Drains, Lanes and Automobiles

The fight over high-density housing at Highway 83 and Walker Road has a second layer. The man behind the rezoning also owns the private utility that would serve them — a utility whose new wastewater plant, regional reviewers warn, is roughly $1m short of funding and could force rates to “double to quadruple.”

On July 23rd the El Paso County commissioners will decide whether to rezone about 15 acres beside Monument Academy, at the corner of Highway 83 and Walker Road, for as many as about 324 dwelling units, most of them at high density. The planning commission has already recommended denial, 6-1: both motions cited the rezoning’s failure to meet the county’s first and third approval criteria, with acting chair Christopher Whitney finding that the request “is not in general conformance with the El Paso County Master Plan and is not compatible with existing and permitted land uses in zoning districts in all directions.” That is the argument in the hearing room. The more revealing story is in the county’s deed books and a regional water committee’s minutes — and it is about the same handful of names appearing on every side of the same corner.

The developer is Matthew Dunston, through MA Infrastructure LLC. The land would be served by a private utility, the Walden Corporation, which Dunston owns. The water-and-sewer “will-serve” letter that the rezoning relies on is written on Walden Corporation letterhead, addressed to “Mr. Dunston,” and signed by Matthew Dunston. In other words, the applicant, the landowner and the utility vouching that water exists are, functionally, one person.

Land that came “better than free”

The arrangement is not new; it dates to the deal that built the school. In 2018 Dunston resigned from the Monument Academy board and bought roughly 65 acres from Lewis-Palmer School District 38, with a condition that he donate part of it for the academy’s new east campus. He kept the rest. The academy’s own board minutes are blunt about the sequence: “Matt Dunston stepped down from the Board back in 2018 in order to purchase the acreage from D38,” they read, describing how the school’s bond limited its infrastructure contribution to $1.5m and how “bond counsel did offer up the option for MA to spend $1.5m for the purchase of the land as a way to offset the infrastructure costs.”

The mechanics were unusual enough that the board chair explained them to a community newspaper at the time: Dunston “donated the property to MA Infrastructure LLC, which would receive the $1.5 million purchase price from MA and apply that money to a portion of the … infrastructure,” Mark McWilliams told Our Community News in 2019, adding that the academy had “effectively obtained the land ‘better than free.'” Residents called the whole thing a conflict of interest. Dunston rejected the charge — “It’s not even in the universe of impropriety,” he told the Gazette — and noted he would “likely also have to get zoning approvals to develop the rest of the site, but that’s a long way off.”

The long way off has arrived — and the retained land took an unusual route back to him. County records show the rezoning parcel was platted as “Tract A” of the MA Subdivision in November 2023, and then, on April 1, 2025, conveyed by quit-claim deed from the Monument Academy Foundation — the tax-exempt entity behind the school’s roughly $29m bond — to Dunston’s MA Infrastructure LLC for $10. The county assessor values the parcel at about $186,000. It is that $10 parcel Dunston now seeks to fill with high-density housing. (The Monument Academy Foundation is the 501(c)(3) that carries the school’s bond financing; its most recent IRS Form 990 reports about $21.7m in assets against roughly $29m in outstanding tax-exempt bonds. The chain of deeds by which the land passed into the Foundation before being quit-claimed out is the subject of an open-records review.)

Step back, and the 2018 arrangement did more for Dunston than secure a development site. The school’s money — $1.5m of its bond, routed through his own company — helped pay for the roads and drainage the subdivision required, his retained land included, and gave him a partner to share the cost. More lasting still, it handed his private water utility a customer that does not leave: the academy’s east campus became a ratepayer on an aging system that lives on monthly bills — steady, long-term revenue, with the promised houses to follow. The land deal and the water company were, from the outset, the same enterprise.

A water system in trouble

Follow the pipes and the story widens. Walden Corporation — a for-profit company incorporated in 1965 and now controlled by Dunston, at a Monument address tied to him and MA Infrastructure — is the private water and sewer utility for the Preserve at Walden and the surrounding area. The developer’s own marketing says so plainly: “Water & Sewer utilities are provided by the Walden Corporation.” Its customers already include the Monument Academy east campus. Its wastewater plant sits on two parcels that the county assessor lists as owned by Walden Corporation — privately held and taxable, not the property of any public district. The plant’s compliance record is uneven, too: in its own filings the utility acknowledged 23 permit exceedances over the past decade, 17 of them for suspended solids, and in February the state denied Walden’s request to drop the stringent 0.05-milligram-per-litre phosphorus limit its permit carries in the Cherry Creek watershed.

That plant is failing and must be replaced, and the finances are the problem. In a county filing (PPR2538) carried by the same consultant as the rezoning — Vertex Consulting Services, the firm of the county’s former planning director, Craig Dossey, which is also steering Buc-ee’s’ bid on Monument Hill — and assigned to the same county planner, the utility proposes to swap its antiquated lagoon system for a membrane-bioreactor package plant. In November 2025 the plan went before the Pikes Peak Area Council of Governments’ Water Quality Management Committee, where “Matt Dunston, owner of the Walden Corporation, presented on the application.” The committee’s minutes, adopted that January, are unsparing:

“WQMC does not see that a 20-year plan has been provided, nor have financial concerns been addressed. Also, Debt service looks like member rates will need to double to quadruple in order to pay for the project. The amount of funding available to pay for the project is about $1 million short of what is needed.”

Dunston told the committee he believed he had addressed the plant’s finances; the committee recorded that it had seen no such plan. Its members sent the application forward only on the condition that the state health department independently verify the utility’s “financial capability” under the rule governing “Applicants using Borrowed Funds to Finance the Treatment Works.”

The numbers behind that condition are now clearer. The project’s own estimate puts the new plant’s cost at about $6.45m; Walden holds a bank pre-qualification for a loan of “up to $5 million” and told the committee it would cover the remainder from connection fees (the one-time “tap fees” each new hookup pays) — the roughly $1m gap the committee flagged. The utility described its financing to the committee as a “commitment letter to fund the whole thing”; the Integrity Bank & Trust letters in the file describe a pre-qualification and a construction-draw inspection process, and name no committed sum.

The same minutes carry a second, sharper finding. The committee wrote that “it appears that the sludge had been covered up by the applicant rather than having it properly removed,” a concern it referred to both the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and El Paso County Public Health. The applicant, the minutes say, claimed the sludge — which the committee’s materials call a “Class B Hazardous Material” — sits over a liner and is hauled away every three to five years, “but was unable to show any documentation that this is happening.” Fencing and signs, the committee noted, had since been added around the pile.

Why the two files may be one problem

For a utility with only about 381 residential connections, a whole new treatment plant is a heavy lift — which is precisely what drives the “double to quadruple” warning and the million-dollar gap. The obvious relief is more customers. And the county file for the plant shows how the new plant is sized: the engineer’s drainage report puts the new plant’s design flow at 150,000 gallons a day and its peak at 225,000 — well above both the current discharge permit of 110,000 gallons a day and the plant’s present flows of 32,000 to 76,000 gallons. Yet nearly all of that capacity is already spoken for. The engineer’s process-design report — filed with the state, though not yet approved — derives that 150,000-gallon figure from the existing homes, the subdivision’s growth to a 520-home build-out, and the two schools expanding to their target enrollments, reaching about 145,000 gallons before any margin.

The roughly 324 high-density units the rezoning would allow appear nowhere in it. The one further project the report does count — “a new development consisting of 120 additional homes” the Walden Corporation says it is planning — folds into that 520-home total; the Walden Preserve property owners’ association’s own development plan for future filings identifies those as 116 large-lot homes, on lots averaging just over an acre — the subdivision’s remaining build-out, not the rezoning site. Serving that density as proposed would therefore mean crowding out the capacity reserved to finish the subdivision, or enlarging the plant — and its cost — again.

That is the intersection worth watching, and the utility’s own funding plan makes the link explicit. Walden told the committee it would service the debt from tap fees and “a lot of future tap fees for undeveloped lots, plus adding new taps” — that is, from more building. The rezoning would deliver several hundred such customers, along with one-time connection fees, at the very moment the utility is asking the state to bless its borrowing. It would enlarge the customer base of a private company its own applicant owns.

How much existing customers would pay is where the applicant and the reviewers part company. Walden told the committee the switch would raise a typical sewer bill by “$10 to $35 a month,” with no rise in the water rate. The committee, reading the same debt, put it very differently — rates that “double to quadruple.” The arithmetic favours the committee’s caution: servicing a loan approaching $5m over twenty years runs on the order of $400,000 a year, set against roughly $250,000 in annual revenue the utility’s own 2025 wastewater statement records. Spread across a few hundred existing bills, that is the doubling the committee foresaw — unless a wave of new connections arrives to share the cost, which is precisely the plan, and precisely why the rezoning and the plant are so hard to separate. What the plant would ultimately cost each existing customer sits in a financial plan the utility has yet to make public; this newspaper has requested it from the state and from PPACG.

The corner is strained in a more literal sense, too. The applicant’s own traffic study finds the Highway 83 and Walker Road intersection already failing at peak hours, and projected to fail by 2045 with or without the project — before the new housing adds its roughly 1,900 vehicle trips a day.

None of this is, on the record so far, illegal. Campaign contributions are disclosed; the records reviewed do not establish that any of these land transactions broke the law; a developer may own a utility and build houses it will serve. Dunston has consistently framed the plant as a like-for-like replacement of an existing use, and told the planning commission the site could not physically hold the maximum density its zoning would allow. It is also true that the county’s planning staff stopped short of opposing the rezoning — by practice, El Paso County staff recommend neither approval nor denial, supplying only draft conditions to apply should the board approve — and that the commissioners, who have approved every land-use application they have voted on since 2021 (354 matters, by this newspaper’s count, with none denied), will have the final say on July 23rd.

But the public record now establishes something narrower and still worth stating: the same man owns the land proposed for high-density housing, the company that would build it, and the private utility that would serve it — a utility that needs money, more customers, and the state’s sign-off on its debt, all at once. When the commissioners take up the rezoning, that is the fuller picture in front of them.

Why seek the higher density the current plant cannot serve? The record does not say, and this account will not guess at motive — but it narrows the field. A rezoning need not be built to pay: lifting the land from one house per five acres to as many as 324 units multiplies its value, whether Dunston develops it himself or sells the entitlement to someone who will. Were it built, the denser housing would throw off connection fees and monthly bills faster than the subdivision’s slow-selling one-acre lots — the revenue a utility carrying fresh debt most needs — though serving it would require a plant larger, and costlier, than the one now before the state. Each path leads back to the same man, and the same balance sheet.

The Monument Independent sought comment from Matt Dunston, MA Infrastructure LLC and the Walden Corporation, from Vertex Consulting Services, and from the Monument Academy Foundation. None had responded as of 2 p.m. on Friday, July 10th; any responses will be added to this article.

Update (July 10, 2026): After publication, The Monument Independent obtained the wastewater plant’s process-design report from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. This article has been revised to reflect it: the new plant is designed for the existing homes, the subdivision’s build-out and the two schools — not the proposed high-density units — and the state has not yet approved the design. An earlier version estimated the plant held roughly 40,000 to 46,000 gallons a day of spare capacity for the high-density units; the report shows that capacity is largely committed to the subdivision and the schools. It has since been expanded to add the plant’s financing (an estimated $6.45m cost against a bank pre-qualification for a loan “up to $5 million”), the utility’s own rate, compliance and funding figures drawn from records obtained since publication, and the Walden POA’s development plan identifying the subdivision’s remaining build-out as 116 large-lot homes.

Sources

El Paso County records (primary)

• Rezoning applications — P261 (RR-5 → RM-12) · P262 (RR-5 → RM-30) (EDARP) — staff report, will-serve letter, public comments.
• Wastewater-plant replacement — PPR2538 (EDARP) — application and the drainage report giving design flow 150,000 gpd / peak 225,000 gpd.
• El Paso County Assessor — rezoning tract 6115011001 (15.35 ac; ~$186,037; owner MA Infrastructure LLC); plant parcels 6115000001 and 6115000005 (owner Walden Corporation; taxable).
• El Paso County Clerk & Recorder — recording search: D38 → 83 Walker LLC, $1.25m (instrument 218134619, 2018); MA Subdivision plat (223715214, Nov. 2023); Monument Academy Foundation → MA Infrastructure LLC, quit-claim deed, $10 (225026373, Apr. 1, 2025).

Regulatory / water quality

• PPACG Water Quality Management Committee — meeting materials, Jan. 28, 2026 (minutes of the Nov. 19, 2025 meeting, item 3.C, “Walden WWTP – Matt Dunston, Walden Corporation”) — funding-gap, “double to quadruple,” and sludge quotations. Committee page.
• CDPHE — Water Quality Records Center (Walden certification COX631032 / general permit COX631000, obtained by records request): the AquaWorks DBO process-design report (design basis — 381 existing homes, a build-out of ~520 homes including “120 additional homes,” and the two schools; design flow 150,000 gpd; total project cost estimated at about $6.45m); the discharge-permit history; and the Feb. 25, 2026 denial of Walden’s request to remove the 0.05 mg/L Cherry Creek phosphorus limit. Regulation 22 / Implementation Policy CW-19 (“Applicants using Borrowed Funds to Finance the Treatment Works”) — the formal financial plan requested; not yet returned.
• PPACG Water Quality Management Committee — Nov. 19, 2025 meeting materials (obtained by records request): the Walden Corporation 2025 wastewater income statement (≈$250,000 annual revenue; $178,674.68 in operating and reserve accounts); Integrity Bank & Trust letters (pre-qualification for a loan “up to $5 million,” June 4, 2025, and a construction-draw process letter, Nov. 6, 2025); and Walden’s written answers to the committee (23 permit exceedances over ten years, 17 for total suspended solids; projected sewer increase of “$10 to $35 a month”; funding from tap fees and “future tap fees for undeveloped lots, plus adding new taps”).

Corporate & nonprofit filings

• Colorado Secretary of State business database: Walden Corporation (entity 19871180663, for-profit, 1965); MA Infrastructure LLC (20191394934); Monument Academy Foundation (nonprofit, 2004).
• ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer — Monument Academy Foundation, EIN 51-0506848 (501(c)(3); files a full Form 990).
• Developer marketing — Walden Preserve, “Utilities”; consultant — Vertex Consulting Services.
• Walden POA — “Walden Preserve Development Plan for Future Filings”: 208.82 acres; 116 large-lot homes across future filings (minimum one acre, average 1.08 acres), plus 14 lots in Filing #2 — the subdivision’s remaining single-family build-out.

Contemporaneous reporting & documents (2019)

• Monument Academy Board of Directors minutes, Aug. 8, 2019 (on file) — “in order to purchase the acreage from D38.”
• Our Community News, Vol. 19 No. 11 (Nov. 2, 2019) — Mark McWilliams: “donated the property to MA Infrastructure LLC”; “better than free.”
• The Gazette, June 12, 2019 — Dunston: “It’s not even in the universe of impropriety.”

Our prior coverage

• “At Highway 83 and Walker Road, a setback for density” — the June 18 planning-commission vote.
• “Rezoning at the schoolhouse gate” — the original rezoning report.
• “Permission granted”: the county’s 354-0 land-use record and our vote tracker.
• “Buc-ee’s tries the back door” — Vertex’s role in the county’s other big land fight.

Sourcing note: the 2019 land-deal figures and quotations are drawn from Monument Academy board minutes (Aug. 8, 2019) and Our Community News (Nov. 2019); the 2025 conveyance from El Paso County Clerk & Recorder (reception 225026373) and Assessor records; the utility findings and quotations from the Pikes Peak Area Council of Governments Water Quality Management Committee meeting materials (Jan. 28, 2026, minutes of the Nov. 19, 2025 meeting); plant design figures from the project’s drainage report on file with El Paso County (PPR2538); entity and ownership details from the Colorado Secretary of State and the county assessor; the plant’s financing, rate and compliance figures from the utility’s submissions in the PPACG November 19, 2025 meeting materials and Walden’s written answers to the committee, obtained by records request; the plant’s design basis from the AquaWorks process-design report obtained from CDPHE; and the subdivision’s remaining build-out from the Walden POA development plan.

Methodology

This account rests on primary public records. Land transfers were confirmed against El Paso County Clerk & Recorder instruments (by reception number) and the county Assessor’s parcel records, not press accounts; where a 2019 news report and the recorded deeds differed, the deeds govern. The utility findings are quoted verbatim from the Pikes Peak Area Council of Governments committee packet we obtained and cross-checked against the committee’s video record; the plant was presented at the committee’s November 19, 2025 meeting and those minutes were adopted January 28, 2026. Ownership of the Walden Corporation was established four ways — the Secretary of State registration, the taxable parcel ownership at the Assessor, the developer’s own utilities page, and the committee’s description of Dunston as “owner of the Walden Corporation.” The plant’s 150,000/225,000-gallon design flows are from the engineer’s drainage report in the county’s PPR2538 file; the design basis — 381 existing homes, a build-out of approximately 520 homes and the two schools at target enrollment — is from the AquaWorks DBO process-design report obtained from CDPHE, which does not include the proposed high-density units. The “120 additional homes” that report counts toward its 520-home build-out corresponds to the 116 large-lot future filings shown in the Walden POA’s development plan; neither figure includes the high-density units. The Foundation’s asset and bond figures are from its most recent IRS Form 990, via ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer. The debt-service comparison — on the order of $400,000 a year to service a loan approaching $5m over twenty years, against about $250,000 in annual wastewater revenue — is our own arithmetic from the utility’s stated project cost (about $6.45m), its bank pre-qualification (“up to $5 million”) and its 2025 wastewater income statement; the utility’s formal rate-and-debt (CW-19) analysis is not yet public. The 23-exceedance compliance figure, the projected “$10 to $35” rate increase and the funding statements are quoted from Walden’s written answers to the PPACG committee, obtained by records request; the February 2026 phosphorus-limit denial is from CDPHE’s Walden records (certification COX631032). The statement that the commissioners have approved every land-use matter they have voted on since 2021 is our tally of voted land-use items, none denied, and excludes withdrawn, continued, and consent items. Outbound links to third-party records carry the tag utm_source=monument-independent; links to our own reporting do not. Every person and entity named was contacted for comment before publication.