Craig Dossey ran El Paso County’s planning department for seven years. Nina Ruiz was his planning manager. Both now work at Vertex Consulting Services, the applicant of record on eight rezoning files open at the county today — two of which the Board of County Commissioners takes up on September 24. The county’s own working files show that in 2019 the provisions setting out what that department’s director may decide were written into the code under their accounts, and that two of the planners now managing the firm’s applications worked in the department alongside them.
On June 18, at a Planning Commission hearing on a rezoning at Highway 83 and Walker Road, a Monument-area resident named Mary Louise Fiddler put a question to the commissioners. The adopted minutes record it plainly: she questioned “whether the applicant’s previous involvement in developing County planning documents created a conflict of interest,” and encouraged the commission “to preserve public confidence in the planning process.”
The applicant’s representative that day was Vertex Consulting Services. The firm was formed on August 15, 2022. Its registered agent is Craig Allen Dossey, who until that year was Executive Director of the El Paso County Planning and Community Development Department, and who is listed on the firm’s own website as its president. Nina Ruiz — who appears in the county’s 2026 filings as Nina Dossey, and on the firm’s website as a senior executive consultant — was the department’s planning manager.
The Independent went to look at what the record shows. Some of what it shows is less than has been suggested. Some of it is more.
What the record does not support
The most common version of this story is that Dossey wrote the code he now argues. That is not what the documents say, and it should be set aside first.
The El Paso County Land Development Code was adopted on October 12, 2006, nine years before Dossey became Executive Director. Section 5.3.5, “Map Amendment (Rezoning)” — the section every Vertex application is written against by name — has not changed in substance in at least thirteen years. The Independent compared the county’s own archived Chapter 5 from August 2014, whose footer reads “Revision (2) 04/02/2007 thru 02/08/2013,” against the code as it stands today. The four criteria the Planning Commission and the Board apply to every rezoning are word for word identical. The only difference in the whole section is that the 2014 text says “DSD Director” and the current text says “PCD Director,” reflecting a change in the department’s name.
Section 5.3.6, the similar-use provision the Board invoked in August 2026 to grant Buc-ee’s its appeal, is likewise unchanged across the same period.
The county’s plan is a similar case. Your El Paso County Master Plan, adopted in 2021, was prepared with the planning consultancy Houseal Lavigne; the minutes of both adoption hearings record John Houseal giving the consultant presentation. The county’s 2018 Water Master Plan was prepared by Forsgren Associates. Dossey appears in that plan as county staff.
What the record does show
In the spring of 2019 the department drafted an amendment to the Land Development Code called LDC-19-007. It went to the Planning Commission on August 20 and to the Board on August 27, and was adopted as Resolution 19-329. The staff report carries two names on its FROM line: Kari Parsons, Planner III, and Craig Dossey, Executive Director.
The amendment implemented House Bill 19-1274, which allowed county boards to delegate final-plat approval to administrative officials. In the staff report’s own words, the changes were “intended to implement this allowance under State Statute by authorizing the Executive Director of the Planning and Community Development Department to approv[e] final plats.”
The county publishes the working documents behind that amendment on its development-review portal, and the Chapter 2 file is a Word document with its revision history intact. Word stamps each insertion and deletion with the user account that made it and the date. The Chapter 2 file carries fifty-five such marks: thirty-one from Nina Ruiz’s account, sixteen from Kari Parsons’s, eight from Craig Dossey’s. Chapter 2 is the chapter listing what the planning director may do, and it was amended as follows:
- A new subsection (11), “Approve Final Plats”: “The PCD Director may administratively approve final plats, vacations, replats, and final plat amendments pursuant to the requirements and procedures of this Code.” The operative sentence was inserted by Ruiz’s account on May 13, 2019. Dossey’s account edited the same sentence on June 14, pluralizing “plat” and adding “and final plat.” Parsons’s account added the heading and the words “vacations, replats” on June 25.
- Subsection (8), on administrative decisions, was expanded to cover “administrative decisions and determinations.” The two added words came from Ruiz’s account on May 13.
- A new subsection (15), “Other Administrative Authorities”: “The PCD Director has the authority to complete all other actions as necessary to carry out the intent of this Code.” Inserted in full by Ruiz’s account, May 13, and renumbered by Parsons’s account in June.
Seven years later, in August 2026, the Board granted an appeal by Buc-ee’s EPCO, LLC — prepared and filed by Vertex — against the Executive Director’s determination that it was unclear whether the use met the code’s convenience-store definition. The Board resolved that the use “is an allowed use in the C-1 zone district.” That is the appeal machinery for administrative decisions and determinations, the phrase the 2019 amendment expanded. It is a sequence of dated facts; the county’s resolution does not say which subsection the original determination was issued under, and the Independent does not assert one.
The same 2019 amendment changed the county’s subdivision water-supply standards. The Chapter 8 working file carries 1,172 tracked insertions and deletions, made between January 28 and June 25, 2019 — 621 from Kari Parsons’s account, 219 from Lori Seago’s, 126 from Gabe Sevigny’s, 110 from Craig Dossey’s, and 96 from an account named DSDRecording, which is not an individual’s name. Inside that file:
- The distance within which a shallow-alluvial water sample may be taken was changed from 500 feet to half a mile, an increase of roughly five times in radius. That edit was made by Parsons’s account.
- The requirement that the sample be taken from the closest up-gradient well was changed from “shall” to “should,” by the DSDRecording account.
- The requirement that future water quality “shall meet or exceed” the county’s standards became “should,” struck by Parsons’s account and replaced by DSDRecording’s.
- A presumption that residential subdivisions of four lots or fewer met the water-quality standards was deleted, by Parsons’s account. That change cuts the other way.
- A two-year expiry was added to water testing. Dossey’s account inserted the word “only” into that sentence and the clause allowing the expiry date to be extended if the county health department approves.
Dossey’s account made fourteen of the tracked edits inside the paragraph that carries the sampling change, none of them the change itself. On the record of the file, the water-supply softenings were written by the department’s planner and by a departmental recording account, not by the two people who went on to found the firm.
The staff report described the Section 8.4.7 changes to the Planning Commission as being intended “to be consistent with El Paso County Board of Health (2018) regulations” and “to expressly identify the report requirements for a water resource report.” It does not mention the sampling distance or either change from “shall” to “should.” The full redline was attached to the packet the commissioners received.
Twelve agencies returned twenty-five comments on the amendment. The Colorado Division of Water Resources — the State Engineer’s office — wrote: “The Division of Water Resources has no comments on the proposed changes.” Colorado Springs Utilities, whose referral category covers water resources, recommended approval with no comments. So did the county’s own Environmental Division. No reviewing agency raised the sampling change.
The plan, and how it is argued
On May 5 and May 26, 2021, the Planning Commission held special hearings on Your El Paso County Master Plan. Dossey opened both and answered most of the department’s substantive questions.
Residents of Black Forest used those hearings to ask for a hard five-acre floor on lot sizes in the timbered areas. Terry Stokka told the commission that “the 2.5-acre lot size changes the zoning from RR-5 to RR-2.5” and that “the Plan strips the Black Forest of the last protection it had to densities.”
Dossey argued against it. “Drawing rigid boundaries is a very short-sighted thing to do,” he said. “The concept of this plan is to provide flexibility based upon compatibility. Stringent inflexible standards could lead to a worse development than having a quality development plan.” The five-acre language was not added. The plan was adopted 8–0.
Five years on, Vertex has four open rezoning files that convert RR-5 land to RR-2.5 — Needles Highway 83, Timbers of Black Forest, Siesta Grove and Sundance West — and a fifth, Iron Ridge, that the Board approved in July and the county closed on August 18. All of them are argued through the master plan: through its placetypes, its priority development areas and its areas of change.
At the June 2026 Walker Road hearing, Dossey told commissioners that “the Master Plan specifically identifies the area as appropriate for multi-family and attached residential uses,” and that requiring higher-density uses “to be located only adjacent to existing multi-family development would make implementation of the Master Plan’s housing objectives impractical.”
At the September 3, 2026 hearing on Needles Highway 83, a commissioner asked how the county weighs the cumulative effect of one rezoning after another. The county planner, Joe Letke, answered that “cumulative growth is considered through the Master Plan,” that the property sits “within a priority development area where large-lot residential development at approximately 2.5 acres is anticipated,” and that for the broader area “staff relies on whether the application is in general conformance with the recommendations of the Master Plan.”
That is ordinary advocacy, and it is being done by the official under whose directorship the plan was produced.
How much work the firm does here
The county’s Planning Projects Dashboard, launched this year, publishes every approved and active project in unincorporated El Paso County back to 2023 — 463 of them. On forty, the applicant of record is Vertex Consulting Services or one of its principals.
They are not all rezonings. The forty include subdivision plats, site development plans, variances of use, a minor subdivision and a Board of Adjustment variance, alongside thirteen rezonings.
The dashboard is also incomplete. It does not reach back to 2022, when the firm was formed, and it is missing five Vertex rezonings that sit on the county’s own active-project list — among them both files the Board votes on next week. Working from that active list and the development-review portal instead, the Independent has confirmed forty-five Vertex files one by one, of which eighteen are open today. The true figure is higher still.
The planners on the other side of the counter
Your El Paso County Master Plan names the department that produced it. The acknowledgements page reads: “Planning & Community Development — Craig Dossey, Executive Director; Mark Gebhart, Deputy Director; Nina Ruiz, Planning Manager; Kari Parsons, Planner III; John Green, Planner II; Ryan Howser, Planner II; Sophie Kiepe, Planner I; Tracey Garcia, Executive Assistant.” The staff-present line in the May 26, 2021 Planning Commission minutes lists the same names.
Two of those planners now manage Vertex files for the county. Of the forty Vertex-linked applications on the dashboard, Kari Parsons is the county project manager of record on seven and Ryan Howser on five — nearly a third between them. Across all forty-five files the Independent has confirmed, Parsons has ten. Parsons is also the co-author, with Dossey, of the 2019 staff report described above.
The overlap does not extend across the rest of the department. Meggan Herington, the current executive director, began on January 4, 2023, succeeding an interim appointee and arriving from the Town of Monument, where she had been planning director since June 2021; she worked in county planning earlier in her career, at a date the county has not published. Jen Uhler, project manager on four of the forty-five, announced her first day at the department on November 3, 2025. Joe Letke, who has ten, joined in March 2022, according to his own professional listing, as code enforcement supervisor — a different division, and at most a few weeks before Dossey’s reported last day — and is now a senior planner.
Nothing in the record suggests any of these files has been handled improperly. Planning departments are small, staff turnover is normal, and files are often assigned by geography rather than by applicant. County planners do not approve rezonings; the Planning Commission recommends and the Board decides, in public.
But it is the situation Fiddler was pointing at in June, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving as an impression. The applications of a firm whose principals are the department’s former executive director and former planning manager are being reviewed, in part, by planners who worked under both of them, against a plan the same group produced.
The law
Colorado’s ethics code addresses the move from public office to private practice twice, once as advice and once as a rule.
The advice is C.R.S. 24-18-105(3): a public officer, local government official or employee “should not, within six months following the termination of his office or employment, obtain employment in which he will take direct advantage, unavailable to others, of matters with which he was directly involved during his term of employment,” including “rules, other than rules of general application, which he actively helped to formulate.” The word is “should,” and subsection (1) of the same section says the principles in it “are intended as guides to conduct and do not constitute violations as such of the public trust.”
The rule is in the next part of the article. C.R.S. 24-18-201(1) provides that “a former employee may not, within six months following the termination of his employment, contract or be employed by an employer who contracts with a state agency or any local government involving matters with which he was directly involved during his employment.” That is mandatory language, and the Independent’s earlier account of this statute as reaching only financial interests in contracts was wrong.
What it reaches here is a narrower question. The provision is addressed to a former employee contracting with, or being employed by, an employer who contracts with the local government. Vertex represents private applicants before the county rather than contracting with it. The Colorado Independent Ethics Commission has read the six-month rule narrowly in several published rulings, declining to extend it through layers of subcontracting and declining to find a conflict where the agency itself reported none. The Independent has not established the date on which either principal’s county employment ended, and the county has not published it.
No complaint has been filed and no authority has found a violation. The county’s own 2021 Personnel Policies Manual contains no post-employment restriction on planning staff.
What is before the county now
Eight Vertex rezoning files are open at the county.
Two go to the Board of County Commissioners on September 24: Needles Highway 83, which converts RR-5 land to RR-2.5, and the Hillpointe Apartments rezone. The Planning Commission recommended Needles for approval 6–3 on September 3, with Blaine Brew, Suzanne Casagrande and Jason Wulf opposed.
The Board’s packet for Needles gives pages 45 to 76 to public comment, under the heading “Public Comment — Letters of Opposition.” It contains fifteen comment forms, every one marked OPPOSE, and five letters, one of which is reproduced twice on consecutive pages. The words “support” and “SUPPORT” do not appear anywhere in the packet. There is no comment in favor of the rezoning in it.
The Kyle rezone went to the Board on September 10; its resolution was recorded on September 17. Three more — Sundance West, Timbers of Black Forest and Siesta Grove — are in review. Two further applications, to rezone parts of the Highway 83 and Walker Road property to RS-5000 and to RM-12, were filed on September 8 and given file numbers on September 9. They follow the Walker Road applications the Board denied in July, which the county has since closed.
Iron Ridge, a rezoning of about 120 acres from RR-5 to RR-2.5, was approved by the Board in July, recorded as Resolution 26-233, and closed on August 18.
What it adds up to
Every document described here is public, every hearing was held in the open, and the Board, not the department, decides a rezoning. No complaint has been filed about any of it.
What the record establishes is narrower and harder to wave off. The plan Vertex argues from was produced by the department Craig Dossey ran, and two of the planners who now handle the firm’s files are named on its acknowledgements page a few lines below him and Nina Ruiz. The discretionary powers those files move through — administrative determinations, administrative approval of final plats, the residual authority to “complete all other actions as necessary to carry out the intent of this Code” — went into Chapter 2 in 2019 under Ruiz’s account, on a staff report Dossey signed. The firm has since used the determination machinery successfully, on behalf of Buc-ee’s.
So the same small group helped write the department’s discretion into the code, produced the plan that discretion is measured against, and now works on both sides of the counter. A resident who objects to a rezoning in northern El Paso County is arguing against a plan Vertex’s principals produced, in front of staff they used to manage, under administrative powers written into the code under their names. That is what Mary Louise Fiddler was describing in June.
Sources & further reading
The Independent’s own coverage. Denied in July, Walker Road Rezoning Returns as RM-12 and RS-5000 — how a denied rezoning comes back. After the Denial: What the County’s Vote Does — and Doesn’t — Mean — the procedural posture after the July denial. Eight Hours at Centennial Hall: How Buc-ee’s Won Its Appeal — the appeal decided through the determination provision described here. El Paso County Is Rewriting the Rules the Buc-ee’s Fight Turned On — the current rewrite of the same code. The Water Under the Palmer Divide — the aquifers the subdivision water standards govern.
The eight open rezoning files, El Paso County development-review portal. P265, Hillpointe Apartments Rezone · P268, Needles Highway 83 · P264, Kyle Rezone · P258, Sundance West Rezone · P269, Timbers of Black Forest · P2610, Siesta Grove · P2611, MA Infrastructure RS-5000 · P2612, MA Infrastructure RM-12. The closed file: P2511, Iron Ridge Rezone. The portal’s own public active-project list, which carries all eight and is the source for the five the dashboard omits.
The 2019 code amendment, LDC-19-007. Project LDC-19-007 · the Planning Commission staff report of August 20, 2019 · the adopted Board resolution · the Chapter 2 working file · the Chapter 8 working file · the full twenty-five-entry review-comment table.
Hearings, recommendations and decisions. The Board of County Commissioners packet for Needles Highway 83, September 24, 2026, which contains the Planning Commission minutes of September 3, the staff analysis and the public-comment block described above · the signed Planning Commission resolution of September 3 · the Hillpointe Board packet for the same date · the recorded Board resolution on Kyle, 26-289 · the recorded Board resolution on Iron Ridge, 26-233 · the adopted Planning Commission minutes of June 18, 2026.
Code, plan and dashboard. El Paso County Land Development Code · El Paso County Planning Projects Dashboard. Your El Paso County Master Plan (adopted May 26, 2021) and the El Paso County Water Master Plan (2018, Forsgren Associates) were read as the adopted PDFs; the county publishes no stable direct link to either.
The statute. Colorado Revised Statutes 2026, Office of Legislative Legal Services — Title 24 carries C.R.S. 24-18-105 and C.R.S. 24-18-201, with the annotated Colorado Independent Ethics Commission rulings quoted here.
Entities. Vertex Consulting Services. Colorado Secretary of State, Vertex Consulting Services LLC, ID 20221785139, searchable through the Colorado Secretary of State business database.
Staff dates. Breeanna Jent, “Meggan Herington announced as El Paso County’s newest Planning and Community Development director,” The Gazette, December 15, 2022. Public professional listings and posts for Joe Letke and Jen Uhler.
Methodology
The count of the firm’s county work was built in two passes. The first pulled all 463 records from the public map service behind the county’s Planning Projects Dashboard and opened each record’s portal page; forty name Vertex Consulting Services or one of its principals as applicant of record. The second read the portal’s public active-project list, which carries five Vertex rezonings the dashboard does not — P268, P269, P2610, P2611 and P2612. Each of the resulting forty-five files was then opened individually on September 17, and its status and project manager were read from that page rather than from the dashboard, whose status field lags. Forty-five is a floor, not a total: the dashboard does not reach back to 2022, when the firm was formed.
Project-manager figures count the manager of record shown on each file today. Several files have had more than one manager over their life, and a count that included earlier assignments would come out differently.
The tracked-change figures were read directly from the revision markup inside the county’s own Word files, counting each insertion or deletion element once. Word splits a single human edit across several elements wherever formatting changes, so these are element counts rather than counts of separate decisions; collapsing adjacent elements by the same account and timestamp yields lower numbers — 871 rather than 1,172 in Chapter 8. Authorship is the account name Word recorded. An account establishes which login the change was saved under, not who was at the keyboard.
The referral figure counts rows in the portal’s published comment table for the amendment: twenty-five entries from twelve agencies, several of which returned more than once. That table is complete as a table, but it is not the whole referral record. The project’s activity log shows three further returns — from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, Woodmoor Water and Sanitation District, and Widefield Water and Sanitation District — for which no comment was posted. Their contents are unknown, and the finding that no reviewing agency raised the sampling change is limited to the comments the county published.
The public-comment description covers what is in the Board’s packet for the September 24 hearing as posted on September 11. Comments filed after that date are not in it. The comparison of code sections used archived captures of Chapter 5 (August 2014, April 2016) and Chapter 8 (April 2016) against the code as codified today. Statutory text is quoted from the 2026 Colorado Revised Statutes as published by the Office of Legislative Legal Services.
One date the Independent could not establish from any published county record is the day on which either principal’s county employment ended. The six-month question in C.R.S. 24-18-201 turns on it, and the article draws no conclusion that depends on it.
