Three Governments, One Map: The Independent Launches TriLakes Growth

Following one development project across the Tri-Lakes can mean checking three unrelated government systems. Following the region meant there was nowhere to look at all. TriLakes Growth, a publication of The Monument Independent launched in beta this month, indexes all three into one public record of what is being proposed, where it sits, and how far along it has got. It is free, carries no advertising and asks for no account.

The Tri-Lakes is one place to the people who live in it and three places to the governments that regulate it. A subdivision on Leather Chaps Drive is a Town of Monument case. A sign application on County Line Road is a Palmer Lake agenda item. A rezoning in Black Forest is an El Paso County file. Each government keeps a competent record of its own work. None of them keeps a record of anyone else’s.

Nor do the three records resemble one another. El Paso County runs a searchable review system, EDARP, that logs every event on a file and posts the documents alongside. The Town of Monument publishes its cases as an ArcGIS story map, a scrolling narrative of the applications its planning department considers significant. The Town of Palmer Lake publishes neither a project list nor a map: its land-use business exists as items inside meeting agendas and PDF packets, findable only by reading them. A resident who wants to know what is being built near a particular road has to know, first, which of the three is in charge of it.

One map, three jurisdictions

The clearest illustration is the map, because until now there was not one. El Paso County publishes a Planning Projects Dashboard, and it is useful, but by its own account it maps unincorporated county — its welcome screen adds that the dataset is “not intended to be comprehensive” and directs anyone wanting the full list back to EDARP. The two towns sitting inside the region it draws are blank space on it. Monument’s map covers Monument. Palmer Lake has no map. The combined view did not exist because no government has a reason to build it.

The idea came from a reader. Dawn Shels, writing in the Independent’s Facebook group, asked that the county’s dashboard be put alongside the tracker so people could see both. The county dashboard is now linked on the site. The map goes further than the request: pins are colored by jurisdiction, cluster as you zoom out, and carry the project’s status, its parcels, the land owner and the date of the last activity. A gold ring means a hearing is scheduled. As of September 10th, 214 of the 263 tracked projects are placed on it; the rest are Monument pre-applications, Palmer Lake agenda items, and county files whose parcels the state mapping layer does not carry.

What sits on a project page

Take the county file at the center of the Buc-ee’s argument. ADM264 shows the applicant, Buc-ee’s EPCO, LLC; the county project manager assigned to it; the date it was created, June 18th; seventeen timeline entries running from the file number’s assignment to the return of review comments; and eleven filed documents, each linking to the county’s own copy. It lists the two parcels, each linked to the assessor’s record for it, and names the land owner those records show — CSMS Management LLC — with a link through to that company’s registration with the Colorado Secretary of State. Where a corporate owner cannot be matched to a state filing with confidence, no link is offered rather than a wrong one.

Ownership is the part with the least competition. Land ownership comes from the El Paso County Assessor’s published parcel data and is re-imported monthly. When a tracked parcel changes hands, the change is written onto the project’s timeline and appears in the site’s activity feed. On August 13th the feed recorded parcel 5222000025 in Black Forest passing from an individual owner to Timbers of Black Forest Subdivision 2025 LLC — a single transfer that landed on three separate project records at once. A parcel quietly changing owners is often the first public sign that a project has started moving again.

What an index turns up

Some of what the tracker collects is already public and simply unread. The Town of Monument’s project list carries pre-application entries for Costco, logged in May 2026, and Chick-fil-A, logged in June. A pre-application is an early conversation with town staff and commits nobody to anything; both entries are the town’s own, not this newspaper’s reporting. They have nonetheless sat in public view for months without much notice.

Scale is easier to see when the filings are gathered. Flying Horse North has six separate files in the system, five of them still open, which read as unrelated applications in the county’s list and as one cluster on the map. And the two Buc-ee’s tracks now diverge in a way that a single-jurisdiction view would hide: on the county side, the appeal of ADM264 goes to the commissioners on August 27th; on the town side, the Palmer Lake record shows the annexation request withdrawn, with the Board of Trustees convening executive session on August 13th for legal advice on where the discussions stand.

The limits of a beta

The site indexes and organizes; it does not replace anything. Every project page links to the government’s own file, and that file is the record. The compilation runs on a schedule — county and Monument records daily, Palmer Lake weekly, ownership monthly — so entries can lag the source systems, and automatic classification can get a project’s type or status wrong.

One gap is worth naming plainly. Hearing dates are parsed out of the status text the governments publish, which works well for Monument and Palmer Lake and poorly for the county, whose hearings are scheduled through a separate agenda system the tracker does not yet read. County hearings are therefore under-represented in the upcoming-hearings box until that is added. A weekly tracker of newly licensed businesses and newly registered entities is built but unpublished: it starts from zero by design, because the records cannot establish when an already-operating business began, and it goes live when the first genuinely new listings appear.

Corrections and tips go to [email protected], as they do for everything else this newspaper publishes.

Updated, September 10, 2026: the figures above have been refreshed; when this article was published on August 13th the tracker held 189 Tri-Lakes projects with 158 on the map. A second change is more than an update. A gap between the tracker’s internal coverage boundaries was discarding county filings in the Highway 83 corridor north of Black Forest without recording that it had done so — eight active files, among them both Monument Academy infrastructure rezoning applications (P2611 and P2612) and the Monument Academy site development plan addition. A reader who searched this tracker for those files on the day this article was published would not have found them, and nothing in the article said so. The eight have been restored, the boundary has been closed, and the tracker now logs every record it excludes so that the next such gap is visible within a day rather than a month. The omission was found because a reader sent the file numbers in and asked why they were missing.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage: Buc-ee’s Hearing Set for Aug. 27 — the county appeal of ADM264, the file used above to show what a project page holds · Monument Council Asks the County to Reject Buc-ee’s Zoning Claim — a town letter docketed into a county file, an example of the cross-jurisdiction paper trail the tracker was built to follow · A Colorado Springs Councilman Told a Forum on Civility That Palmer Lake Was Steamrolled. Palmer Lake Won. — the Palmer Lake annexation history behind the record that now reads withdrawn.

The tracker: TriLakes Growth · the projects map · major projects · this week · resources · about and methodology · RSS.

The government records it indexes: El Paso County EDARP · the county’s Planning Projects Dashboard · the Town of Monument’s Development Review Projects map · Town of Palmer Lake agendas and packets · El Paso County Assessor parcel data · the assessor’s property search.

Methodology

Counts in this article were queried from the tracker’s own database on September 10, 2026: 263 projects inside the Tri-Lakes filter, 192 of them still on their government’s active list, 214 with a location on the map, 497 parcels carried with assessor ownership on 383 of them, and roughly 10,400 timeline entries and 2,890 linked documents attached to those projects. Every one of these numbers moves daily as filings open and close; they are a snapshot, not a standing claim. A further 85 county records sit in the database unclassified — the mapping layers carry no geometry for their parcels, so the tracker cannot place them inside or outside the region and does not display them. They are excluded from every figure above and are being worked through by hand.

Projects reach the tracker geographically: El Paso County’s active list carried 700 applications county-wide at the tracker’s most recent county sync, on August 12th, and the tracker keeps those falling in the 80132, 80133, 80921 and 80908 ZIP codes, testing the ZIP first and the parcel’s location second. Monument records come from the town’s published project list, Palmer Lake items from published agendas and packets. The Costco and Chick-fil-A entries are the Town of Monument’s own listings at pre-application stage and are described as such; this newspaper has not independently reported on either project, and neither entry should be read as confirmation that either company will build. The Buc-ee’s project page, the Palmer Lake annexation record, the map, the digest, the resources page and the methodology page were each opened and read on August 13, 2026 before being described here.

The Independent owns TriLakes Growth outright, which is a conflict worth stating: this article is an announcement of a product this newspaper built, and it has been written to describe the thing’s limits as fully as its uses. No one was asked for comment for this article, and none is claimed.