Palmer Lake Could Vote in 2027 on Dissolving Its Fire Department

Palmer Lake has run its own fire department since 1937. On Thursday afternoon the Monument Fire District sat down in the town hall and told the trustees what it would take to end that: a ballot question as early as May 2027, an increase of 8.4 mills on every property in town, and — in the district’s view — a new station a mile out of the village at Elephant Rock. Nobody voted on anything. The mayor has asked for the item to return on August 27th.

The workshop was the third public conversation in as many years between the Town of Palmer Lake and the Monument Fire District, and the first at which the district arrived with answers rather than questions. It brought most of its command staff. Andy Kovacs, who handed over as fire chief on August 3rd and now serves the district in what he called an administrative role, led the presentation; his successor, Colin Fitzgerald, was out of state.

Kovacs’s conclusion was that the merger works. “There is certainly an opportunity for the fire district to provide service to the town of Palmer Lake,” he said. What remained, he told the trustees, were facilities, the six full-time firefighters the town employs, and the question of how a village of about two thousand keeps its identity inside a district ten times its size.

The Mechanism

Nothing happens without a vote of Palmer Lake’s residents. The town would draft ballot language dissolving its fire department and asking to be included in the fire district, which is a special district under state statute. Kovacs put the earliest realistic date at May 2027, with November 2027 the next opportunity. Town staff noted that Palmer Lake runs its regular elections in even years, so a 2027 question would mean a special election, and that who pays for it has not been worked out.

Kovacs said more than once that his own board has not committed to anything either. The district’s directors were briefed several months ago and two of them sat in the room on Thursday, but any commitment to build a station, or to absorb a payroll, would need their approval.

The Money

El Paso County certifies a single property-tax levy for Palmer Lake: 21 mills for the 2025 tax year, payable in 2026. There is no separate Palmer Lake fire district on the county’s rolls, because the town’s fire service is a town department. Of those 21 mills, Kovacs said, the district understands 10 to be dedicated to fire and emergency medical services. The Monument Fire District’s own levy is 18.4 mills, unchanged since voters approved it in 2017.

Hence the figure Kovacs put in front of the trustees: residents would “essentially accept an 8.4 mil increase.” That arithmetic holds only if the town gives up the 10 mills it now spends on fire. Mayor Dennis Stern said it would — that the fire levy “would disappear” and the fire district’s levy would be the only one on the bill for that service.

The mayor made the town’s case in fiscal terms at the close of the workshop. The 10 mills raised about $675,000 in the current year, he said, and the general fund committed roughly $800,000 more on top of it. On his numbers the town already spends more on fire than 18.4 mills would raise, and the merger would free about $800,000 a year for other needs — which, with a tight budget ahead, he called essential.

Nobody at the workshop translated 8.4 mills into a figure for an individual household, and no such estimate has been published. Kovacs also expects Palmer Lake’s insurance rating to improve — the town is rated ISO 4, the district 3, and Kovacs anticipates the district falling to 2 once a training center on Highway 105 and newly purchased water tenders are scored. He said plainly that he did not know what that was worth in dollars on a homeowner’s premium.

The Firefighters

The district would take all six full-time firefighters. Roughly two-thirds of the property-tax revenue Palmer Lake would bring in would go to employing them, Kovacs said, and the timing suits him: the district’s 2027 budget already contemplates six new posts to staff a two-person squad at the fire station it is building on Jackson Creek Parkway. Palmer Lake’s six could satisfy that need.

They would come onto the district’s wage schedule, and Kovacs, asked directly by Mayor Stern to characterize the gap, said there would be “a healthy pay raise.” They would not be assigned to the Palmer Lake station as a unit; the district would blend them into the organization and expect them to spend a first year learning it, in the manner of probationary firefighters. They would be oriented to apparatus the town does not operate — a ladder truck, a water tender, advanced life support ambulances.

Trustee John Marble raised the one person not in that count. “I just want to make sure we’re not leaving Chief Vincent out to dry,” he said. Kovacs said the district envisions a one-time payout of salary and benefits to Fire Chief John Vincent for his service to the town, an expense the district would carry.

Palmer Lake’s volunteers have no direct equivalent. The district sunset its own volunteer program after the Tri-Lakes and Donald Wescott districts came together, on the grounds that the community had outgrown it; all its stations are staffed around the clock. What it offers instead is a paid part-time wildfire mitigation crew, seven posts on the district’s 2026 organizational chart, which Division Chief Jonathan Bradley described as a route into the fire service rather than a substitute for riding an engine. The crew runs community chipping through the summer and, this year, a new right-of-way clearing program in partnership with El Paso County, the Town of Monument and Mountain View Electric. Everyone who came through it this year completed initial wildland firefighter certification. Bradley said Palmer Lake joining could finally give the district the personnel for winter pile burning, something it has looked at but never had the crew to run.

The Station

This is the part the trustees returned to most often, and the part the district’s answer does not resolve comfortably.

Palmer Lake’s station has stood at Middle Glenway and Valley Crescent since 1937. The town commissioned a feasibility study of three possible sites: rebuilding where it is, a parcel on the north side of Highway 105, and the Elephant Rock property. The district took that study to its own architects. Their answer, delivered by Division Chief Jamey Bumgarner, was Elephant Rock — water and sewer already at the site, room for apparatus to loop in off Highway 105 and pull through, and space at the back for a 5,000-to-7,000-square-foot police or community building if the town wanted one. A mapping exercise using Palmer Lake’s actual call locations put the ideal station within about 300 feet of that site.

The design is a 9,800-square-foot, seven-bedroom station with two apparatus bays built so a third can be added, sixteen parking spaces, and decontamination corridors that let crews strip, shower and change between the apparatus floor and the living quarters. Bumgarner put the cost at roughly $8 million and was careful about it: “we might tell you tonight that we think it would cost $8 million and we would go out for a bid and it might cost 6.5,” he said, “but we might also… wind up costing $10 million.” Kovacs put the district’s likely range at $8m to $10m, against about $14m for the larger Jackson Creek station now under construction. Any of it would need the district board’s approval.

Rebuilding in the village, the district found, would open response-time gaps toward its own Station 3. And there is a blunter point underneath the whole discussion: the district says it does not need a station in Palmer Lake at all. Fire Station 1, on Highway 105 outside the town limits, already covers the entire town within the district’s four- and six-minute response standards, and would go on doing so while anything new was built.

That is precisely what the trustees and the fire chief said residents will not accept. Chief Vincent told the meeting his staff’s concern is that the existing building is a community fire station, and asked how many Monument Fire District stations sit inside a community in the way Palmer Lake’s does. Kovacs agreed, listing it as one of the two hardest things to sell: “it’s been resonated pretty loud and clear that they would prefer to have a fire station in the town.”

Asked by Trustee Michael Beeson what would become of the old station, Kovacs floated a fire museum, a wildfire education center, or a home for the mitigation crew, which currently works out of administrative offices. Glen Smith, the interim town administrator and police chief, said the town commissioned an engineering study of the building last year and offered to hand it over.

What the Board Pressed On

Trustee Atis Jurka opened with five concerns and they framed the afternoon: the transition itself, the station’s location, what happens to the firefighters, how long it would take, and whether insurance rates would move.

Beeson pushed on the practical and the sentimental in roughly equal measure. He asked what becomes of the town’s assets — the answer being that the district would inventory everything, that the engine is about thirty years old and would likely be surplused or donated, and that Palmer Lake would in exchange get a nearly new engine, a wildland unit and an ambulance replaced every five years. He asked how the town’s budget would interface with the district’s, and was told the whole line comes off the town’s books. He asked how a train blocking the crossing would be handled, and was told the district already lives with that in Monument, calls for a unit from the other side, and can request mutual aid from Larkspur if a delay would be significant; Chief Vincent added that the town’s side-by-sides can cross the bridge.

And he asked the question the district itself named as the hardest. Palmer Lake has an unusually close relationship with its firefighters, Beeson said, and the town does not want to be pushed to the side and minimized. Kovacs said the district would keep the traditions — the Christmas Star, the chili supper, the pancake breakfast — and pointed to the Gleneagle events it inherited and continued after the Wescott merger. Along with station location, he listed loss of identity as one of the two biggest obstacles to a yes vote, with the increased cost of service third.

Chief Vincent asked the district for five years of response and turnout times for Station 1, said he could not find them on the district’s website, and raised whether a union representative should be at future meetings. About 90 percent of the district’s firefighters belong to Local 4319, Kovacs said; membership is not mandatory, non-members receive the negotiated benefits, and grievances go to the fire chief.

Glen Smith drew out the one member of the district’s staff who had not spoken. Noting that in his own field a national accreditation runs to 460 standards, he asked Jeremy Furman, the district’s accreditation manager, to explain what the district’s status actually means. Furman said the model was recently updated to an eleventh edition of some 260 standards, reassessed every five years, and that the point is comparison with like agencies rather than with big-city departments: “We’re not evaluated against what FDNY does, or Colorado Springs Fire.” A peer team visited in 2025 and left the district with just over a dozen recommendations to complete before it seeks reaccreditation. One was that it had no continuity-of-operations plan; the district is now splitting the cost of an emergency manager with the Town of Monument to write one. Kovacs said about 1 percent of fire departments in the country hold the credential.

Asked what the district gets out of it, Kovacs gave a regional-services answer. “We’ve got two fire chiefs, we’ve got two administrative staff, and there’s a lot of duplication of effort,” he said, “which, as a taxpayer, seems like we could do better.” Standardized training, apparatus and certification across one organization, he argued, makes every response safer, including the mutual-aid responses the district already makes into Palmer Lake.

The exchange was cooperative rather than adversarial throughout. No motion was made and none could be: a workshop is not a business meeting.

How Long

Trustee Jurka asked what nobody had put a number on: if the town pulls the trigger, how long does this take. Kovacs reached for the Wescott precedent, which ran a couple of years, and said he expects faster this time — the district has done it once, and much of the work, on salaries, apparatus and facilities, can be front-loaded ahead of a vote. Building a station would take a couple of years on its own, but the district could operate out of Station 1 throughout.

Both sides said the deciding factor is what residents are told between now and a ballot. Kovacs committed to town halls, presentations and a question-and-answer campaign. Town staff asked the board for direction on points of contact and on what data the two organizations should assemble together, and made the case for over-communicating: change is always hard, and an informed vote is the only kind worth having.

Later the same evening, at the regular meeting, Mayor Stern asked for “discussion and possible action” on the fire district to be placed on the agenda for August 27th.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage: Palmer Lake Board of Trustees, July 23, 2026 — the previous meeting, at which Chief Vincent gave the department report on deployments, drought and mitigation costs referenced here · Woodmoor, Explained — how special districts, including fire districts, are governed in the Tri-Lakes.

Meeting record: Town of Palmer Lake Board of Trustees workshop and regular meeting, August 13, 2026 · Board of Trustees Regular Meeting Packet, 08.13.26, 103 pages, and the six-page supplemental packet.

Monument Fire District: Mill levy · Accreditation · History and the Wescott merger · 2026 organizational chart.

Palmer Lake Fire Department: the town’s own fire department page, giving the department’s history from 1937, its ISO 4/4X rating, its roughly 400 calls a year and its staff roster. It is reachable from the town website; the page does not hold a stable direct address, so none is given here.

Property tax: El Paso County Treasurer, certified mill levies.

Methodology

This account of the workshop is drawn from the town’s live stream of the August 13th meeting, working from a machine-generated transcript of that recording. 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 every speaker quoted by name here was verified against the recording itself rather than taken from the transcript; where a speaker could not be identified with confidence, the attribution is to the office rather than the person. Direct quotation is limited to passages that are unambiguous on the recording, and figures spoken aloud are attributed to the person who spoke them rather than stated as fact. Personal names and job titles, which transcripts of this kind garble, were checked against the meeting packet and the fire district’s own published staff pages rather than transcribed by ear.

The mill levies are the certified rates published by the El Paso County Treasurer for the 2025 tax year, payable in 2026. The county certifies one levy for the Town of Palmer Lake, 21 mills, and one for the Tri-Lakes Monument Fire Protection District, 18.4 mills; there is no separately certified Palmer Lake fire levy, so the 10 mills described at the workshop is an allocation within the town’s own levy rather than a distinct taxing authority. The 8.4-mill figure is the district’s, and depends on the town reducing its levy accordingly. The town’s fire budget and year-to-date spending are from the unaudited June 2026 financial statements in the meeting packet.

The cost of the Jackson Creek Parkway station is given as the figure Kovacs stated at the workshop. Published accounts of the March 2026 groundbreaking put it higher, and the two have not been reconciled; no independent figure is asserted here. Neither the town nor the district has published an estimate of what 8.4 mills would cost a typical household, and none is calculated here.