El Paso County Is Rewriting the Rules the Buc-ee’s Fight Turned On

Three days after the Board of County Commissioners found that the current land code allows a 74,000-square-foot travel center on Monument Hill, the rewrite of that code is open for public comment. The 516-page draft, released July 14, would rebuild the rules for unincorporated El Paso County from the studs. It retires the term the Buc-ee’s argument was fought over and puts a square-footage threshold in its place, moves the water question earlier in the process, and caps fuel islands in a set of districts that do not yet exist. The first of six public meetings is on Thursday, and the comment window on the draft is open now.

A Rewrite of a Code Nearly Two Decades Old

El Paso County has been overhauling its Land Development Code since May 2024. The work is run by the county’s Planning and Community Development Department with an advisory group of residents and development professionals, and drafted by Clarion Associates, a Denver land-use consultancy, under a Strong Communities planning grant from the Colorado Department of Local Affairs.

The consultants’ opening report calls the project the county’s “first significant overall code update since 2007”; a few pages later the same document dates the last comprehensive update to 2006. Either way the working code is roughly two decades old, and it has been patched item by item since — a fire and wildfire amendment in June of this year, natural medicine in 2024, special district policies in February.

The stated purpose is to implement Your El Paso Master Plan, adopted in May 2021. The project’s own goals are more revealing than that: “regulating what matters without overregulating,” “creating more predictable development outcomes,” and “tailoring the LDC to work across rural, suburban, and urban settings.” In practice those three commitments point the same direction — fewer judgment calls, more numbers.

The draft has arrived in modules. A code assessment in August 2024. Module 1, on zoning districts and uses, in July 2025, revised later that month. Module 2, on development standards, folded into a single consolidated draft published July 14, 2026. That consolidated draft — 516 pages — is the document now open for comment.

Size Replaces the Argument

The current code defines a convenience store this way:

An establishment for the purpose of offering for sale to the neighborhood in which it is located such items as groceries, ready to eat food, over the counter drugs, and sundries. A convenience store may include retail sale of gasoline and other petroleum products.

There is no size in it. That absence is why the classification was arguable at all: whether a 74,000-square-foot building with 120 fueling positions serves “the neighborhood in which it is located” is a judgment rather than a measurement. The planning director determined on July 1 that he could not tell; the Board resolved the appeal on August 27, finding the proposed use qualifies as an allowed use in the C-1 district. That decision settled the use classification, not construction or operation.

The draft removes the term. “Convenience store” appears once in 516 pages — in a footnote explaining that it, along with “home improvement store” and “liquor store,” has been folded into a single use called Retail, General. That use is then split by floor area.

Read across the middle row and the change becomes concrete. A store of that size is allowed by right in a rural mixed-use center and in light employment; it needs special use approval in an urban mixed-use center; it is not permitted at all in the suburban one. Cross 75,000 square feet and, among the table’s standard districts, the use is listed only in light employment, and there only by special use. The use-specific design standards the draft attaches to that largest tier are two: a sheltered entry, and features alongside the building to promote a walkable environment, such as seats, benches, shade trees and awnings. The county’s general site and building design standards apply on top of them.

The draft treats fuel the same way, and stops short in a place worth noting. Gas stations become allowed by right in all three mixed-use districts. A new standard generally keeps pumps 250 feet from the property line of an abutting residential district or residential use — unless an arterial or expressway separates them, or the station is built before homes go up on that lot — and limits the three mixed-use districts to four pump islands — then adds, in the code’s own words, that the restriction “does not limit the number of fuel dispensers per pump island.” The draft nowhere defines a pump island. A commenter on the county’s own review site asked for one on August 29.

The draft also keeps a separate use called Truck Stop, defined around commercial vehicles and the drivers who operate them — the category the opposition group Tri-Lakes Preservation argued the Monument Hill project belonged in. Under the draft, a truck stop needs special use approval in a rural mixed-use center, and is allowed by right in both employment districts.

Water Moves Earlier in the Process

The second substantive change is quieter and may matter more. Under the current code, the water supply section applies to “any development application which results in the creation of new lots.” It is a subdivision rule; its clarifications and exceptions all speak of subdivisions.

The draft carries that forward and then adds a second category, “Development Projects and Permits,” requiring a water resources report for a planned unit development, a rezoning, a site development plan, a special use review, or a change of use — in each case where no earlier report exists, or where the project would raise water demand above what an approved report covered. It also provides that while a preliminary plan may be approved despite a finding of insufficiency, “all other applications require a finding of sufficiency.” State law bears on the shape of that: a local government must make its water determination “only once during the development permit approval process” unless demand or supply materially changes, but may choose the stage at which it does so.

The site development plan is the point of contact for Tri-Lakes readers. The county’s August 27 release describes what remains for Buc-ee’s: a site development plan reviewed administratively by staff for lighting, landscaping, parking, traffic and roadway improvements. That review, the county wrote, “does not return to the Board of County Commissioners for approval, and there is no appeal of that administrative approval to the Board of County Commissioners.” Under the draft, a site development plan would also trigger the county’s water resources report; the current § 8.4.7 does not list it. That is a change in the county’s own reporting requirement rather than proof that water adequacy goes untested — state law already requires an adequacy determination for projects above a threshold, and lets the county choose the stage at which it makes one.

What Carries Forward

A rewrite this size invites the assumption that everything is in play. Much is not. The 300-year water supply requirement survives intact, and with it the arithmetic that makes it bite: renewable sources are credited with a 300-year life, though an applicant must still show the water is legally and physically available and dependable, while non-renewable Denver Basin bedrock is credited at only a hundred times its annual appropriation — a fixed volume that must then stretch across three centuries of demand. State law permits bedrock withdrawals on a hundred-year life. The county’s rule is the stricter of the two. Planned unit developments carry forward. The three overlay districts — commercial aviation, general aviation, and wind and solar energy generation — are carried forward with revisions; two others, the rural land use plan and high-rise overlays, are dropped. The chapters on oil and gas operations and on cell facilities are carried across. Special use approval remains the route for uses that need case-by-case review — though under the current code the planning director may act on any special use administratively, with two exceptions, and may elevate one to a public hearing at his own discretion.

The provision that decides how much the master plan counts is still current law, and the draft has not yet said what replaces it. Section 2.1.3 of the current code is titled “Master Plan Advisory,” and it is blunt: the Board “has not by such statement rendered the Master Plan a binding requirement or regulation for either zoning or subdivision matters,” and intends it “be advisory only.” That section sits in the administration chapter. The draft has not written that chapter yet. For now the master plan sets guidelines and the code sets the numbers, which is the reason the numbers are worth reading.

Where the Buc-ee’s Parcel Sits

The Monument Hill parcel is zoned C-1, and C-1 has been a legacy district for thirty-five years. Chapter 4 of the current code lists four “obsolete” districts — C-1, C-2, M and R-4 — and freezes each in the same words. For C-1:

No land shall be zoned or rezoned to C-1 on or subsequent to May 1, 1991. All land zoned C-1 on or before May 1, 1991, shall remain zoned C-1 and shall be subject to all the provisions of the C-1 district until such time as the land is either rezoned or annexed.

Frozen, not erased: no new C-1 may be created, and land zoned C-1 stays subject to the C-1 provisions until it is rezoned or annexed. The district still holds its own column in the current use table, alongside C-2, M and R-4 under the heading “Obsolete Zoning Districts.”

The draft opens with a table matching current districts to proposed ones. Commercial Services and Commercial Community become the three mixed-use districts. Commercial Regional and Limited Industrial become Light Employment. Heavy Industrial becomes Heavy Employment. The table carries an “Obsolete” heading of its own — under which it lists CN, CO and I-1, three districts the current code identifies as having been removed by resolution in 2012.

Three details sit awkwardly beside that silence. The draft’s own glossary still defines a base zoning district as including “obsolete zoning districts” — a category its own table fills with CN, CO and I-1, the three removed in 2012, and not with the four Chapter 4 currently names. The draft knows how to retire a district when it means to: it retires the recreational vehicle park district in a single sentence, letting existing RVP zoning continue while barring new rezonings to it — which is the C-1 mechanism, written out for a district covering a sliver of the county. And the consultants flagged the problem at the start. Recommendation B.3 of the August 2024 assessment reads: “Identify and eliminate existing nonconformities through LDC changes where possible to encourage continued property investment. Correct issues created by maintaining obsolete districts.”

Two years on, the draft neither corrects them nor carries them forward, and the published record does not say why. Which rulebook would govern the Monument Hill parcel if the new code took effect as written is a question the published record does not answer.

The Chapters Still to Come

The consolidated draft is incomplete by design, and the missing pieces are the procedural ones. Five chapters carry the same line — “to be drafted in Module 3: Administration and Procedures”:

That is the practical limit on reading this draft. The use tables say which projects get a hearing and which are decided at a counter. The chapter defining what a hearing is, who must be notified and what may be appealed has not been written. The consultants’ original schedule ran “May 2024 through April 2026.” That date passed four months ago.

What It Changes for the Tri-Lakes

Little in the draft names the Tri-Lakes. Several provisions land here anyway.

Lighting. The current code already caps on-site lighting at ten footcandles, allows twenty at loading areas, holds light at a residential boundary to one-tenth of a footcandle and limits canopy lighting to twenty. The draft carries those numbers forward and changes what they attach to, applying the tenth-of-a-footcandle limit at property lines within or next to agricultural, residential and public, civic and open space districts. What is genuinely new is color temperature: covered outdoor fixtures must generally fall below 3,001 kelvin, though the director may allow up to 5,000 where accurate color rendition matters for public safety.

Heights. The proposed mixed-use maxima are forty feet in a rural center, fifty in a suburban one and sixty in an urban one, with forty-five in light employment and sixty in heavy employment — not uniformly taller than the districts they replace, several of which already allow forty or forty-five. Four residential districts rise from thirty feet to thirty-five; residential flex allows forty-five, and residential manufactured stays at thirty.

Parking. The draft reduces parking minimums for several uses, though detached single-family housing stays at two spaces per dwelling. Multifamily goes from a sliding scale topping out at two spaces per unit plus guest parking to one space per unit for anything up to three bedrooms, plus ten percent for guests.

Large lots. A new cluster development option would apply to contiguous parcels of thirty acres or more across nine districts, from agricultural and rural residential to rural mixed-use and heavy employment. Depending on the type, it reserves eighty, sixty or fifty percent of the land as protected open space — held in perpetuity except in a limited-term cluster — and concentrates the housing on the rest. Total density stays capped by the underlying district.

Noise. A noise study becomes mandatory for outdoor entertainment uses that “generate elevated noise levels, including but not limited to racetracks, amphitheaters, concert venues, outdoor music stages, fairgrounds, and similar facilities” — and for industrial uses. Outdoor theaters get their own standards: amplified sound off between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m., sound sources set back at least thirty feet from the nearest property line.

Wildfire, which is on a separate track. Appendix E was adopted by the Board on June 23 through Resolution 26-202, a week before Colorado’s statewide Wildfire Resiliency Code took effect on July 1, and the draft states that “no additional revisions will be made to Appendix E content.” It applies to land in the wildland-urban interface that lies outside the boundaries of a fire district, and exempts parcels of thirty-five acres or more carrying a single home that does not abut a residential or commercial area. The county’s planning director wrote in October that the wildfire work “will be completed independently of the overall Land Development Code update to meet state-required timelines,” and the draft repeats it. Which body enforces the state code on interface land inside the Tri-Lakes Monument, Black Forest and Donald Wescott fire districts is a question the draft does not reach.

How to Weigh In

The consolidated draft sits on a public annotation site where any reader may attach a comment to a specific page. Comments were still being logged there in the last days of August, on subjects from dark-sky lighting to well setbacks to the missing convenience-store definition. The county has not published a closing date for that window.

The county has now posted that schedule. When this article was first published on August 30 its events page read “No events at the moment,” which fell short of the county’s own commitment, in its August 2024 code assessment, that “meeting dates and times will be finalized at least one month in advance of each round of community and stakeholder engagement and updated on the project website events page.” Six meetings are now listed, the first of them on Thursday. One of them is in Monument.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage: Buc-ee’s Tries the Back Door, on the administrative determination that opened the classification question · Is a Buc-ee’s a “Convenience Store”?, on the July 2026 non-determination · Buc-ee’s Appeals, on the appeal to the commissioners · Call It a Truck Stop, on the opposition group’s own classification analysis · At Highway 83 and Walker Road, on the July rezoning vote · Permission Granted, on the board’s land-use record.

The draft and the project: LDC Modules 1 & 2 consolidated draft, July 14, 2026 · LDC Update documents page · LDC Issues Identification and Annotated Outline (code assessment), August 2024 · project events page.

The code in force: Chapter 1, definitions · Chapter 2, administration, including § 2.1.3 Master Plan Advisory · Chapter 3, Table 3-1 district list · Chapter 4 § 4.4, obsolete zoning districts · Table 5-1, principal uses · Chapter 8 § 8.4.7, water supply standards.

County record: Board determination on the proposed Buc-ee’s use, August 27, 2026 · 2026 hearings schedule · code amendments not yet codified · Planning and Community Development wildfire mitigation policy letter, October 7, 2025.

State law and the wildfire code: Colorado Wildfire Resiliency Code Board · C.R.S. § 29-20-303, adequate water supply for development · C.R.S. § 37-90-137, Denver Basin aquifer life.

Methodology

Every characterization of the draft in this article comes from reading the document itself. The Independent obtained the consolidated Modules 1 and 2 draft as published on the county’s annotation site — 516 pages — and read it in full, along with the August 2024 code assessment, 26 pages. Provisions in the code now in force were read on the county’s Municode library rather than summarized from earlier reporting.

Two cautions on the tables. The draft’s use tables print their column headings sideways, which defeats ordinary text extraction; the entries reported here were taken from the tables’ cell positions and checked against the pages rendered as images. And Municode carries the Land Development Code as codified through February 2024. Three amendments adopted since — on fire and wildfire mitigation, natural medicine and special district policies — are listed by the county as not yet codified; their adoption dates and the fire provisions discussed here were checked against the county’s records, but not every provision of each amendment was reviewed.

Statements about what the draft does not contain were tested rather than assumed. The absence of C-1, C-2, M and R-4 was checked against spelling variants across the full extracted text and confirmed by reading the district summary table in the rendered pages; the absence of a convenience-store definition was confirmed by reading the alphabetical run of the definitions chapter where such an entry would fall.

When this article was first published on August 30, the county had not posted its September meeting schedule. That was established by checking the project’s events page, the project blog, the annotation site, the Planning and Community Development homepage, the department’s 2026 hearings schedule, the September 3 Planning Commission agenda, the county’s public agenda portal — searched in full text for “Land Development Code,” “LDC” and “open house” — and the county’s news releases. The schedule above was added on September 2, after the county populated its events page; the times and places are taken from that page, and were cross-checked against a county flyer circulated to residents, which differs on one end time as noted. No inquiry to the county has been sent, and nothing here reports what the county did or did not say.