El Paso County’s planning commission has voted 6-1 to recommend rejecting two rezonings that would allow apartments beside Monument Academy and the rural Walden neighborhood. The county commissioners will have the last word on July 23rd.

For the better part of four hours on June 18th, the El Paso County Planning Commission listened to residents of the Tri-Lakes area explain why a patch of rural land at the corner of Highway 83 and Walker Road should not become a cluster of apartments. Then it agreed with them. By a vote of 6-1, the commission recommended that the county commissioners deny both halves of a proposal to rezone roughly 15 acres beside Monument Academy from rural-residential to multi-dwelling use.

The lone dissenter was Commissioner Thomas Bailey. The motion to recommend denial, made by Commissioner Eric Moraes and seconded by Commissioner Mae Emrick, cited the project’s failure to meet two of the county’s approval criteria: conformance with the master plan, and compatibility with the surrounding land. Vice-chair Chris Whitney, who ran the hearing in the chairman’s absence, was blunt about his own reasoning, saying 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 all directions.” The vote is not the final word. Under Colorado law the commission only advises; the Board of County Commissioners will decide the matter at a land-use hearing on July 23rd, beginning at 9am in the auditorium of Centennial Hall in Colorado Springs.

The applications, filed as P261 and P262 by MA Infrastructure, LLC, would rezone 7.56 acres to RM-12 — up to 12 dwelling units an acre — and 7.79 acres to RM-30, up to 30 an acre, on a single parcel now zoned for one house per five acres. Together those densities would permit as many as about 324 dwelling units, largely apartments. The developer, Matt Dunston, insisted the site would hold nothing like that — not the 324 the zoning permits, and not even the roughly 240 units that had alarmed opponents. “We’re talking about a 15-acre piece that you’ve got detention ponds, parking lots, sidewalks,” he said. “There’s no way you could have that kind of density there.”

Map of the MA Subdivision rezoning at Highway 83 and Walker Road: the 15.35-acre tract with RM-30 to the north and RM-12 to the south, beside Monument Academy’s east campus.
The rezoning tract at Highway 83 and Walker Road: RM-30 to the north, RM-12 to the south, beside Monument Academy’s east campus, with the same owner’s Tract B teed up to the south. Map: The Monument Independent, from El Paso County GIS and the county file.

That distinction matters more than it first appears. A straightforward rezoning grants a property the full density of its new zone, and that entitlement attaches to the land rather than to the owner’s intentions. Mr Dunston’s assurance that he will build well below the maximum — not the 324 units the zoning would allow, nor even the 240 opponents fear — is not, on its own, enforceable; under Colorado law a promise of that kind binds a future buyer only if it is written into a condition of approval, a planned-unit development or a recorded covenant that “runs with the land.” None of those is before the county. The commissioners on July 23rd will be voting on what the zoning would permit, not on what the developer says he intends.

The applicant is represented by Vertex Consulting Services, whose team includes Nina Ruiz and Craig Dossey — until 2021 El Paso County’s own planning director, a point opponents raised pointedly during the hearing.

Opposition was close to total. Records released to The Monument Independent under the Colorado Open Records Act — after the comments had been removed from public view on the county’s planning portal — show 71 written comments on the RM-12 application and 69 on the RM-30. Every one was opposed; not a single comment supported either rezoning.

Much of the debate turned on a single word: walkability. Vertex argued that the homes would sit usefully close to the school. “It actually enhances the walkability and the connection of the neighborhood to that school,” Mr Dossey told the commission, “because now some of the residences actually can walk to the school.” Commissioners were unconvinced. Mr Moraes pressed him on what else, beyond the school, would be within walking distance — “you’ve also said, once you get outside of it, there is no walkability in that area.” Ms Emrick added that walkability “has more to do with … grocery stores in the vicinity and other things,” not just a school across the street. The geography favors the skeptics. The nearest restaurant of any kind is Bennies, a breakfast spot about 5.9 miles away by road in Monument; the nearest grocery store is a Walmart Supercenter some 6.7 miles away, with the closest full supermarket, a King Soopers, farther still. Pressed, Mr Dossey conceded the site’s walkability score “would still be quite low.”

Traffic loomed over everything. The applicant’s own traffic study, prepared by LSC Transportation Consultants in June, projects that the larger tract alone would generate about 1,931 new vehicle trips on an average weekday. The same study found that several movements at the Highway 83 and Walker Road intersection already operate at the worst possible grade — level of service “F” — during peak hours, and that the intersection as a whole is projected to fail by 2045 “with or without” the new development, absent road widening and new signal timing.

Residents put it in plainer terms. One man who lives along Highway 83 said the left-turn lane from Walker onto the highway already overwhelms under the lightest load: “If there’s more than three cars in a left-turn lane, you’re also blocking the thoroughfare, because it’s not adequate for the people we have there right now.” Another speaker, Dr Elisa Rusonis, a researcher who once directed an adolescent trauma-recovery program at the University of Maryland, told the commission it was being “asked to approve nearly 2,000 vehicle trips per day onto failing intersections,” and dismissed the study’s proposed remedies — having new residents make an “indirect left turn,” and asking the academy to stagger its bell times, which the developer cannot compel — as no real mitigation. The larger fixes, a new westbound lane on Walker Road or a full intersection rebuild, she noted, have “no funding, no design, and no timeline.”

The most lawyerly objection came from Laurel Fletcher Schow, a Woodmoor resident, who turned the county’s own analysis against the application. “Your own staff report acknowledges the mismatch,” she said, noting it found multi-dwelling housing “not supported” in the large-lot residential area surrounding the site. “Zoning is not simply a rule about what gets built,” she went on. “It is a promise about how a place changes over time. People … built their lives on the reasonable expectation that 70 years of RR-5 zoning meant something. RR-5 to RM-30 is not an adjustment to that promise. It is a reversal of it.” The request, she argued, “asks you to approve urban densities first and sort out the consequences later.”

Organized neighborhood groups echoed the theme. Harold Larson, of the Northern El Paso County Coalition of Community Associations (NEPCO), which represents homeowners’ associations covering close to 10,000 households, called the project “the tipping point. If it is approved, it sets the stage for the next 10.” Amy Phillips, a past chair of the Black Forest Land Use Committee, struck a more conciliatory note, telling the commission that “it’s not that apartments are bad, but it doesn’t belong in this spot,” and floating low-intensity commercial uses — a tree farm, say, to help reforest fire-scarred land — as an alternative. “We are willing to work with the developer,” she said.

Vertex, for its part, made the case that the site is precisely where density belongs: a rare rural parcel already served by central water and sewer, through the neighboring Walden Corporation; a “hard corner” framed by two highways, a school and a wastewater-treatment plant rather than by single-family homes; and a location the county’s master plan flags for some multi-dwelling housing. Mr Dunston, who said he and his brother have worked in the Walden area since 1986, urged the commission not to let “the process … be disrupted by disruptions.”

Mr Dunston has weathered this kind of opposition before. In 2019, when residents questioned his role in the land deal that created Monument Academy — he had served on the academy’s board, resigning in 2018, then bought the surrounding acreage from the school district and donated part of it for the campus — he dismissed the conflict-of-interest charge as “not even in the universe of impropriety,” he told the Colorado Springs Gazette at the time. At the June 18th hearing he revisited that earlier fight, calling the opposition to the school “deranged and crazy,” while taking care to add that he was not insulting the present objectors. The resistance to his current project he put down to a Nextdoor “frenzy of fear” stirred up by “people with the calculator” — though their arithmetic was sound: the figure they reached was simply the number of units the new zoning would permit.

It did not work. The commission sided, 6-1, with the neighbors. The decision now passes to the five county commissioners, who are not bound by the recommendation. As Mr Whitney reminded the room, such recommendations “are sometimes followed and sometimes they’re not.” Residents who wish to be heard will get one more chance on July 23rd.

Editor’s note on sourcing: Quotations and the account of the hearing are drawn from El Paso County’s official video recording of the June 18th meeting. The county’s official minutes and transcript had not been released at the time of publication; the quotations here were transcribed with the assistance of an AI tool, and we have made a good-faith effort to ensure their accuracy. We will review them against the official record when it becomes available and correct any discrepancies. Readers who spot an error can write to [email protected].

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Michael Christensen is the editor of The Monument Independent. He holds a BA in history and an MS in statistics, and has spent 30 years in marketing — the last 15 focused on digital marketing, data analytics,...

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1 Comment

  1. I hope they vote no on Buc-ees. What a mess that will be fir us residents on Countyline Rd. Not to mention the wildlife.

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