At Highway 83 and Walker, One Rezoning Would Change the Test for the Next

Two rezonings at a rural intersection in northern El Paso County go back to the Planning Commission on Nov. 5. Under the county’s own rules, approving them would give the next applicant at the same corner new evidence to argue from, and the next request has already been sketched: a gas station and “rural town center” on the northwest corner.

In November 2024 Shay Miles met with five county planners and engineers and a state highway official. He was, he told them, “looking to put in an offer on the property located at the Northwest quadrant of 83 and 105.” He had read the county’s master plan, and the corner looked to him “conducive” to what he called a rural town center: a convenience store and gas station, perhaps some offices and shops, and houses or apartments on the land behind.

Miles did not own the land yet. He bought the 30 acres in August 2025, and county records show nothing filed since. But the intersection where he wanted a gas station is the same one where MA Infrastructure LLC is asking the county to rezone 15 acres, for a development its traffic study puts at 131 homes, three months after commissioners turned down a denser version of the same request. The two applications are not connected. Under the county’s rezoning rules, one can still bear on the other. If the Board approves the first, its decision becomes part of the record a future applicant at the corner could cite. Nothing in the code binds the Board to follow it.

What is before the county

The land is Tract A of the MA Subdivision, on the southeast corner of State Highway 83 and Walker Road, west of Monument Academy’s east campus. MA Infrastructure is asking for two districts:

• RM-12, which allows 12 homes an acre, on 7.79 acres to the north.
• RS-5000, small-lot single-family, on 7.56 acres to the south.

MA Infrastructure is the company of developer Matt Dunston, who spoke for its earlier requests at the Planning Commission in June. Its traffic study plans 85 attached homes and apartments on the first and 46 houses and townhomes on the second. A separate planned-unit development for the company’s 19.9-acre Tract B, across Pinehurst Circle, would add 29 houses.

The tract is zoned RR-5, a five-acre district. It has been zoned for five-acre lots since Jan. 5, 1955, when the county first zoned this part of El Paso County. In July county staff found five-acre zoning on all four sides of it and the nearest RM-12 district 5.12 miles to the west, near Interstate 25.

On July 23 the Board of County Commissioners denied the company’s previous requests for RM-12 and RM-30, both on 3-2 votes. Holly Williams moved both denials, and Bill Wysong and Cory Applegate joined her. Carrie Geitner and Lauren Nelson voted against. Seven weeks later the company filed again with the lower densities now before the county. The Planning Commission hears the new requests on Nov. 5. The Board hears them on Dec. 10.

How one approval becomes the next one’s evidence

El Paso County judges every rezoning against the same section of its Land Development Code, Section 5.3.5. Before approving one, the Board must find, among other things, that:

• The request “is in general conformance with the El Paso County Master Plan … or there has been a substantial change in the character of the neighborhood since the land was last zoned.”
• The new district “is compatible with the existing and permitted land uses and zone districts in all directions.”

Both tests look at what is already around a parcel, and an approval changes what is around it. If the Board grants RM-12 at the southeast corner, the land across Walker Road and across the highway will, for the first time, sit beside a district zoned for apartments. An applicant there could point to it as a “permitted” district in one direction. It could also argue that the character of the neighborhood has changed since 1955, and cite the county’s own vote as the change. Nothing obliges the Board to accept either argument. But it would have to weigh them, on a record it had written itself.

Residents have made the same point. “Once you approve greater density, the next applicant can point to it as evidence of compatibility,” Randy Cowden told the Board during public comment on Oct. 27. Leslie Hanks, speaking at the same meeting, cited Red Rock Acres, a 2021 case in which county staff pointed to neighboring half-acre zoning to support more density next door.

The applicant’s side has already called the intersection a commercial location. At the July hearing Craig Dossey, the applicant’s planner, told the Board that “this intersection, 105 and 83, was identified in the Black Forest Plan as a commercial node.”

The four corners

Southeast. MA Infrastructure’s two tracts, still zoned RR-5, which the company is asking the county to rezone. Monument Academy’s east campus sits beside them.

Southwest. Across Highway 83 from Tract A, on the south side of Walker Road, are 39.85 acres owned by Dunston himself, in his own name. He bought them in January 2021 for $1,055,000. They are zoned RR-5, and no land-use application had been filed on them as of Oct. 29. On July 21, two days before the Board’s hearing, a company called 18460 SH 83, LLC registered with the state, giving the parcel’s address as its principal office. The county Assessor still lists Dunston as the owner.

At Miles’s 2024 meeting a county engineer explained that any development on the northwest corner would have to give up 60 feet of land along Walker Road for a future four-lane arterial. The “southern property owner” would be asked for the same when it came in. That is Dunston’s land.

The land south of Dunston’s has been looked at for rezoning too. In September 2025 the engineering firm Kimley-Horn sought the county’s early advice on rezoning Steve Rael’s 40.2 acres to RR-2.5 for 13 lots of 2.5 acres. The request assumed that emergency access “through the north property will be necessary.” The property to the north is Dunston’s.

Northwest. The 30 acres Miles now owns, an L shape that wraps the west and south sides of 10 acres held by the Reed Family Trust. At the November 2024 meeting, county planner Scott Weeks went through the county’s checklist. His spoken warning was about history rather than the plan: “Based on history as I understand it, it’s been kind of challenging to get anything more than rural residential … approved through here … this is still pretty rural in nature.” He urged Miles to talk to the neighbors.

The written checklist the county filed after the meeting was blunter: “Master Plan does not support high density and commercial development.” Nobody said that line aloud. In the meeting the planner also noted that the plan’s “minimal change” designation for the area allows for infill, “so there is acknowledgement that there might be some relationship there.” The county says comments at such meetings “are only preliminary in nature.”

The county also described the shape it would want if the project went ahead: “large lot residential on the edges to the north and the west, and then you’re really tapering down into that commercial center at the two highway intersections.”

The obstacles discussed were practical:

• Floodplain. A 100-year floodplain runs along the west side of the parcel. “We still will not allow construction in that floodplain area,” a county engineer told him. Moving the channel would need a federal map change from FEMA, a process staff described as possibly “lengthy.”
• Highway 105 access. Access onto Highway 105, as county files call Walker Road at this corner, would need a deviation from the county’s spacing rules. Miles called that “the biggest thing to overcome.” The county engineer called it “a paperwork thing” and said the county could not deny access outright.
• Water and wastewater. Still undecided. Miles proposed a commercial well and a commercial septic system or small treatment plant, and said the details would depend on “what the densities wind up being.”

Miles opened a sketch-plan file covering his 30 acres and the Reed land two days before the meeting. He never submitted the plan, and the county closed the file as expired on Dec. 3, 2025. Four months before that, he had bought the land.

Northeast. Across Walker Road from Tract A and across the highway from Miles are 20.78 acres owned by Black Forest Investors, LLC. The company was registered on Nov. 26, 2021, ten days before it bought the land from the Staley Trust for $1,358,000, with the sellers financing the sale. Its principal office is a Las Vegas business address, and no land-use application had been filed on the parcel as of Oct. 29.

The Board has overruled its commission here before

The Planning Commission advises; the Board decides. Less than a mile west of the intersection, the Colorado Pumpkin Patch asked in 2023 to raise its limit from 50 cars to 325, a special use within its RR-5 zoning, not a rezoning. On Sept. 7, 2023 the Planning Commission voted 2-5 against a motion to recommend approval, which made its recommendation denial. A week later the Board approved the request anyway, 4-0 with Longinos Gonzalez absent, in Resolution 23-318.

On Sept. 24 this year the Board approved another rezoning less than a mile south of the intersection. In the Needles rezoning, The North Ranch LLC’s land on the east side of Highway 83, beside Walden III, went from five-acre to 2.5-acre zoning (Resolution 26-322). It is a modest step down in lot size. It is also a change a future applicant could cite.

The same firm on each file

Vertex Consulting Services represented the Colorado Pumpkin Patch, filed the Needles rezoning and represents MA Infrastructure. The plan these applications are argued from was produced by the county planning department that Dossey ran, with Nina Ruiz as his planning manager. Both now run Vertex. At the 2021 hearings on that plan, residents of Black Forest asked for a firm five-acre minimum. Dossey argued against it: “The concept of this plan is to provide flexibility based upon compatibility.” The Independent described the firm’s work in September.

The case for the corner

There is an argument for commerce at this intersection, and it is older than any of these applications. The county’s 1987 Black Forest Preservation Plan said commercial projects on this stretch of the highway should serve local residents, and that those which do “should be encouraged to locate only at the intersections of Hodgen and Walker Roads with State Highway 83,” with “a rustic or rural design theme.” The same passage put suitable housing densities “on the order of one dwelling unit per acre.” The county’s 2021 master plan replaced that plan, along with its other small-area plans. The 2021 plan, in its passage on the Black Forest and north-central area, says “commercial nodes should be considered where appropriately served by the transportation network in the northern area.” The same passage says the county should “maintain existing and expand the Large-Lot Residential placetype in this area.” The school already draws traffic to the corner.

What the plans describe is a node: a cluster of local shops at a crossroads, with large lots around it. What the code tests is compatibility and change, and each approval can change the evidence on both.

The land around it

North of Walker Road, most of the large open parcels along the highway belong to one family partnership. Within a mile of Highway 83 between Walker Road and the Douglas County line, parcels of 35 acres or more cover 1,149 acres, and 817 of them belong to the Younger Family Partnership. Its two largest, of 300 and 277 acres, front the highway a quarter mile north of the intersection. In all the partnership owns 19 parcels in El Paso County, 1,777 acres. A living trust in Delores Younger’s name holds 160 acres more, and Brad and Wende Younger’s trust 80. In 2015 the county granted the partnership a variance to use its working ranch for guest and event activities.

Land like that can be held as ranch land or sold for development, and its price reflects both. Economists at Resources for the Future estimated in 2002 that in counties near cities, the prospect of future development often makes up more than half the value of farmland; Denver is among the cities whose pull shows on their national map. A rezoning nearby is one sign of which way that prospect may be moving.

How other places have handled it

In 1973 a car dealer asked Blaine County, Idaho, to rezone 12.8 acres of one-acre residential land on U.S. Highway 93 north of Hailey for commercial use. The county tabled the request until it had finished a study of the whole corridor north of Hailey, then turned it down. The dealer sued. The trial court wrote that approval “would create a ‘commercial island’ until the ‘dominoes’ did their thing,” and Idaho’s Supreme Court upheld the denial in 1977. The dealer had paid $10,000 an acre for land the previous owner bought in 1961 for $87 an acre, and which the trial court found was worth about $5,000 an acre as zoned. “The plaintiff gambled and the gamble lost,” it wrote.

Flathead County, Montana, shows how an old approval can count later. In 1990 the county adopted a plan for a golf course, hotel, shops and housing on land along U.S. 93 outside Kalispell, and zoned it to match. Nothing was built. “The Stillwater Plan never materialized, but the planning and zoning amendments remained in effect,” the Montana Supreme Court later wrote. In 2003 a mall developer asked to enlarge the plan area from 340 acres to 481, and the county agreed. Neighbors sued, and in 2006 the court held that “extending a preexisting zone classification to include a larger area does not constitute spot zoning.” The old zoning was one part of its reasoning: by then 36 businesses, among them Costco, Target and Home Depot, surrounded the site. The court also sent part of the case back for a closer look at how the county had handled public comment.

Colorado’s Supreme Court has gone the other way on a density step inside a large-lot area. In 1957 Arapahoe County halved the minimum lot size on 25 acres, from 2.5 acres to 1.25, in an area otherwise zoned in tracts of 2.5 to 20 acres. The court threw the change out in 1959, partly over a defective public notice and an uncertain description of the land, and wrote: “It is obvious that the re-zoning granted is not in harmony with the present area development.”

Douglas County, the next county north on Highway 83, answers the question in its master plan. The 2040 plan puts Franktown’s shops and village housing “at the junction of Highways 83 and 86” and says: “Expansion of the Franktown Village Area boundaries is not supported by this Plan.” The county’s older urban islands, Roxborough, Castle Pines Village and The Pinery, were zoned as early as the 1970s. The plan names them Separated Urban Areas, says “the creation and designation of new SUAs is inconsistent with this Plan,” allows the existing ones to grow only for “a compelling public benefit,” and limits land beside them to low-intensity uses such as open space, agriculture, recreation and homes.

Blaine County looked at the whole corridor before it ruled on one parcel, and Douglas County drew Franktown’s edge in its plan. In El Paso County the question comes up one application at a time.

What happens next

The Planning Commission hears P2612 and P2611 at 9 a.m. on Nov. 5 at the Pikes Peak Regional Development Center, 2880 International Circle. Written comments must reach the county through its development-review portal no later than the day before the hearing. The Board of County Commissioners hears the requests at 9 a.m. on Dec. 10 at Centennial Hall. Every public comment filed on the two files so far is marked as opposed: 64 on the RS-5000 request and 56 on the RM-12 request as of Oct. 29. Some people have commented more than once.

On Oct. 29 the Independent sent questions to Vertex Consulting Services, which represents MA Infrastructure; to Matt Dunston; to Steve Rael and Kimley-Horn, his engineers on the 2025 request; and to Monument Academy’s board. An email to Shay Miles, sent to the address on his county filings, was returned as undeliverable. The Independent will add any responses to this article.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage: At Highway 83 and Walker Road, a Setback for Density · At Highway 83 and Walker Road, a Test of the County’s Own Rules · After the Denial: What the County’s Vote Does and Doesn’t Settle · Denied in July, Walker Road Rezoning Returns as RM-12 and RS-5000 · Vertex Consulting Files Its Rezonings With the Department It Came From · A Yes Vote with a Warning: The Needles Rezoning Goes to Commissioners · Needles Highway 83 Approved 3–1, on the Criterion That Denied Walker Road · The Walker Road Rezoning Came Back with New Numbers and the Old Argument · Five Acres at a Time: Sixty Years of Zoning in Black Forest.

County record: P2611 and P2612 project files (EDARP) · July 23, 2026 Board resolutions 26-235 and 26-236 · Resolution 26-322 (Needles Highway 83) · Resolution 23-318 (Colorado Pumpkin Patch) and the Sept. 7, 2023 Planning Commission minutes · EA24125 early-assistance file: brief description, planning and engineering checklists, meeting video · sketch-plan file for Highway 83 and Highway 105 · EA25104 (18220 Highway 83) · El Paso County Land Development Code, Section 5.3.5 · Your El Paso County Master Plan (2021) and the Planning Commission staff report on its adoption (MP-21-001).

Property and business records: El Paso County Assessor parcel data (Oct. 27, 2026) · El Paso County Clerk and Recorder index · Colorado Secretary of State business records.

Public comment: Laurel Schow, public-record submittal for the Oct. 27, 2026 Board meeting.

Elsewhere: Dawson Enterprises, Inc. v. Blaine County, 98 Idaho 506 (1977) · North 93 Neighbors, Inc. v. Board of County Commissioners of Flathead County, 2006 MT 132 · Holly Development, Inc. v. Board of County Commissioners, 140 Colo. 95 (1959) · Douglas County 2040 Comprehensive Master Plan, Section 2, Urban Land Use and Section 4, Rural Communities · Plantinga, Lubowski and Stavins, “The Effects of Potential Land Development on Agricultural Land Prices”, Resources for the Future Discussion Paper 02-11 (2002).

Methodology

Parcel owners, acreage and sale prices come from the El Paso County Assessor’s parcel file of Oct. 27, 2026; corner locations and distances come from the county’s parcel map, measured in a straight line from the intersection to each parcel’s nearest edge. The 1,149-acre figure is the recorded acreage of every El Paso County parcel of 35 acres or more lying at least partly within a mile of Highway 83 between Walker Road and the Douglas County line, as mapped by the Independent. Company formation dates and addresses come from the Colorado Secretary of State.

The quotations from the November 2024 early-assistance meeting and the July 23 hearing were first transcribed by automatic speech recognition, which misrenders names, garbles figures and carries no speaker labels. Speakers were identified from the meetings’ introductions and the video, and every quoted line was checked against the county’s recordings, as were the quotations from the Board’s Oct. 27 meeting. The written checklists quoted are the county’s own documents. Public comment counts were read from the county’s development-review portal on Oct. 29.

The account of how one approval affects the next is the Independent’s reading of Section 5.3.5. The code does not bind the Board to any prior decision.

Using this reporting? Credit The Monument Independent and link to this article: https://monumentindependent.com/news/walker-road-rezoning-four-corners/. Our guidelines are at Using Our Reporting.