Palmer Lake’s town clerk drew names from a lot at 9:30 a.m. on Aug. 27 and certified the ballot her town will send to El Paso County. Two candidates are running for mayor and ten for five trustee seats, among them a trustee the board is simultaneously trying to remove from office. Nothing else appears on the ballot — no local question on data centers, none on the fire department, no tax measure. Because the town is restoring staggered terms, the five trustee winners will not all serve the same length of time: the two who finish highest get four years, the next three get two. Ballots go to every active registered voter in the county on Oct. 5.
The ballot
Two candidates are running for mayor, a two-year office. Kent Hutson is a neuroradiologist who sits on the town’s planning commission and chaired the Appointed Master Plan Advisory Team, the volunteer body that wrote Palmer Lake’s 2022 community master plan; he is taking no campaign contributions. Atis Jurka is a sitting trustee, and was the most active questioner at the Aug. 27 meeting, raising stormwater, pressing for a line-item breakdown of the town’s legal spending and bringing trash haulers’ offers on bear-resistant containers to the board.
Ten candidates are running for the five trustee seats. Voters may choose up to five.
| Candidate | Current town role |
|---|---|
| William Bass | — |
| Beth Harris | Trustee |
| Tony Beltran | Trustee |
| Dennis Stern | Mayor |
| Rebecca “Becky” Albright | — |
| Karla Kerstner | — |
| Roger Moseley | Trustee; subject of a pending removal hearing |
| Kathy Keeley | — |
| John Marble | Trustee |
| Eric Alan Burton | — |
Four of the ten are sitting trustees. A fifth, Dennis Stern, is the sitting mayor, who is not seeking re-election to that office and is instead running for a seat on the board he currently chairs. The mayor’s office will change hands regardless, since Stern is not seeking it, and with only four sitting trustees among the ten trustee candidates, at least one of the five trustee seats will go to someone who does not hold it now. Jurka keeps his trustee seat if he loses the mayoral race; if he wins, that seat becomes vacant and the board fills it by appointment until the 2028 election, under the town code.
Town Clerk Erica Romero, who serves as Palmer Lake’s designated election official, told the board that evening that the names had been drawn that morning and that the candidates had been verified. She signed a certification that the document is “a true and correct representation of the ballot for the November 3, 2026, coordinated election.”
The ballot is still labeled a draft, and Romero explained why: candidates may withdraw until it goes to print. The town publishes an affidavit of withdrawal for that purpose. Under the state election calendar, the last day for a designated election official to certify ballot order and content to the county clerk is Friday, Sept. 4 — 60 days before the election, under C.R.S. 1-5-203(3)(a).
Why three winners get half a term
Palmer Lake elects trustees to four-year terms and holds municipal elections in even-numbered Novembers, coordinated by El Paso County. Running all five seats for four years at once would leave the board with no staggered replacement cycle, so the town has assigned this election’s terms by vote count.
The two trustee candidates with the highest vote totals will serve four years. The three with the next-highest totals will serve two, and their seats return to the ballot in 2028. The terms are set after the county certifies results, which means a candidate does not know the length of the job while campaigning for it.
A candidate facing a removal hearing
One of the ten trustee candidates, Roger Moseley, is the subject of a removal proceeding brought by the board he is asking voters to return him to — and the timing now runs against the election.
Town Attorney James Godbold updated trustees on Aug. 27. He said he had located a likely hearing officer after a search complicated by availability; most, he said, could not sit until November or December. The officer he has in mind may be available before she leaves on vacation on Sept. 20, and if that window closes she is unavailable again until after Oct. 25. He had not yet received an engagement letter from her. Once she is in place he will retain a separate attorney to present the case for the town, because he does not believe he should fill that role himself given potential conflicts of interest.
On the arithmetic Godbold laid out, the likeliest outcome is that voters decide Moseley’s seat before the town decides whether he may keep it. Ballots reach voters on Oct. 5; the later of his two windows opens after Oct. 25.
The allegations are on the public record, and the Independent has reported them in detail. Interim Town Administrator and Police Chief Glen Smith authorized an outside investigation after multiple staff complaints and told the board in April that it found Moseley had created a hostile work environment for female staff. The charge letter, which the Independent has read, states that the investigator found sufficient evidence to substantiate that Moseley raised his voice to staff in an intimidating tone and pointed a pen at a staff member in an aggressive manner. The town’s special counsel opined that a prima facie case of hostile work environment based on sex could be stated. Moseley has not disputed raising his voice; he disputes the characterization, and so do several of his colleagues and supporters. On July 23 the board voted 5-0 to have Godbold appoint an independent hearing officer to determine whether cause exists to remove him.
Two features of his candidacy are unusual enough to state plainly. Moseley won his seat in a recall election last fall — that is, from voters who wanted the board changed. And he is himself suing the town: as of the Independent’s July reporting he had three active suits against it, one of them a challenge to Dennis Stern’s right to hold the mayor’s office. Stern is on the same ballot, running for trustee.
Moseley remains a sitting trustee. He attended and voted at the board’s 4 p.m. special meeting on Aug. 27 and was excused from the 6 p.m. regular meeting because of illness.
What is not on the ballot
Two questions Palmer Lake spent the summer on will not reach voters in November.
The board voted 5-0 on Aug. 27 to begin negotiating a merger of its fire department into the Monument Fire District, aiming at a special election in March 2027. Godbold told trustees that putting it on the November ballot was “not feasible or realistic,” and that the town first needs a memorandum of understanding sketching the terms — “because I think people want to know what am I getting for my for my vote.”
A six-month moratorium on data centers is also absent. The board directed staff to bring a resolution to its Sept. 10 meeting rather than an ordinance, on the advice of Town Administrator Patrick Davidson and Godbold, who both said a resolution would be easier to unwind after six months. A resolution does not require voter approval.
How and when to vote
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| Fri., Sept. 4 | Last day for the town clerk to certify ballot order and content to the county (C.R.S. 1-5-203(3)(a)) |
| Week of Sept. 14 | Ballots mailed to military and overseas voters |
| Mon., Oct. 5 | Ballots mailed to every active registered voter in El Paso County |
| Tue., Nov. 3 | Election Day. Ballots must be physically received by 7 p.m. Colorado does not accept postmarks |
El Paso County Clerk and Recorder Steve Schleiker briefed the board in person on Aug. 27, opening the meeting’s presentations. The county will operate 41 voter service and polling centers and 44 monitored ballot drop boxes — both, he said, the most it has ever run — and expects to hire more than a thousand election judges for an election it estimates will cost $2.5 million.
Schleiker’s central warning to Palmer Lake voters was procedural: Colorado does not accept postmarks. A ballot must be physically in the clerk’s possession by 7 p.m. on Nov. 3. He said the most common mistake he sees is an unsigned envelope, and that voters who scrawl a signature at the drop box often produce one that does not match the record, triggering a cure letter.
He also told the board that Palmer Lake needs a ballot drop box of its own rather than sending residents down to Santa Fe or the park and ride. Mayor Stern agreed. Schleiker said his office would work with Romero on a location, without committing to one for this election.
Correction, Sept. 2, 2026: An earlier version of this article said that at least two of the town’s seven elected positions would change hands because Atis Jurka was “leaving the trustee bench” to run for mayor. Under Palmer Lake’s code, a trustee’s seat is not vacated by candidacy; Jurka keeps his seat if he loses. The count of at least two stands for a different reason, stated above, and the passage has been rewritten.
Sources & further reading
The Independent’s own coverage: A Town Without Guardrails — the year of procedural breakdown behind the removal fight, including the spending on it and the disputed minutes · Palmer Lake Board of Trustees, July 23, 2026: A Hearing Officer, a Clean Audit and a Bridge Already Gone — the 5-0 vote that sent the Moseley matter to a hearing officer, and what the charge letter says · Kent Hutson Chaired Palmer Lake’s Master Plan. Now He Is Running for Mayor. — profile of one of the two mayoral candidates · Palmer Lake Could Vote in 2027 on Dissolving Its Fire Department — the merger question now aimed at March 2027 · Palmer Lake Board of Trustees, August 13, 2026 — the preceding meeting, including the legal-fee report and the new town administrator · BoardWatch Adds Palmer Lake and a Tracker for Each Board — the Independent’s running record of how this board votes.
Town record: Certified draft ballot, Nov. 3, 2026 · Elections page, Town of Palmer Lake · Board of Trustees regular meeting agenda and packet, Aug. 27, 2026 · Board of Trustees special meeting agenda, Aug. 27, 2026 · Recording of the Aug. 27 meetings.
County and state: El Paso County election information · September 2026 election calendar · Find a voting location or drop box.
Methodology
The candidate names, their ballot order and the offices sought are taken from the ballot certified by the town clerk, read as an image at three magnifications because the document carries no text layer. The rules on term length, the number of seats and the two-year mayoral term come from the town’s own elections page. The Sept. 4 certification deadline and its statutory citation come from the September 2026 election calendar the town publishes, not from a secondary summary.
Accounts of the Aug. 27 discussion come from the town’s recording of the meeting, worked from a machine-generated transcript of that recording. Transcripts of this kind are imperfect — they misrender names and garble figures — 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 named here was confirmed against the recording itself rather than taken from the transcript. Names are spelled as they appear on the certified ballot and in the town’s minutes rather than as the transcript renders them. Figures attributed to the county clerk are as he stated them at the meeting.
The account of the allegations against Roger Moseley, the charge letter’s findings, the July 23 vote and his lawsuits against the town are drawn from the Independent’s own earlier reporting, linked above, which worked from the charge letter, the town’s invoices and the meeting record. The Independent has not seen the investigator’s report; the town attorney has said it stays confidential while the matter proceeds, and that Moseley himself will see it only if the hearing officer admits it into evidence.
Two limits are worth stating. Where the table records no current town role for a candidate, that means the Independent did not establish one from the public record — not that none exists. And the timing observation about the hearing falling after ballots are mailed follows from the two windows the town attorney described on Aug. 27; no hearing date has been set, and the town has not said when it expects one.
No candidate was contacted for this article, which reports what the certified ballot and the meeting record show. The Independent will report on the candidates individually before ballots are mailed.
