Opposition Groups Put a Number on Buc-ee’s: A Net Loss of $600,000 a Year

Tri-Lakes Preservation and The Community Voice released a fiscal analysis on Tuesday, sixteen days before El Paso County’s commissioners hear Buc-ee’s appeal. It estimates that a travel center on Monument Hill would leave local governments and districts about $602,000 a year worse off, and the county and the region’s transportation authority with tens of millions more in one-off infrastructure. The estimate turns on a projected fall in the value of surrounding homes.

Two groups opposed to the proposed Buc-ee’s on Monument Hill published a fiscal impact analysis on Aug. 11 concluding that the 74,000-square-foot travel center would cost local governments and special districts roughly $602,000 a year, once lost property tax revenue and new emergency-response costs are set against the taxes the project would generate.

The 26-page report was prepared by Tri-Lakes Preservation, Inc. “with support from The Community Voice,” a group credited on the cover and with the report’s infrastructure-cost research. It went to news outlets by email on Tuesday afternoon, sixteen days before the Board of County Commissioners takes up Buc-ee’s appeal, APP261, of the county’s July 1 non-determination on ADM264.

Neither Buc-ee’s nor El Paso County has published a fiscal analysis of the project, the report says.

What the report counts as revenue

The analysis starts from $31.8 million in annual taxable retail sales. That figure is not Buc-ee’s own. It was produced by Economic & Planning Systems for the Town of Palmer Lake in April 2025, when the company was seeking annexation for the same parcels, and it is an EPS estimate built from sales data Buc-ee’s provided — an average of $30 million in 2024, escalated two percent a year to a 2027 opening. It excludes gasoline sales.

On that base the report credits the project with $1,068,000 a year in tax revenue: $391,000 to El Paso County from its 1.23 percent sales tax, $318,000 to the Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority from its one percent, and $359,000 in property taxes divided among Lewis-Palmer School District 38 (about $200,000), the Monument Fire District (about $102,000), the county (about $40,000) and the Pikes Peak Library District (about $16,000).

That property tax estimate rests on one comparable. An endnote shows it derived from the Monument Walmart — a 222,000-square-foot building on 27 acres, with a market value of $22.3 million — run through local mill levies. Buc-ee’s would be 74,000 square feet on 31 acres.

The offset the report builds its conclusion on

Against that revenue the report sets a projected decline in the value of the homes around the site, and it is much the largest number in the ledger.

Using a hedonic model — a standard tool in real-estate economics for isolating how one feature moves house prices — the report projects that 6,062 homes and improved properties within three miles would lose an average of 3.6 percent of their value, some $173 million. At current mill levies that translates to about $940,000 a year in forgone property tax, of which $486,000 would come from D38 and $231,000 from fire districts.

The report is explicit in its Appendix B about how the model was built. Its distance-decay curve is calibrated from published research on other kinds of unwanted neighbors. The nearest analogies among its citations are a 2017 study of gasoline stations and nearby home values, three separate studies of leaking underground storage tanks, and two on big-box retail; it also draws on work covering truck-parking facilities, highway interchanges, shale-gas development and quarries. No study of property values around an existing Buc-ee’s is cited. The report describes the characteristics it treats as the source of the harm: a 24-hour operation, continuous lighting, underground fuel storage, traffic and regional draw in an area the county’s master plan designates suburban residential.

The modeled loss is larger than the report’s entire cost side, and the conclusion depends on it: on the report’s own figures, revenue less costs but without that offset would show a gain of about $338,000 a year rather than a loss.

The cost side comes from Palmer Lake

The report assumes two categories of new ongoing cost, and takes both, unadjusted, from the same EPS study prepared for Palmer Lake.

The first is $170,180 a year for two additional El Paso County Sheriff’s deputies — two patrol officers at $67,000 plus 27 percent benefits in the EPS tables — with $75,000 in one-time costs for a patrol car, equipment and training. The second is $559,440 a year for six additional Monument Fire District staff, with $406,000 one-time for a truck and equipment. Together they come to about $730,000 a year.

The report says plainly that it is transferring those numbers: the county and the district “are likely to incur similar ongoing costs,” it argues, “accordingly, this analysis uses the same estimated costs.” In the EPS study those figures were sized for the Town of Palmer Lake, whose entire police budget was $1.45 million; the Buc-ee’s increment represented a 15.8 percent rise in police spending and a 50.6 percent rise for fire.

For scale, the report notes that Buc-ee’s own trip-generation memorandum projects 22,150 daily vehicle trips, and that the Johnstown Buc-ee’s drew 445 emergency calls in 2025, a figure obtained by open-records request.

Who gains and who loses

Netted out, the report has the burden falling unevenly. Fire districts, overwhelmingly Monument, are estimated to lose $688,000 a year. School tax revenues lose $286,000 — $244,000 of it borne by the state’s education fund, $42,000 reapportioned to D38 property owners through the mill levy override. Other local governments and districts lose $95,000 and the library district $21,000. El Paso County comes out ahead by $170,000 and the PPRTA by $318,000 — both on sales tax the project itself generates.

The report also runs nine scenarios, varying sales between $25 million and $50 million against three levels of property-value loss. Eight produce annual losses, ranging to $1.1 million; one produces a $399,000 gain, which the report argues is unlikely because higher sales would mean more traffic and therefore a larger hit to home values.

One-time costs, and what the comparison table contains

The report’s second claim is about infrastructure. Its Appendix A lists fifteen communities with a Buc-ee’s recently opened or under construction, fourteen of them with a dollar figure, and puts the average taxpayer cost at $22,121,429 — described in the text as “about $20 million.”

The fourteen entries range from $4.2 million in San Marcos, Texas to $100 million in Ocala, Florida; the median is $13 million. They also describe three different kinds of money. Some are cash spending on roads and bridges, such as $28.7 million in Mebane, North Carolina and $15 million in Harrison County, Mississippi. Some are property-tax abatements — $2.4 million over eight years in Monroe County, Georgia, a 65 percent cut for seven years in West Memphis, Arkansas. Others are rebates to Buc-ee’s of sales tax the store itself would generate, over fifteen years in San Marcos and twenty in Springfield, Missouri, Mansfield, Ohio and Loxley, Alabama. The $20 million entry for Palmer Lake describes a repayment arrangement that, as the report’s own note records, never happened, because Buc-ee’s dropped the annexation and came to the county instead.

On Monument Hill the report expects interchange and roadway work, notes that Buc-ee’s has proposed improvements to Beacon Lite Road and is in discussions with the state transportation department about the I-25 ramps, and observes that the county is already spending $18.7 million in PPRTA funds to rebuild Beacon Lite as a two-lane rural collector. It flags one omission in particular: the submitted plans put the site more than 30 feet above grade but include no soundwall to stop traffic noise reflecting across the interstate toward Woodmoor.

Whether Buc-ee’s would seek repayment for infrastructure it funds is, the report says, unknown — such proposals typically come after initial approvals, and the company did ask for one in Palmer Lake.

What the commissioners are actually deciding

None of this is formally before the board on Aug. 27. The appeal turns on a single question of classification: whether a 74,000-square-foot travel center with 120 fueling positions is a “convenience store” under the county’s land development code, or a use similar enough to one to be permitted by right in C-1. Fiscal impact is not among the criteria. The report’s argument is directed less at the appeal than at the county’s posture toward the project generally; its closing recommendation is that the county help Buc-ee’s find a site elsewhere.

The Independent has requested comment from El Paso County Planning and Community Development, the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, the Monument Fire District, Lewis-Palmer School District 38, the Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority, Buc-ee’s and Tri-Lakes Preservation, and will publish their responses as they arrive.

Update, Aug. 11: Rick Sonnenburg, contract manager for the Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority, said the Beacon Lite Road work is a joint county-PPRTA capital project — funded by the authority, managed by El Paso County staff — and referred the Independent’s questions to the county engineer.

Josh Palmer, the El Paso County engineer, answered them the same afternoon. The $18.7 million figure “is accurate for the current construction phase,” he said, covering paving, widening, horizontal and vertical improvements and roadside drainage, with substantial completion expected by the end of 2026. The Buc-ee’s was not a factor in the road’s design or classification: “Design was started and complete several years ago and to date nothing has been submitted or approved for construction of any development.”

Asked whether improvements attributable to the project would be eligible for PPRTA funding, Mr Palmer said they would not: “all development in El Paso County is financially responsible for improvements required to support their development and any impacts it may have.” The authority has no separate process for assessing the transportation impact of a large private development, he added, though voter-approved capital projects “consider all known or anticipated development to ensure that there is no conflict in scope.”

Mr Sonnenburg added that PPRTA voters approved the Beacon Lite Road project in a ballot issue on Nov. 6, 2012 — more than a decade before Buc-ee’s came to the Tri-Lakes. The county’s project page describes the work as upgrading the road from gravel to asphalt and improving curves, grades and drainage, and says it remains on track for completion in spring 2027.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage: Buc-ee’s Hearing Set for Aug. 27 · Monument’s council writes to the county · Call It a Truck Stop, the same group’s earlier land-use analysis · Buc-ee’s appeals to the commissioners · the county’s July 1 non-determination · eighty-plus objections filed “for reference only” · the original use-determination filing

The report: Tri-Lakes Preservation, Inc. with The Community Voice, “Fiscal Impact on Local Jurisdictions From a Buc-ee’s on Monument Hill,” Aug. 11, 2026 — read the full report here, hosted by The Independent.

Underlying study: Economic & Planning Systems, fiscal impact analysis prepared for the Town of Palmer Lake, April 24, 2025.

County record: El Paso County EDARP files ADM264 and APP261. · the county’s own Buc-ee’s update page

Entities: Tri-Lakes Preservation, Inc. · The Community Voice · Monument Fire District · Lewis-Palmer School District 38 · El Paso County Planning and Community Development

Methodology

Figures in this article are the report’s own and are attributed to it throughout. The Independent read all 26 pages, including the ten that exist only as images and return no text to an ordinary extraction. Appendix A and the tables behind endnotes 11, 35 and 47 are among them, and they carry the property-value bands, the property-tax comparable and the community-cost list on which the report’s headline numbers rest.

Three figures here were calculated by The Independent from values printed in the report rather than taken from its text: the $13 million median and the $4.2 million-to-$100 million range of the fourteen costed entries in Appendix A, which the report gives only as an average; the composition of those entries as road spending, tax abatements or sales-tax rebates, read from the table’s own descriptions; and the $338,000 figure for revenue less costs excluding the modeled property-value loss, which is the report’s own arithmetic with one line removed. The report’s internal arithmetic was checked and reconciles: its revenue, offset and cost lines produce the stated $602,000, and its six-jurisdiction breakdown sums to the same figure.

Where the report relies on the 2025 Economic & Planning Systems study prepared for Palmer Lake — for the $31.8 million sales estimate, the Sheriff and fire staffing costs, and the one-time equipment costs — The Independent consulted that study directly rather than relying on the report’s characterization of it. The exclusion of gasoline from the sales base, and the derivation of the sales figure from data Buc-ee’s supplied to EPS, come from that study.

The report is an advocacy document produced by groups opposed to the project, and states its assumptions openly. Its property-value projection is a model, not a measurement, and no comparable study of homes near an existing Buc-ee’s is cited in it.