On Sept. 17, the Colorado Springs City Council put off deciding Project Taurus, a data center on the former Intel campus off Garden of the Gods Road, until April 13, 2027. That is one week after the city election, when the mayor’s office and the council’s three at-large seats are on the ballot. All three at-large members voted for the delay. The next day, the developer, Raeden, said it was weighing “whether or not this is the right partnership” for the company. The decision itself was made in June by the city’s planning staff, under a rule that sends such changes back to whichever body approved “the original.” In April, seven weeks before staff signed, the developer’s lobbyist wrote that the project would “almost certainly be approved administratively.” The city’s own files contain a competing answer to which approval counts as the original. In unincorporated El Paso County, the code has no category for a data center at all.
The council voted 7-2 to postpone, on a motion by Roland Rainey Jr. seconded by Brian Risley. The date it chose falls a week after the city’s general municipal election on April 6, 2027. At that election voters will choose a mayor and fill the council’s three at-large seats. Those seats are held by Council President Lynette Crow-Iverson, President Pro Tem Risley and David Leinweber. All three voted to postpone. New members are typically sworn in a week after April 13, the Gazette reported. If the city follows its usual swearing-in schedule, the Project Taurus vote would come after voters choose the officeholders but before the winners take office.
Dave Donelson moved to decide on March 5 instead, before the election. The amendment failed 3-6. Only Donelson, Kimberly Gold and Nancy Henjum voted for it, and Gold and Henjum were the two votes against the postponement itself. Both said they were ready to vote that night and would have voted against the project, according to the Gazette. Donelson told the paper that the vote would now happen “conveniently” one week after the election.
Rainey gave the reason for the delay when he proposed it. “Accountability, rules and standards,” he said, according to the Gazette. “They want some type of standards, not just for this particular applicant but for data centers in general.” Council members described the postponement as giving Raeden, the developer, time to negotiate a large-load contract with Colorado Springs Utilities, and giving the city time to begin drafting rules for data centers.
Raeden responded the next day. In a statement posted on its website on Sept. 18, the company said parts of the hearing had been disrupted by conduct that “at times crossed the line from passionate disagreement into threats and intimidation.” It said it would use the extra time “to continue engaging with the community and City to answer outstanding questions, while carefully evaluating whether or not this is the right partnership for RAEDEN.” Four people were arrested during the meeting, according to KRDO and the Gazette.
The staff decision had been forecast in April. On April 21, John Suthers, a former Colorado Springs mayor who is lobbying for Raeden through the firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, wrote to a colleague: “Despite public opposition for all kinds of bizarre reasons it will almost certainly be approved administratively.” He forwarded the email chain that day to the city’s acting city attorney, as part of a request that the city waive a conflict of interest (see “One firm, two clients,” below). Staff approved the plan administratively seven weeks later.
The appeals before the council came from residents who had already lost once, before the Planning Commission on July 23. The lead appeal was filed by Integrity Matters, a Colorado Springs nonprofit watchdog group, and residents of the Chelsea Glen neighborhood nearest the site, the Gazette reported. The commission voted 6-2, with one member absent, to uphold the approval. It added four conditions of its own.
The appeals raised several grounds, among them noise, the plan’s consistency and the project’s effect on neighbors. One of them was who had the authority to sign the approval. On June 10, the city’s Land Use Review Division approved Raeden’s plan for 30 generators and 36 chillers on 21.96 acres at 1565 High Tech Way. The application was classified as a “Major Modification” of an existing development plan. It was never referred to the Planning Commission. The applicant held a Rapid Response certificate from the city’s Economic Development Department. Staff slides say the designation encourages agencies to prioritize review and cut the first review cycle from four weeks to three, and that it otherwise does not change administrative procedures. The applicant’s own project statement, filed May 27, is inconsistent about the size of what it proposed. Its text describes a new chiller yard of 66,150 square feet and a net reduction in floor area of 19,428 square feet. The table on the same page lists the chiller yard at 110,267 square feet, and a later section counts an increase of 24,689 square feet. In a memo dated June 15, planning director Kevin Walker and planning manager Daniel Sexton wrote that the department “determined that the application did not need to be referred to the City’s Planning Commission for final action.” City code allows that. Section 7.5.515.E.1 lets staff approve a development plan “or refer to the Planning Commission if found necessary.”
A different section decides who may approve a change of this kind. Section 7.5.516.B.2 of the city’s Unified Development Code reads: “A Major Modification to the permit or approval may only be approved by the decision-making body that approved the original permit or approval, using the same procedure used for the original.”
The case turns on which approval counts as the original.
Two answers, both in the city’s files
Staff’s answer came at the July 23 hearing. According to the commission’s adopted minutes, Sexton said the department “has consistently interpreted that provision to look at the last approval, which, in this case, was administrative.” He identified that approval as file AR DP 00-00177, a development plan approved in April 2000. The “AR” stands for administrative review. The applicant’s lawyer, Caitlin Quander of Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, made the same argument in a July 16 letter. The plan “was approved administratively,” she wrote, “as evidenced by the ‘AR’ designation.”
Raeden’s own statement after the council hearing described the project as “the adaptive reuse of a site already zoned for a data center in a light industrial corridor.”
Sexton also told the commission that “in 1995 a special permit was issued by the City Council,” but that the action “does not represent the final entitlement that governs the property’s current use or operation.”
That 1995 action is now available in full. The city’s Land Development Review Search lists it as file CPC CP 85-178-A1(95), “APRV CC ON 08/08/95.” On Aug. 8, 1995, the council had six related requests before it from United Technologies Microelectronics Corp.:
- an amendment to the site’s concept plan;
- three variances allowing buildings and a nitrogen tower 95 feet high, where 45 was the limit;
- two variances extending the life of the concept plan and the variances to eight years.
The approved concept plan carries a red stamp: “APPROVED AUG 08 1995 BY CITY COUNCIL.” The staff report told the council that “the nearest residential uses are hundreds of feet away.” It also said the applicant had promised “particular attention” to “screening from existing and proposed future residents to the south.”
The 2000 file describes itself differently from the way it was described this summer. The application form, signed by the reviewing planner on March 17, 2000, is typed “Major Amendment to Approved Development Plan.” It names the plans it amends: the council’s 1995 concept plan and a 1996 staff-approved development plan. A Feb. 14, 2000 letter from the applicant’s planners, NES Inc., is in the city’s file. It says Intel was “seeking to amend the existing Development Plan.” It adds that “based on our review of the approved Concept Plan, the proposed revision is not a significant change and only requires an amendment to the Development Plan.” The file number itself reads AR DPA, for development plan amendment, in the city’s index and on the file stamp. Senior planner James Mayerl approved it on April 25, 2000.
Both readings have support in the record. The development plans in the city’s index from 1996 on were all approved by staff, which supports the city’s position. The concept plan, which the 2000 plan described itself as amending, was approved by the council, which supports the appellants’ position. The city replaced its concept-plan system when the Unified Development Code took effect in 2023. The code still recognizes older concept and master plans: under section 7.5.516.F.2, amendments to them are treated as amendments to land-use plans.
City staff formally treated the April 2000 administrative plan as the original approval. The Planning Commission upheld the resulting approval. But, as staff told the council on Sept. 17, the commission “did not provide further guidance as to what was meant by the ‘original permit or approval’ phrase.” The 1995 and 2000 records leave a competing argument in the file, and neither the commission nor a court has expressly resolved it.
The answer carries a cost. The June 11 approval letter says no citywide police and fire impact fees are required for the modification. The reason it gives is that the data center building “was approved before the effective date of CDI through AR DPA 00-00177 and related modifications.” The 2000 approval that let staff decide the case without a hearing is also the basis on which the city waived those fees.
When the record went online
Much of the paper behind that argument became public only after staff had decided. The city’s online index records when each scan was posted.
| Posted | Record |
|---|---|
| Dec. 8, 2015 | 1996 development plan |
| Jan. 15, 2016 | 1995 concept plan, council-stamped (scan) |
| Feb. 18, 2026 | 2000 plan drawings |
| June 10, 2026 | Staff approves Project Taurus |
| June 23, 2026 | 1995 council agenda packet and staff report (306 pages) |
| July 17, 2026 | 2000 Intel height-variance application, staff report and decision, and the NES letter |
| July 23, 2026 | Planning Commission upholds approval |
| July 29, 2026 | 2000 decision letter and application form |
| Aug. 5 and 7, 2026 | 2000 review correspondence; 1979–1999 plans and amendments |
| Aug. 31, 2026 | 1995 concept plan (color) |
The index records when files were posted, not why. An index date is not the date a record came into existence. The city presumably held these files on paper throughout. The council-stamped concept plan had been online since 2016. But the 1995 staff report, the 2000 application and the applicant’s 2000 letter went online weeks after staff had signed. The 2000 decision letter and application were posted six days after the Planning Commission hearing.
What the hearings added
The Planning Commission did not overturn staff, but it did change the approval. Its four conditions were:
- public reporting of utility use for 10 years;
- a correction to one equipment sheet;
- monitoring of low-frequency sound in dB(C) alongside the A-weighted readings the city’s noise code uses;
- a 50-megawatt cap, with any increase requiring a hearing before the commission itself.
The low-frequency condition addressed a gap staff had acknowledged. Asked whether the noise study had to cover low frequencies, Walker said, as the minutes record it, that staff “did not require that information, because even if it was provided, there is nothing they can do about it.” He also told the commission the city would not recommend limits in C-weighted decibels, because no reliable standard links them to health effects.
Staff’s approval carried no such ceiling. Asked at the hearing whether a future expansion would come back for a public hearing, Walker said that “can be based on a number of factors evaluated at time of application processing.” The commission wrote the answer in.
Some commissioners said the code had not kept up. Commissioner Sheva Willoughby, who voted against the approval, said staff “may have had limited discretion to deny it,” and that the appeal let “a public decision making body” consider “whether the code’s terminology and review framework have kept pace.” Vice Chair Andrea Slattery, who voted to uphold it, said data centers “should be defined as their own land use category, potentially with multiple tiers.”
Three parts of the record bear on how much the hearing process could have added:
- Noise review. The city hired Hankard Environmental to check the applicant’s noise study. On May 14, Michael Hankard annotated the May 12 version of the study 17 times. Beside its equipment data he wrote: “This data needs to be provided! They should list exactly what sound power levels were used, and exactly where they were obtained from. Otherwise, a reviewer such as myself has no idea what they are doing.” The annotated copy is not among the documents in the city’s online file for the project. It reached the council’s record as an exhibit filed by Integrity Matters. On May 29 the applicant issued a further revision, Revision C. Hankard’s own model followed in a three-page letter to the city on June 1. The letter says it compared his results with the DLAA report “revised 05/12/2026,” the version he had annotated, and found “very good agreement.” For site layout it used the April 22 second submittal. The records reviewed for this article do not show that Hankard independently reviewed Revision C. Staff approved on June 10. Hankard is also the city’s sound consultant at the Ford Amphitheater, another contested noise case. It measured three concerts there for the city in October 2024. Its report, which the city published that November, described a low-frequency exceedance at one show as “an imperceptible increase” and not material to residents’ complaints, as The Independent reported in August.
- Enforcement. The noise, lighting and screening obligations sit in a development agreement signed July 16. It carries a $1 million financial assurance. Section 8 of the agreement reserves enforcement “strictly” to the city and Raeden. Neighbors are not parties and cannot enforce it.
- Power. Asked at the hearing where a 300-megawatt figure had come from, Bryan English of Colorado Springs Utilities said it appeared in an initial plan set shared at a kickoff meeting late last year, when the project received its Rapid Response designation. He said projected demand fell as the utility assessed the transmission and distribution capacity serving the site. Another utilities manager, Jared Miller, told the commission the customer “has consistently been evaluated as a 50 megawatt user,” according to the minutes. At the council meeting, utilities chief executive Travas Deal said, as Colorado Public Radio reported, “our largest data center customer is right around six megawatts currently.”
The address also has a history of noise complaints. In 2019 and 2020, under a previous owner, the city handled 49 shipping containers stacked on the property “for on-site noise mitigation” as a minor staff-level amendment. City review letters record that the containers had “already toppled over during a wind storms.” The letters also refer to “citizen letters of opposition” and threaten further enforcement if deadlines were missed. The amendment was approved in July 2020. The city’s letters do not say what produced the noise.
One firm, two clients
The applicant’s law firm also works for the city. Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck is Colorado Springs’ state and federal lobbyist, and it also represented Raeden in the land-use application and in building support for the project. The firm asked the city to waive the conflict, and the city agreed. The record of that exchange is in city emails released under the Colorado Open Records Act. Integrity Matters filed them with the Planning Commission, and they now sit in the council’s appeal file.
On April 21, John Suthers, a former Colorado Springs mayor who works at the firm, asked acting City Attorney Marc Smith to waive “any actual or perceived conflict.” The firm’s formal waiver language describes the data center as a matter “in which the City is involved as an adverse party.” Smith pointed to the council rule that generally requires councilmembers to refrain from receiving information outside the hearing process on pending quasi-judicial applications. He asked: “Are these truly lobbying activities or do they constitute legal services to process the applications?” On April 28 he replied: “The City hereby consents to the waiver with the limitations regarding adverse litigation.” The chain Suthers forwarded to Smith that day included his note predicting administrative approval, quoted above.
The same records show the firm’s land-use lawyer, Caitlin Quander, asking the new city attorney on June 3 for a call on “timeline and a few procedural questions.” After the approval, she sent an agenda for a June 26 meeting with the city attorney, Walker and Sexton. It asked whether the city was confirming that each appellant met the standing rules (“we have a lot of out of town involvement here”). Walker sent her the city’s draft hearing ground rules that day. In their July 23 objection, the appellants said they were not party to those exchanges.
Mayor Yemi Mobolade told KRDO, which obtained the correspondence independently, that the city uses Brownstein “exclusively for state and federal lobbying efforts” and followed established protocols in granting the waiver. The firm told the station it obtained the necessary waivers and uses separate teams for each client. Jason Green, Raeden’s president, said the company had “received zero special treatment or concessions.”
The county has no category for it
Project Taurus is inside Colorado Springs. Large parts of northern El Paso County are unincorporated. Woodmoor, Gleneagle and Black Forest are governed by the county’s Land Development Code, and there the gap is wider.
The code does not list a data center as a use. It is not in Table 5-1, the table of principal uses, and it is not among the code’s definitions. Neither does the county’s rewrite: the consolidated draft now posted for public comment, which is open through Oct. 16, has no data-center row in its use tables and no definition. When a proposal matches no listed use, section 5.1.6 says the planning director “is authorized to classify any unlisted use based on similar uses.” The director’s written determination, under section 5.3.6, “shall have the same effect as any provision of this Code.”
This is the procedure Buc-ee’s used. The company asked planning director Meggan Herington to classify its proposed store. She did not make a determination. Buc-ee’s appealed, and on Aug. 27 the county commissioners granted its appeal 4-1. The county’s release that day said the next step, the site development plan, “is an administrative review and approval process.” That plan “does not return to the Board of County Commissioners,” the release said, and “there is no appeal of that administrative approval to the Board.” Carrie Geitner, who chairs the board, defended the mechanism that day, as reported by CPR. “A previous board,” she said, “created a pathway to get a similar (use), because they knew that they didn’t know everything.”
Colorado Springs and El Paso County differ most over who may appeal. In the city, owners and tenants within 1,000 feet, or within three miles if they commented, may appeal a staff decision. That is how Project Taurus reached the Planning Commission and then the council. The county’s page on Buc-ee’s is explicit: “The administrative determination does not require notification to adjacent property owners.” The code defines an aggrieved party as the owner of the property in question. Neighbors are included only where notice to them was required. Under the county code, the neighbors who took Project Taurus to two public hearings would ordinarily not qualify to appeal a use determination. That determination resolves only how the use is classified. Later development and construction approvals would still be required. But in the Buc-ee’s case the county has said the next of those approvals, the site development plan, is administrative, with no appeal to the commissioners.
The county does have a hearing route for special uses, but the director controls it. Under section 5.3.2(H), special uses “may be acted upon by the PCD Director,” who “in his sole discretion, is authorized to elevate” an application to a public hearing.
Other counties have written rules. Weld County approved a data center in an existing industrial building on Sept. 9 through a use-by-special-review process: a public hearing before its planning commission, which voted 7-0, and another before its commissioners, who voted 5-0. Its rules set a 65 dB(C) limit at the property line.
Towns have paused
Monument’s council voted 6-0 on July 20 for a six-month moratorium, Ordinance 18-2026, on permits and applications involving data centers. Palmer Lake’s trustees had a six-month moratorium, Resolution 31-2026, on their Sept. 10 agenda. As of Sept. 18 the town had not posted minutes of that meeting. The county has taken neither step. Its code rewrite has no data-center use, and its procedures chapter, which will say who decides and who may appeal, reads in the current draft: “To be drafted in Module 3: Administration and Procedures.”
When the Colorado Springs council takes up Project Taurus on April 13, a week after its election, it will be deciding a question its own staff answered in June. Under the county’s current code, a planning director could classify an unlisted data-center use administratively, and neighbors ordinarily would not qualify to appeal that classification. The rewrite would send unlisted uses to an interpretation procedure in a chapter that has not yet been written.
Sources & further reading
The Independent’s own coverage: What the Garden of the Gods Data-Center Fight Means for the Tri-Lakes (the June explainer) · Monument Town Council, July 20, 2026 (the moratorium vote) · Commissioners Grant Buc-ee’s Appeal, 4-1 (the use-determination appeal) · El Paso County Is Rewriting the Rules the Buc-ee’s Fight Turned On (the code rewrite) · Vertex Consulting Files Its Rezonings With the Department It Came From (county planning practice) · At the Ford Amphitheater, the Complaints Track the Wind (Hankard’s work for the city at the Ford Amphitheater)
City of Colorado Springs, Project Taurus: Project file DEPN-26-0039 (Accela): approval letters, staff decision memo, project statement, development agreement, noise studies and the Hankard letter · Council appeal file (Legistar): staff presentation, Planning Commission record, appellants’ exhibits and vote records · City Code §§ 7.5.515–7.5.516
City of Colorado Springs, historical file: City Council agenda packet, Aug. 8, 1995 · UTMC concept plan, approved by City Council Aug. 8, 1995 (color) · same plan, scan posted 2016 · AR DPA 00-00177 application, 2000 · decision letter, April 25, 2000 · review file, 2000 · NES Inc. letter, Feb. 14, 2000 · HO NV 00-00141 staff report · and record of decision, Nov. 1, 2000 · AR DPA 00-00177-A8MN19 review letters, Dec. 18, 2019 · and April 7, 2020 · approval, July 20, 2020
City elections and council: City Elections page · Get to Know Your Councilmembers
El Paso County: Land Development Code, Chapter 5 (Table 5-1, §§ 5.1.6, 5.3.2, 5.3.6) · Land Development Code rewrite, Modules 1 & 2 consolidated draft · County release on the Buc-ee’s appeal, Aug. 27, 2026 · County Buc-ee’s update page · 2026 board chair and vice chair
Other reporting and records: Raeden statement, Sept. 18, 2026 · The Gazette, Sept. 17, 2026 · The Gazette, Sept. 18, 2026 · KRDO, Sept. 18, 2026 · KRDO, Sept. 16, 2026 (Brownstein conflict waiver) · Colorado Public Radio, Sept. 17, 2026 · Colorado Public Radio, Aug. 27, 2026 · Weld County release, Sept. 10, 2026 · City of Colorado Springs GIS (parcels, buildings, streets), used for the site map · Town of Palmer Lake, Sept. 10, 2026 meeting files · Integrity Matters, Project Taurus appeal page (the lead appellant)
Methodology
The account of the 1995 and 2000 approvals comes from records retrieved on Sept. 18, 2026 from the City of Colorado Springs’ Land Development Review Search and from the project’s Accela file, not from any party to the appeal:
- The 306-page 1995 council packet was downloaded three times by independent routes, and the copies matched.
- The pages concerning the site were read in full. The remaining pages concern other agenda items, and a keyword search of all 306 pages found no other reference to the site.
- Posting dates are the dates in the city’s document index. They show when a record went online, not when the city first held it.
The annotated noise study was compared page by page with the city’s own copy of the same version, dated May 12, 2026. The two copies’ text is identical.
Parts of the Planning Commission minutes were not read. Of the 212,712 characters of text, 77,440 characters of public comment in support of the appeal were not read, and nothing in this article relies on that span.
The Brownstein correspondence was read in full as filed by the appellants (62 of 62 pages, including redacted meeting invitations). The same emails appear in the appellants’ supplements in the council’s appeal file, and KRDO reported obtaining the correspondence separately. The Independent did not obtain them directly from the city.
The site map was drawn from the city’s own GIS layers for lot lines, building footprints and streets. Lot 4 measures 21.93 acres on the city’s parcel layer, against the 21.96 acres the city lists for the site. The generator and mechanical yards were traced from the site plan in the city’s Sept. 17 presentation, which was fitted to the city’s lot lines and building footprints to within about 3 feet. As a check, the plan’s printed 350.9-foot distance from the chiller-yard sound wall to the residential lot line measures 347.7 feet on the city’s parcel layer. The roughly 370-foot distance to the nearest house is our measurement from the traced yard to the nearest house footprint on a residentially zoned lot.
The county’s consolidated code draft (516 pages) was read through its use tables, its definitions and its procedures chapter; the absence of a data-center use is from that reading, not from a keyword search alone. Posting dates in the table were captured twice, by two independent routes, and matched.
The Independent did not find the council’s minutes of Aug. 8, 1995 in the city’s online file. That is a statement about the online index, not about the City Clerk’s records.
