On July 27th three Colorado Springs councilmembers convened a public forum on polarization and civility. At the end of it, one of them told the room that Palmer Lake had turned down a Buc-ee’s and that the company was building it anyway on the other side of the town line, so the town would take the traffic and get nothing. Neither half of that is true. Palmer Lake fought the project for two years, lost a mayor and two trustees doing it, and the company withdrew. Nothing is being built, and on the day he spoke no hearing had been scheduled.
The event was held at a Colorado Springs library, co-hosted by the national nonprofit Braver Angels and the council’s three at-large members: David Leinweber, Brian Risley, the council president pro tem, and Lynette Crow-Iverson, the council president. A local company, Reclaiming Civility, supplied facilitators. Michael Montgomery, the deputy city administrator, was thanked from the podium for helping organize it. The mayor’s chief of staff attended. Springs Taxpayers United recorded the proceedings.
Registrants had been surveyed in advance, and returned water, homelessness and annexation as their leading concerns. Homelessness having been covered at a June forum, Mr Leinweber folded the other two into a heading of his own devising: what does smart growth mean to you? He had set the evening’s subject a week ahead of it.
The Beaver on Monument Hill
He raised Buc-ee’s himself, at the close, prefacing it as a diversion — “it’s not related to us” — and then making it related. The company, he said, had offered Palmer Lake $955,000 a year in sales tax, “call it $1 million annually,” against a town general fund of $3 million. It had offered a $5 million upgrade to the town’s water system and to build a new interchange “totally on their dime, which could easily run into the $10 million range or whatever.” The town said no. And now, he told the room, Buc-ee’s had bought the land and was building at the same location under county jurisdiction, so Palmer Lake would get the traffic and none of the benefits.
Nobody had asked him about Palmer Lake. There was no question from the floor, no table report on the subject, and nothing in the survey that produced his own agenda.
Buc-ee’s does own the land — thirty-two acres at I-25 and County Line Road, bought for $10 million. It has no permission to build on it. Nothing is being built. And Palmer Lake never rejected it.
What Palmer Lake Actually Did
The town’s board declared the site eligible for annexation in May 2025, on a 6–1 vote, after an earlier eligibility resolution was rescinded under a challenge brought under the state’s open-meetings law. What followed was not a town failing to say no.
Mayor Glant Havenar resigned in June 2025, after twelve years in town offices, when text messages surfaced in which she appeared to discuss how votes would go before the meetings at which they were taken, and to acknowledge operating a false account on a neighborhood social network. Officials went on resigning through the autumn. In September residents recalled two trustees, Shana Ball and Kevin Dreher, and replaced them with two opponents of the project. On the same ballot they voted 765 to 375 — better than two to one — to take annexation decisions out of the board’s hands and put them to a public vote. Days earlier the planning commission had recommended against the project, finding it in conflict with the town’s own master plan.
By February 4th, 2026, Buc-ee’s withdrew its application. The elected board never took a final vote, because there was nothing left to vote on. The town has since fired and replaced its attorney, and a sitting trustee is suing it over how the mayor’s vacancy was filled.
Palmer Lake did not lose. It spent two years, a mayor, two trustees and its own institutional peace, and the company left.
The company then went to the county. In June it asked El Paso County’s planning director to classify a 74,000-square-foot travel center as a “convenience store” permitted by right in the parcel’s C-1 zoning. On July 1st she declined to decide, saying she could not determine the question. Buc-ee’s appealed the next day. The county publishes, in plain language, what that appeal decides: classification, and not a development plan, not construction, not access or traffic improvements, not utilities, not operation.
As of July 27th — the day Mr Leinweber told a room the project was going ahead — no hearing on the appeal had been scheduled. Colorado Public Radio reported exactly that, the same day, in a story about a Last Week Tonight segment on the company’s conduct in litigation.
The Numbers He Used
His figures were not invented, which is a different thing from being understood.
The $955,000 is a line in the fiscal analysis Palmer Lake commissioned from Economic & Planning Systems: $31.8m in projected 2027 sales, excluding fuel, taxed at the town’s 3%. The water and roadway commitments come from the annexation agreement whose negotiated terms the town released in July 2025, which put Buc-ee’s down for $14,016,552 of water infrastructure and for all roadway work required by the project. Each number is real. Each arrived in that room stripped of whatever sat beside it in the document it came from.
The same EPS report priced what the town would have to add: two police officers at $170,180, six firefighters and paramedics at $559,440, additional public works at $102,200. The negotiated deal returned about a percentage point of sales to Buc-ee’s as an incentive, on the order of $350,000 a year. The town’s own consultant projected municipal spending rising 23.7%, from $4.23m to $5.23m. Mary Scott, a former corporate chief financial officer who is treasurer of the opposition group Tri-Lakes Preservation, worked through the report line by line and put the town’s recurring net benefit at $2,543 a year, before a dollar of capital spending. A figure approaching $1m, set beside a general fund of $3m, sounds transformative. Two and a half thousand dollars does not.
The water and roadway promises were terms of an agreement that was never executed. They lapsed with the application in February, five months before he offered them as benefits the town had spurned. And the roadway promise was never priced: it bound the company to whatever proved “required,” and what is required has never been established. A peer review by the engineering firm Galloway, prepared at the request of Ian Griffis on behalf of a consortium of local landowners, found that neither traffic study modeled volumes on I-25 itself — so no analysis exists of whether the interstate could absorb the merge — that off-ramp queues would reach the gore point at peak hours, that sight lines would likely forbid turning right on red and lengthen those queues further, and that both studies assumed three-quarters or more of the traffic was already passing by, when a Buc-ee’s draws people who would not otherwise be there.
Errors of this kind are usually random. These were not. Every one of them — the gross figure without the costs, the lapsed commitments recited as live, the unpriced interchange, the town recast as a loser — pointed the same way, and the way they pointed was the argument he had come to make: that towns which resist this kind of development get the harm without the money, and that Colorado Springs should therefore annex outward while it can. It is possible to make that many mistakes in one direction by accident. It requires a run of luck.
He was not short of means to check. He sits on the council that serves as the utilities board. He chose the subject. He set the topic a week early. The county had published the answer.
Two days later a letter arrived. Integrity Matters, a Colorado Springs advocacy group registered as a 501(c)(4) and a persistent opponent of the project, wrote to tell Mr Leinweber his statements had been “grossly incorrect,” and copied two dozen reporters, editors and elected officials. Its president, Dana Duggan, disputed the tax figure, the water figure and the interchange figure in turn. The group is not neutral and does not claim to be. On the two points that mattered it was right.
The Recusal Question
Two years earlier, the same three councilmembers had been part of something else.
Colorado Springs councilmembers sit in a quasi-judicial capacity when they decide land-use applications, and the convention before such hearings is that the city attorney’s office polls members to disclose conflicts and private contacts with applicants. On June 25th, 2024, at a hearing on the Arrowswest project, that poll was not conducted. Dave Donelson asked that it be conducted anyway, and noted that members on the dais had taken money from the applicant — $2,500 each, by his count, to Mr Risley, Michelle Talarico and Mr Leinweber. Ms Crow-Iverson had received $2,500 from the same source, which he did not mention. The contribution appears on Mr Leinweber’s schedules as coming from Weidner Properties, of Kirkland, Washington.
The city attorney’s office took the position that campaign donations are excluded from the city’s conflict-of-interest provisions. That may well be a correct reading of the code. It is also the reading under which Colorado Springs, which sets no limit on what an applicant may give a councilmember, asks for no mention of it when the two meet across the dais.
Three days later Mr Donelson held a news conference calling for campaign finance transparency. The following week the council convened a special meeting to censure him. Resolution 60-24 charged him with a breach of decorum — disorderly conduct, violating council rules, and disobeying the president’s direction to stop. Mr Leinweber said Mr Donelson had named him publicly, twice, in “a direct confrontation on the dais in a public fashion without any warning,” and that he should not be questioned about his motives. Mr Risley asked whether he would apologize. Mr Donelson said he had asked three members to recuse themselves as he had done himself in the past, that he was accusing nobody, and that his point was that there might be “an appearance of no impartiality.”
Randy Helms, then council president, asked the body to “show grace and vote no.” He was outvoted. The motion, made by Mr Leinweber and seconded by Mr Risley, carried 6–2: Avila, Crow-Iverson, Henjum, Leinweber, Risley and Talarico for; Donelson and Helms against; O’Malley excused.
A second motion, also Mr Leinweber’s, redistributed the seats Mr Donelson was losing, and passed on the same division, as did a third. Mr Donelson observed that the members voting to strip his assignments already knew which ones they would be taking, and called that its own conflict of interest. Among the reassignments was a nomination of Mr Leinweber to the El Paso County Board of Health.
The Arrowswest hearing resumed a week later. Nobody recused. The project moved forward.
Not everything about the censure was about money: Ms Henjum and Ms Avila voted for it, and neither is near the top of the council in developer receipts. But the giving to the three members who would later convene a forum on civility has a shape to it. In the spring of 2023 each of them accepted $10,000 from the O’Neil Group, the private-equity and real-estate firm of the Colorado Springs investor Kevin O’Neil — Mr Leinweber on February 24th, Ms Crow-Iverson on March 3rd, Mr Risley on March 22nd, all recorded to the same post-office box. Thirty thousand dollars from one firm to the three members elected citywide.
The schedules continue. Mr Leinweber’s largest single entry is $25,000 from Colorado Springs Forward, the business and development-aligned political organization; below it, $2,500 from a Classic Homes vice-president, $1,000 each from the chief executive of Covington Homes and a commercial broker at NAI Highland. Ms Crow-Iverson’s include $5,000 from the Housing and Building Association’s political action committee, $2,500 from a Classic Homes partner living in Monument, $2,000 from Vantage Homes. Mr Risley’s include $2,500 from Norwood Limited and $2,500 more from a development-management entity at the same downtown address, plus $5,000 from a builders’ committee and $750 from the realtors’ PAC.
Mr Donelson’s developer receipts across the same period total $1,050.
Why This Reaches the Tri-Lakes
The council has no vote over the Buc-ee’s parcel. But the parcel sits in unincorporated El Paso County, which means the five commissioners who will decide its classification are the same five who govern unincorporated Monument, Palmer Lake and Woodmoor. Whatever reasoning they adopt about a 74,000-square-foot travel center in a legacy C-1 zone will be available for the next application on the next legacy C-1 parcel, and there are such parcels here.
The council also sits as the board of Colorado Springs Utilities, whose service decisions shape where growth is possible in the northern county, and its planning department is finalizing AnnexCOS, a framework for growth beyond the city’s boundaries. The interchange under discussion is the one Tri-Lakes residents use to get home.
So the question of what Palmer Lake’s experience means is not academic here. It was recast, at a Colorado Springs forum, into an argument for expanding the city northward — and the version that served that argument was the false one.
There is a further reason the account is striking coming from Mr Leinweber. By his own account he has spent more than four decades in outdoor recreation; he joined Angler’s Covey in 1996 and bought it in 1999, and he and his wife Becky built it into a family business and one of the largest fly shops in the country, now largely run by their daughter. In 2015 he founded the Pikes Peak Outdoor Recreation Alliance, with the Colorado Springs Chamber & EDC and Visit Colorado Springs, to strengthen the outdoor recreation industry across the Pikes Peak region. He chairs it, sits on the state Outdoor Recreation Industry Office’s advisory board and on the local Trout Unlimited board.
The parcel he described sits a few miles south of the Greenland Wildlife Overpass — the largest wildlife crossing in North America, per the state transportation department, finished in December 2025 at a cost of about $15m — and south of the conserved Greenland Ranch, across the line in Douglas County. In her letter Ms Duggan put the point to him directly: “Since your business profits from our open spaces, I’m sure you have heard of the Greenland Ranch.”
That is an appeal to consistency, not an allegation of profit. An outfitter’s trade depends on open country and public water, which argues for scrutinizing a travel center on Monument Hill rather than waving it through. His record on open space is long and substantial, and that is what makes the errors harder to excuse rather than easier. Of everyone in that room, he had the least reason to be casual about what is happening on Monument Hill.
Facilitation Is Not Verification
Braver Angels is a national nonprofit whose depolarization work dates to 2016, when the Institute for American Values wound down its think-tank operations to take it up. One of its directors, Glenn T. Stanton, is also director of global family formation studies at Focus on the Family, headquartered in Colorado Springs.
Reclaiming Civility, the local partner, describes itself as a mission-driven company selling training and workshops; the Chamber & EDC held a ribbon-cutting for its launch in 2025. It was founded by Lori Leander and Lisa Brandt, and Ms Leander facilitated a table on the 27th.
Neither organization undertook to check anything anyone said, and neither claimed it would. That is not a criticism of them. It is the point. Braver Angels asks participants to speak from personal experience and to disagree accurately, and its method has no mechanism for establishing whether a factual claim is accurate. Put a sitting officeholder in that format and the format supplies him with an audience, a moderator, city staff and the appearance of a fair hearing, and supplies the audience with no means of checking a word of it.
There was one other assurance offered that evening. A Colorado Springs Utilities expert told the room her team had evaluated roughly 150 large-user prospects this year and taken four to the next stage of paid study. Mr Leinweber restated it: “Only four of them even kind of passed. So we’re telling lots of things no.” Four advancing to further study is not 146 refusals — prospects abandon sites, choose other cities, stop returning calls. A reassurance about water had been sharpened, in the retelling, into something the utility had not said.
Then he closed on strategy.
“We can’t divulge all the deals all the time because, you know, we have to kind of like think strategically and then roll out a really good plan.”
David Leinweber, councilmember at large, at a town hall on civility and polarization, July 27th, 2026
What Is Still Missing
Palmer Lake commissioned three studies to inform the decision it was being asked to make: the fiscal analysis from Economic & Planning Systems, a traffic study from Stolfus & Associates and a water resource study from GMS, Inc. None of the three can now be downloaded from the town’s website.
The fiscal study was posted at townofpalmerlake.com, on a page recording that a corrected version followed the original and that a revised report was issued on May 21st, 2025 — a page that promised the reports would continue to be reposted for public viewing. As of July 29th, 2026, that page and that file both return the town’s error message, and a search of the town’s own document center for “fiscal impact” returns nothing but the community master plan. The study survives in the record as Addendum 5-FIA, an attachment to the September 3rd, 2025 planning commission agenda, which the agenda host also failed to produce. Every figure in this article that originates in that report therefore reaches readers secondhand. The town clerk can say when the reports came down, and why.
Three other documents would close questions this article has had to leave open. The annexation white paper, held by the town, is where the police and fire costs the town’s own consultant had quantified appear as zero, against a note that the board of trustees had decided no new costs would be incurred — a determination that appears nowhere in the public record. The Kimley-Horn study of November 2024, prepared for the developer’s engineers, and the Stolfus study of February 2025, prepared for the town, are between them the source of every vehicle count anyone has quoted in this dispute, including the counts that changed.
Two to One
Palmer Lake spent two years on this. It lost a mayor, recalled two trustees, replaced its attorney, and voted better than two to one to take annexation out of its own board’s hands. Then Buc-ee’s withdrew, and went to the county to ask whether a building the size of a supermarket, with more than a hundred fueling positions, might be a convenience store. The question is open. The five commissioners who will answer it also govern the unincorporated Tri-Lakes. They have not set a hearing date.
None of that is what a room in Colorado Springs heard on July 27th. It heard that a town said no and was steamrolled regardless — the useful version, if the case being made is that resistance is pointless and the city should annex outward while it can.
The evening’s stated purpose was to teach people to disagree accurately. The three officeholders who convened it had, two years before, censured the one colleague who asked whether developer money ought to be disclosed before they ruled on a developer’s application. He had taken $1,050 from developers. They had taken $10,000 apiece from a single firm. He lost his committees; they distributed them among themselves.
All three are on the ballot in April.
Sources & further reading
The Independent’s own coverage: Buc-ee’s tries the back door · Eighty-plus objections to Buc-ee’s, filed “for reference only” · Is a Buc-ee’s a “convenience store”? The county says it cannot tell · Buc-ee’s appeals — and the question lands with the commissioners · Call It a Truck Stop
City record: Minutes of the special Colorado Springs City Council meeting of July 2nd, 2024, and Resolution 60-24 · Colorado Springs City Clerk, campaign finance filings
County record: El Paso County planning and development, Buc-ee’s information page · file ADM264 · file APP261
Palmer Lake: September 9th, 2025 special election results · negotiated annexation terms · Town of Palmer Lake
Engineering and fiscal analysis: Galloway, “Palmer Lake Buc-ee’s TIS Review,” June 12th, 2025 · Mary Scott’s line-by-line analysis of the EPS fiscal impact report · Integrity Matters, “Beaver Math”
Entities: Braver Angels · Reclaiming Civility · Integrity Matters · Tri-Lakes Preservation · Pikes Peak Outdoor Recreation Alliance
Methodology
Quotations from the July 27th forum come from a recording made by Springs Taxpayers United and published to YouTube. The working transcript is machine-generated and misrenders several proper names; quotations used here were checked against the recording and names corrected against the city’s roster.
The censure is reported from the official minutes of the special city council meeting of July 2nd, 2024, and from Resolution 60-24. Quotations in that passage are as recorded in the minutes.
Individual campaign contributions are direct contributions to candidates’ own committees, itemized on A-1 statements filed with the Colorado Springs city clerk in 2023 and read by this newspaper in a transcription compiled from those filings by Integrity Matters. Colorado Springs sets no limit on the size of a contribution to a municipal candidate. No aggregate total or ranking of councilmembers appears here. Integrity Matters publishes such totals, but they combine direct contributions with independent expenditures by outside committees — money a candidate neither receives nor controls — and the group’s own summary reports several members as having received more than 100% of their donations from developer and dark-money sources, which cannot be. Independent expenditures are a legitimate subject and will be reported separately once quantified.
Fiscal figures originating in the Economic & Planning Systems report reach this newspaper through a line-by-line analysis of it prepared by Mary Scott and published by Integrity Matters, citing the report page by page. The report was not retrievable from the town when this article was prepared; this newspaper has not read it directly or reproduced Ms Scott’s arithmetic. The $2,543 figure is hers. Her working papers give two marginally different totals elsewhere and Integrity Matters’ correspondence a third; all fall within about $40, and the figure used is the one Integrity Matters publishes.
Palmer Lake election results are the unofficial tallies reported after the September 9th, 2025 special election, before certification.
Integrity Matters and Tri-Lakes Preservation are interested parties and are attributed as such. Where this newspaper could not substantiate a claim — including a widely repeated figure of 70% public opposition, which traces to a social-media audience poll rather than a survey, and a diverging-diamond interchange said to cost $50m, which appears in no engineering document reviewed here — it is not reported as fact.