Is a Buc-ee’s a “Convenience Store”? The County Says It Cannot Tell

The administrative shortcut Buc-ee’s chose has produced no answer. El Paso County’s planning director says she cannot determine whether the proposed 74,000-square-foot travel plaza on Monument Hill is a “convenience store”—so she has neither approved it nor denied it. The one party who can appeal the non-ruling is Buc-ee’s itself.

On July 1st the county gave its answer to the question the whole Buc-ee’s fight had turned on—and the answer was that it has none. In a seven-page letter to Buc-ee’s EPCO, LLC, Meggan Herington, El Paso County’s planning and community development director, wrote that the county “cannot determine” whether the proposed travel center qualifies as a “convenience store,” or is similar enough to an allowed use to be built in the parcel’s C-1 zone. The ruling on file ADM264 is neither an approval nor a denial. It is, in effect, a shrug with legal force.

That outcome upends the strategy behind the filing. As this newspaper explained, an administrative determination is the quiet route: a written interpretation by the director, with no public hearing and no vote by the elected commissioners. Buc-ee’s had asked the county to classify a 74,000-square-foot plaza at Beacon Lite and County Line roads, beside Interstate 25, as a humble “convenience store”—a use its commercial zoning already permits by right. Instead of a yes, it got a cannot-say.

Why the county balked

The trouble, the letter makes plain, is the county’s own definition. A “convenience store,” the code reads, is “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—and it “may include retail sale of gasoline.” Ms Herington notes that when the definition was rewritten in 2007, the county added both the gasoline clause and that telling phrase about “the neighborhood in which it is located.” A destination built to draw travelers off the interstate is an awkward fit for a store defined by the neighborhood around it.

Staff did the homework. They reviewed 26 convenience-store and gas-station approvals across the county, concentrating on those cleared since 2007 under the current definition, and compared the proposal with the other uses C-1 allows. The Buc-ee’s, the letter concludes, combines “characteristics, impacts, and design elements that are mixed and uncommon” in unincorporated El Paso County, and cannot be filed tidily under any single definition. More pointedly still: there are “no previous convenience store approvals within the C-1 zoning district on record” at all. There is no precedent for even an ordinary convenience store in this obsolete zone—let alone a Texas-sized one.

It is not only the county that draws the line smaller. NACS, the convenience-store industry’s own trade association, sorts stores by size, from the sub-800-square-foot “kiosk” up through the “traditional” store of about 2,500 square feet to its largest recognized format, the “hyper convenience store,” at 4,000 to 5,000 square feet. Buc-ee’s proposed 74,000 square feet is roughly fifteen times that—bigger, by an order of magnitude, than the biggest thing the industry itself is willing to call a convenience store.

The back door neither opens nor closes

For a project that chose the administrative route precisely to avoid a public reckoning, a non-determination is a curious result. The shortcut did not deliver the classification Buc-ee’s wanted; nor did it hand opponents the denial they wanted. It simply leaves the central question—what, for zoning purposes, a Buc-ee’s actually is—unresolved.

What it does do is hand the next move to Buc-ee’s. Under the code, an administrative determination may be appealed within 30 days, and such appeals are heard by the Board of County Commissioners. But the right to appeal belongs only to an “aggrieved party,” which the county defines as the owner of the property in question. That is Buc-ee’s. The residents who filed more than 80 objections still have no standing to appeal; the company that wanted to skip the commissioners is now the only party that can take the matter to them. To begin, the letter directs the applicant to contact the county’s Kylie Bagley.

Opponents claim a win

Buc-ee’s critics treated the letter as a victory. Integrity Matters, a local watchdog, declared that “the beaver does not fit in the box,” arguing that the classification was only ever “difficult” if the goal was to squeeze a 30-acre travel center into a definition written for the place one grabs milk and a lottery ticket. Residents thanked Ms Herington for a determination that, in one organizer’s words, used “the County’s own code” to halt the administrative path without a dramatic rejection. Their point is that a plan built around a fast administrative “yes” did not get one.

It is worth being precise about what the ruling is not. It is not a denial, and it does not end the project; the county itself stresses that the determination “is not an approval or denial of a development application.” Buc-ee’s, which has said little throughout, has not signaled whether it will appeal, refile, or wait.

The determination also lands amid wider scrutiny of how large projects move through the county. Vertex Consulting Services—the firm that filed the boundary-line adjustment reshaping the Buc-ee’s parcel—was founded by Craig Dossey, the county’s former planning director; the same firm represents a contested rezoning at Highway 83 and Walker Road that the Planning Commission recommended denying, 6-1, and that reaches the commissioners on July 23rd. In a letter to the Colorado Springs Gazette, a Monument resident argued the county’s process too easily “makes the implausible sound procedural.” Opponents also say a lawsuit is already under way challenging the parcel’s boundary-line adjustment and grading permit; this newspaper has not yet independently confirmed that filing.

What happens next

The county says it cannot know the next step until the 30-day window—running from July 1st—closes or an appeal is filed. Three paths are open to Buc-ee’s: appeal the non-determination to the commissioners, and make its case in the public hearing it had hoped to avoid; file a fresh land-use application, such as a rezoning or special-use permit, which would carry its own hearing and, opponents estimate, might not reach the Planning Commission before September; or walk away, as it did at Palmer Lake.

The irony is hard to miss. Buc-ee’s asked one official to settle one question quietly, in up to fourteen business days. The county took about eight of them—and answered that it cannot settle the question at all. Every route the ruling leaves open now leads back toward the elected board, and the public hearing, that the administrative route was built to sidestep.

Sources

• El Paso County Planning & Community Development, ADM264 determination letter (Meggan Herington to Buc-ee’s EPCO, LLC, July 1, 2026), 7 pp.; outcome summarized on the county’s Buc-ee’s Update page.
• El Paso County, “Buc-ee’s Update” page — includes the county’s own FAQ: “Did the County deny Buc-ee’s? No.”
• El Paso County EDARP, file ADM264.
• El Paso County Land Development Code, §§2.2.4, 5.3.6 and 1.15 (definitions).
• NACS, “What Is a Convenience Store?” — store-format size definitions (kiosk to hyper).
• Integrity Matters — statement on the determination (July 1, 2026).
• Colorado Springs Gazette, Letter to the Editor, Laurel Schow, “Process Should Answer To Residents” (July 2, 2026).
• The Monument Independent, “Buc-ee’s tries the back door” (June 23, 2026) (internal link — no UTM).

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