Colorado Springs approved a data center on a staff signature this month, well south of the Tri-Lakes. If the next one targets unincorporated land near Monument, the decision would fall to five county commissioners — and to an aquifer the region is already racing to escape.
The fight over a data center on Garden of the Gods Road is a preview, not a local emergency. The site is in Colorado Springs, about 15 miles south of Monument, and no one is proposing a data center in the Tri-Lakes today. But this month the city’s planning department approved “Project Taurus,” a data center in the old Intel plant, on an administrative signature — no council vote, though an appeal could still send it to public hearings. Neighbors learned of it from a Friday-afternoon email. The operator has presented the facility to the city at about 50 megawatts; its own confidential report to Colorado Springs Utilities — obtained under the open-records act by the watchdog group Integrity Matters — describes building out to 300 megawatts of critical power — six to eight times larger — and contemplates burning natural gas on site. The artificial-intelligence build-out that has reshaped Virginia and Texas has reached the Front Range, and it is shopping.
The Tri-Lakes should not assume it is immune. And if a data center does come — most cheaply to the unincorporated land at the area’s edges — the decisive room will not be a city council or a town board. It will be a county hearing.
Why the county is the path of least resistance
Big projects that cannot win in a city tend to reappear on unincorporated land. The pattern is fresh and local. In June 2025 Colorado Springs voters rejected the Karman Line annexation by 82 percent, largely over water; the developer had already said that if the city said no, he would “still try to build in unincorporated El Paso County or create a new municipality.” Buc-ee’s, after withdrawing its Palmer Lake annexation, has not filed a county application — but an affiliated entity bought unincorporated land at I-25 and County Line Road, cleared by a staff boundary adjustment, which has kept attention on the county process.
A data center could follow the same road, and that road runs through the Board of County Commissioners. On unincorporated land an industrial use that the zoning does not already allow needs a rezoning or a special-use approval. That request goes to the county Planning Commission for a recommendation and then to the five commissioners for a public-hearing vote, filed and tracked through the county’s development-review portal. Whether the county’s current land-use code squarely contemplates a 24-hour, high-load data center is an open question — the county is in the middle of a multi-year Land Development Code update, and the code was not written with the 300-to-420-megawatt loads the confidential report contemplates.
Two features of that path matter for the Tri-Lakes. The first is who decides. A data center inside Monument or Palmer Lake would face a town board the Tri-Lakes elects; one on the unincorporated land around them answers instead to five county commissioners — a board shaped in part by the June 30 primary, on which the Tri-Lakes holds a single seat. It is a board with a strongly pro-development record: by The Monument Independent’s count it has not denied a land-use application in at least its last 354, and it has at times approved projects its own Planning Commission urged it to reject. A developer who reaches that board begins from a favorable position.
The Tri-Lakes does have a voice on that board: Bill Wysong, who represents Monument, Palmer Lake and the county’s western edge, is its most frequent dissenter on contested land-use votes and pledged to take no developer money. But he is one vote of five.
Water is the binding constraint
If anything stops a data center near Monument, it will be water, because the Tri-Lakes has the least of it and the most to lose. Monument remains heavily dependent on the Denver Basin aquifer, a finite, declining, non-renewable source; Triview drew on it historically, and Woodmoor and Donala remain tied to Denver Basin groundwater. For a decade the districts have spent millions trying to escape that dependence — Triview’s Northern Delivery System, opened in 2024 through a partnership with Colorado Springs Utilities; Woodmoor’s purchase of a ranch with senior Fountain Creek rights; Donala’s steady hunt for surface water. The whole regional project is to trade a draining aquifer for renewable supply.
Data-center developers, by their own account, prize two things above almost all else: cheap power and water for cooling. A “closed-loop” design still needs a large initial fill and ongoing make-up water; an evaporative system needs far more. A single campus competing for water in a region already rationing its way off the aquifer is not a rounding error. It was water that sank Karman Line. In the Tri-Lakes it is the rawest nerve of all.
A different grid, and a faster lane
Here the unincorporated map changes the physics. A data center inside Colorado Springs draws on Colorado Springs Utilities. One on county land around Monument could instead fall in the territory of Mountain View Electric Association, the rural cooperative, which buys its wholesale power from Tri-State Generation and Transmission. That distinction carries real weight. Tri-State has been trying to create a “high-impact load tariff” for customers of 45 megawatts and up, including data centers; federal regulators rejected a 2025 version on jurisdictional grounds, and Tri-State refiled in March 2026. It has reported some four gigawatts of data-center interest against about 2.5 gigawatts of its own generating capacity. Cooperatives can face a different oversight structure than investor-owned utilities — often with fewer traditional rate-case proceedings — though wholesale tariffs and large-load deals can still draw federal review.
The tariff even invites developers to “bring their own resource,” meaning on-site generation, often gas. That is not hypothetical: the Colorado Springs operator’s confidential report floated 60 to 200 megawatts of natural-gas generation and running a gas plant as prime power. Continuous combustion is a different air-quality and noise proposition than the diesel backup generators a data center is usually sold on, and on-site gas would raise its own air-quality, noise, utility and land-use questions.
Noise, and the quality of a rural evening
The Taurus dispute has turned, more than anything, on sound, and that fight transfers directly. The facility’s own acoustic model predicted 41 decibels by day and 38 at night. On unincorporated land the ceilings come from El Paso County’s noise ordinance and the state statute behind it — 55 dB(A) by day and 50 at night for residential or commercial areas, higher for industrial — A-weighted limits that critics argue understate a low-frequency hum. The gap between a model and a measurement is where residents live: the Garden of the Gods neighbors are fighting over an unmodeled low-frequency band, the 31.5-hertz hum that A-weighted readings understate and that carries across cold air at night. A data center is not a noisy neighbor for an hour; it is a hum that never stops, punctuated by generator testing. For homes that border open county land precisely because it is quiet, that is the cost that does not show up on a tax-revenue slide.
And scale compounds all of it. The lesson of Taurus is that the number presented to a community — 50 megawatts — is a starting point, not a ceiling. The protections, the water study, the noise model are written for the small version; the build-out is designed for the large one.
What the Tri-Lakes can do before, not after
Monument is not waiting. Mayor Mitch LaKind has directed the town’s planners to study data centers, and the town is weighing not a temporary pause but an outright bar. “We have no code that allows for their use,” LaKind said in May, “and we are looking to see… whether we’re going to allow their use at all.” Within its own limits a town controls its zoning, and a data center cannot force its way in against it. The harder problem is the unincorporated land at Monument’s edges, where the town’s reach mostly ends: there it can comment as a referral agency when the county circulates a proposal, set its preferences in its three-mile plan, or try to bind the county through an intergovernmental agreement — but the decision still belongs to the county. Its firmest lever may be water, since the Tri-Lakes districts can decline to serve a load they cannot supply.
Other Colorado counties have shown that local government is not powerless. Larimer County has imposed a temporary moratorium on data centers while it writes rules; Weld County is weighing zoning changes to govern where they may go. Palmer Lake’s own planning-commission chair recently urged the town’s trustees to consider a moratorium. The common thread is timing: standards set before an application lands are policy; conditions bargained after one is filed are damage control.
Standards set before an application lands are policy; conditions bargained after one is filed are damage control.
For readers, a short watch list. The June 30 primary will shape the commission that would weigh a Buc-ee’s or any data center. Any data-center filing would surface in the county’s development-review portal before it reached a hearing. The Tri-Lakes water districts’ postures — whether they would sell or commit supply to such a load — are worth asking now. And at the state level, two 2026 data-center bills — an incentive bill (HB26-1030) and a guardrail bill (SB26-102) — both died in committee in May, leaving the issue to local governments for now.
None of this means a data center is bound for Monument tomorrow. It means that if one comes, the decisive room will be a county hearing, the water will come from an aquifer the region is straining to leave behind, and the rules will have been written — or not — before anyone in the Tri-Lakes is asked.
Related
- The land-use vote tracker — every El Paso County BOCC decision since 2021, 354-0.
- Follow the money — who funds the commissioners deciding Buc-ee’s.
- Board games — what the county commission is, and why it matters.
Sources and further reading
- Integrity Matters — obtained the confidential utility report under the open-records act; tracking the Project Taurus fight.
- Colorado Springs Gazette — the proposed Garden of the Gods data center.
- KRDO — Monument weighs barring data centers before any arrive.
- Colorado Public Radio — voters reject the Karman Line annexation (June 2025).
- Colorado Newsline — both 2026 data-center bills rejected.
- Rocky Mountain Voice — Tri-State’s high-impact load tariff and the local-government gap.
- Triview Metropolitan District — water source primer.
- Larimer County — temporary data-center moratorium.
- El Paso County — BOCC land-use records (AgendaSuite) and the development-review portal.
