompetence.” Her verdict: “That’s not harassment, that’s accountability.”

This newspaper does not know which account is nearer the truth, and neither does anyone else who has not read the report. That is rather the point. We wrote this month that Palmer Lake had mislaid the rules that would let it settle an argument at all. On July 23rd it borrowed one. Borrowed rules are better than none. They are not the same as rules the town wrote, debated and adopted before it needed them.

A firm for all seasons

There is a tidiness to the arrangement worth noting. Lyons Gaddis, Mr Godbold’s firm, has served as Palmer Lake’s special water counsel since around 2018. In June the board voted 3-1, with Mr Moseley recused, to retain the same firm as special counsel to define the process for the investigation into him. This month it took the general-counsel work as well, as one of only two answers to the town’s request for proposals; the other, a sole practitioner, lacked the insurance the request required.

So the lawyer who advised the board on what to do with the report belongs to the firm engaged to design the procedure that produced it, and now also holds the town’s general business. None of that is improper, and no one at the meeting suggested it was. It is, however, the kind of concentration that a town with more choices would avoid — and Palmer Lake has few. It has burned through three town attorneys since January. When a jurisdiction this small goes shopping for counsel and two firms answer, one of them uninsured, the winner inherits every role by default.

An argument before the door closed

Before any of that, the town’s own camera caught something it does not usually capture.

After the board voted to convene into executive session, the livestream kept running for roughly ten minutes while Mr Godbold and Mr Moseley argued, at the dais, over whether Mr Moseley could stay in the room. The recording of that exchange remains posted on the town’s YouTube channel. The executive session itself is not in the published video; it was cut, and the recording resumes as the board returns to open session at 6:14 p.m. What the camera preserved was the dispute over recusal — not the substance of the report, which was discussed only after the room was closed.

It was bracing. Mr Godbold told Mr Moseley he had “a patent conflict of interest” and could not lawfully take part; that permitting it “would be a gross violation” of his own obligations; and that refusing to step aside “creates liability for the town” and amounted to “a breach of your responsibility and ethics as a trustee.” Then, without pausing: “that’s nothing personal to you.”

Mr Moseley did not go quietly, and some of his objections were better than others. He complained that the notice describing the session “did not fully explain why I should recuse myself.” He observed that he had sat for the investigators voluntarily and discussed the matter in public: “I’m not keeping anything secret.” He asked who had written the report, whether Mr Godbold meant to present evidence, and how the board could absorb the material now without contaminating whoever would judge him later — “How can you taint the judges who will have to hear my case?” It is not a frivolous question. When he let slip that he already had a copy of the report, Mr Godbold replied that if so, “there’s been a gross violation by someone within the town for providing that to you,” and undertook to check.

Mr Moseley also pressed a procedural claim: that under Mr Whitmer the board had already voted 6-1 to hold a hearing. Mr Godbold said he had not been party to that and understood no decision had been taken. A trustee brokered a peace — the earlier vote had happened, but had been cast before anyone had read the report. “I could argue that we were insufficiently prepared to make that vote,” the trustee offered. Mr Moseley’s reply was crisp: “Definitely were.”

Then he stood down. “Based on this illuminating discussion, I will recuse myself,” he said. “And I’m getting tired of doing this.”

What Mr Moseley will not see

Two of his questions went unanswered in any satisfying way, and both concern the document at the center of the case.

The first is whether the public will ever see it. That, Mr Godbold said, depends on the outcome: if the matter proceeds, the report stays confidential; if it goes nowhere, there is a point at which it may be released. The logic is defensible — witnesses and complainants have statutory confidentiality rights that do not evaporate for the convenience of a news story. The effect is nonetheless awkward. The report becomes public only if it comes to nothing.

The second is whether Mr Moseley will see it. Not automatically, Mr Godbold said. He will get the names of witnesses the hearing officer calls. He will get the report itself only if the hearing officer admits it into evidence — which, Mr Godbold added, he doubted a hearing officer would do, preferring live testimony.

There is a coherent theory behind this: the hearing is meant to be built from evidence tested in the open, not from an investigator’s summary. But it produces an odd picture. A man may be removed from an office he won in a recall election on the strength of a document he has not been allowed to read, prepared by investigators he cannot cross-examine, in a proceeding governed by rules the town never wrote down. Whatever the report says about his conduct, that is a thin foundation on which to unseat an elected official — and a thin foundation serves the complainants no better than it serves him. A finding reached this way will persuade nobody who is not already persuaded.

A clean audit, and a lone no

The regular meeting that followed ran another two and a half hours and opened with better news than Palmer Lake has lately been used to.

Jim Hinkle, of Hinkle & Company, presented the 2025 audit and reported “an unmodified opinion, which in layman’s term is a clean opinion.” His firm found no significant deficiencies and no material weaknesses in the town’s internal controls, had no disagreements with management and, unusually, made no audit adjustments at all. Because Palmer Lake spent less than $1 million in federal money in 2025, it escaped the federal “single audit” it faced the year before. Its Fire and Police Pension Association plan was fully funded for a second year running. For a town that has spent the year in procedural chaos, the books are in order.

The contrast with 2024 was the point of the exercise. That audit was finished late and on an emergency basis, after a previous auditor missed the state’s deadlines, and the lateness compressed everything after it. Palmer Lake therefore had no extension this year: the filing deadline was July 31st.

That squeeze produced the evening’s only contested vote. Trustees had been handed the draft the day before. Mr Moseley objected that one day is not enough to read an audit and discharge a fiduciary duty — “it would be hard to accept the report until we have a chance to look at it” — which, whatever one thinks of him, is the correct instinct. Mr Hinkle offered a compromise: approve the draft now, take questions for five business days, file on time and, if a material error surfaced later, reissue the report as a restated statement. Missing the deadline, he noted, carries no fine; the state simply withholds highway tax money until the filing arrives.

Mr Godbold flagged a risk — that a single unsatisfied trustee could hold up approval by the whole board. Resolution 29-2026 passed 5-1. The lone no came from the opposite direction to Mr Moseley’s: Ms Harris, who had argued the resolution should simply be passed as written, voted against it because the added provisos were, she said, “unnecessary.” At least two colleagues agreed they were superfluous, and voted for them anyway.

The bridge that was already gone

The second listed business item was the possible replacement of the Lover’s Lane log bridge. It had been overtaken by events. The bridge was removed the day after the Parks Commission discussed it, on the understanding that the commission’s agreement was all the authority required. Mr Smith told the board he saw no case for rebuilding: an engineered Air Force Academy bridge stands about a hundred feet upstream, close enough that “I can almost flick a quarter” to it, and the trail has been rerouted with rock.

Then came the evening’s most affecting stretch. Gene Kalesti, a former parks commissioner recovering from a traumatic brain injury, had a friend, Steve Draper, read most of his proposal for him. Their case was not for the old bridge but a better one: engineered for pedestrians, cyclists and horses, with two-sided railings and wider approaches, built by the volunteers who put up the original and — the crucial clause — paid for privately. “He is not asking the taxpayers to fund the project,” Mr Draper read.

Mr Kalesti disputed that the structure had ever been designated temporary, citing a 2023 resolution, a regional building department permit and 52 pages of approvals. He argued the damage was done by horses, which the trails were never approved to carry. And he made the safety point plainly: “Removing the bridge does not remove the crossing. It simply removes the safest crossing.”

He also made a point about institutional memory that nobody at the dais contradicted. “Not one single member of you were here when we did this work,” he said. “Not even the mayor.”

The board’s answer was procedural: take it to the Parks Commission, which keeps the priority list and would inherit the maintenance and the liability, then bring back a complete proposal. Mayor Dennis Stern thanked Mr Kalesti for raising the matter in the first place and promised the board would see the proposal returned with a recommendation. Mr Kalesti, who has been through this before, knew what he was being offered. “We made our presentation many times,” he said of the original build. “It took about 15 times to get our plan approved.”

Borrowing Monument’s homework

The town’s Planning Commission has asked the board to consider a moratorium on data centers. The item nearly slipped past: the clerk reported the request, the board talked around it, and only when a trustee pointed out that no actual direction had been given — “I wanted to get the consensus from the rest of the board” — were members polled one by one. They agreed to pursue one, with an agenda item targeted for August 27th and Monument’s ordinance language to be circulated as a model. Monument’s council imposed a six-month freeze on July 20th, before any developer had asked for anything.

Palmer Lake’s discussion was more skeptical than its neighbor’s. Mr Stern said he did not think the town needed to “push back against data centers” and complained of misinformation about their water and power use. Mr Godbold, still learning the code, wondered whether a moratorium would be duplicative if existing zoning and setbacks already made a data center impossible. Others were unmoved: one trustee said he had received “probably a hundred emails” on the subject and that even a largely declaratory step was worth taking. A colleague noted that if Colorado Springs succeeds in pushing a proposed data center away, the surprise could land here — most plausibly on the Monument Hill land at the center of the Buc-ee’s annexation fight, which is easily big enough. The practical difficulty, several agreed, is that Palmer Lake has no definition of a data center to work with — which is, in miniature, the town’s whole predicament.

The business that waits

The rest of the evening was municipal residue, and a catalog of things still undone.

Fire Chief John Vincent, back from deployments to the Hopi reservation and a wildfire near Ouray, delivered a report the board had to amend its agenda to hear, and used it to press a long-running complaint: his department has been squeezed out of hazard mitigation for want of anywhere to put a slash pile. The Buc-ee’s annexation remains untangled — special counsel retained under a $15,000 cap blew through a June 30th deadline, and one trustee asked whether the new attorney might simply draft the resolution himself.

A resident, Martha Brodzik, used public comment to accuse the mayor of holding serial one-on-one meetings with trustees about a land swap he is personally involved in, which she said violates Colorado’s open meetings law. Mr Stern said the sessions were “strictly educational” and added, with more equanimity than the charge invited, “if I’m in violation, I stand convicted.” Trustee Tony Beltran asked for a hard number on what defending the town’s three lawsuits has cost the taxpayer — the figure, he said, residents ask him about more than any other.

And Mr Moseley returned to a complaint three months old: that Palmer Lake tracks some $415,000 in developer reimbursements on a manual spreadsheet that has already produced five errors. Staff replied that most town processes are manual, that the errors were caught, and that software will be considered at budget time. It was a small exchange, and a revealing one. The trustee the town is trying to remove spent his last minutes of the evening asking why the books are kept by hand.

Palmer Lake’s larger accounts were certified clean that night. Its procedures were not. Having hired a lawyer, commissioned a hearing officer and set the machinery going, the town is about to discover whether borrowed rules can carry the weight of a decision this heavy — or whether, a year from now, it will still be arguing about how it decided.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage

Primary sources

Other reporting

Methodology

This account is drawn from the town’s published recording of the July 23rd special and regular meetings and from the official agenda packet. Dollar figures, vote tallies and resolution numbers are as stated on the recording or in the packet. Our Community News had not yet published its account of this meeting when this was written.

Three cautions. First, quotations come from the recording’s automated captions. Obvious speech-recognition errors have been corrected where the intended word is unambiguous — the captions render “recuse” as “recruit” and “taint” as “tank,” for instance — and repeated words and filler have been trimmed. Nothing has been added and no quotation altered in substance.

Second, the captions do not identify speakers. Statements are attributed by name where the speaker is unambiguous from context — the mayor chairing, the town attorney advising, the auditor presenting, a named member of the public at the podium — or where the Independent’s editor identified the speaker from the video. The attributions to Ms Harris and Mr Beltran, and the identification of Ms Harris as the lone no on Resolution 29-2026, were confirmed that way; minutes for this meeting had not been published, and that vote was taken by voice rather than roll call. Where a speaker could not be identified with confidence, the piece says “a trustee” rather than guessing. Personal names, which the captions garble, have been checked against the town’s official minutes and prior published reporting rather than transcribed by ear.

Third, the ten-minute exchange between Mr Godbold and Mr Moseley took place after the board had voted to convene into executive session but while the meeting was still being broadcast, and it remains publicly posted by the town. The executive session itself does not appear in the published video. The quoted material concerns whether Mr Moseley should be present, not the findings of the report, which the board discussed only after the room was closed.

The Independent has not seen the Employers Council report and takes no position on whether the allegations against Mr Moseley are true. We do take a position on process: that a town removing an elected official should do so under rules it adopted in advance, on evidence the accused can answer, before a tribunal whose independence is beyond argument. Palmer Lake is closer to that standard than it was on July 22nd. It is not there yet.

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