El Paso County’s Planning Commission recommended on Nov. 5 that commissioners deny both of MA Infrastructure’s refiled rezonings at Highway 83 and Walker Road, by seven votes to two. The applicant argued that central water, sewer and a charter school had already changed the area. Most of the commission read the county’s master plan, which asks for large lots here, and found that the requests did not fit it.
Christopher Whitney had a question about one sentence of El Paso County’s master plan. The plan allows townhomes and apartments in its Suburban Residential areas so long as they are “not the dominant development type.” How, Whitney asked the applicant’s consultant, did two parcels zoned for little else pass that test? Craig Dossey, who ran the county’s planning department for seven years before joining Vertex Consulting Services, had an answer few applicants could give. “So obviously I was a part of writing that section of the master plan,” he said. Whitney heard out his account of what the sentence was meant to do, then replied: “You had me there. I didn’t write it. I can’t argue what your intent was.”
Then he voted to recommend denial, and so did six of his colleagues. The Planning Commission recommended, 7-2, that the Board of County Commissioners turn down both requests from MA Infrastructure LLC, the company of developer Matt Dunston. One would rezone the northern 7.79 acres of the tract beside Monument Academy’s east campus to RM-12, which allows 12 homes an acre (P2612). The other would put the southern 7.56 acres in RS-5000, a district of small single-family and two-family lots (P2611). It is the third time since June that a county body has voted against denser zoning on the same 15 acres. The commission recommended denial of the earlier requests 6-1 on June 18, and commissioners denied them 3-2 on July 23. The Board takes up the new ones on Dec. 10.
How the commission split
Mae Emrick made both motions, citing the requests’ lack of conformance with the master plan. Voting with her were Whitney, Bryce Schuettpelz, Suzanne Casagrande, Jim Byers, Eric Moraes, who took part online, and the chairman, Timothy Trowbridge. Thomas Bailey, the lone dissent in June, voted no on both motions again, and Sarah Brittain Jack joined him. Jason Wulf sat on the dais without a vote.
The county’s planners took no side. Kari Parsons, the principal planner on the files, told the commission that the new applications “are separate” from those denied in July and “substantially different,” each with its own legal description. Weighing staff’s analysis against the applicant’s was “up to you,” she told them. “Staff cannot provide a recommendation for that.” Her staff report, posted Oct. 29, found that the densities the districts would allow “are significantly higher than the surrounding densities of single-family detached properties in all directions, excluding the school site.” Emrick quoted that passage before the vote.
The applicant’s case
Dossey’s argument rested on what the area already is. Walden, the subdivision east and south of the school, runs on central water and sewer, which under the county’s code makes it urban by definition, he said; its half-acre and one-acre lots are “not large lot.” The land was last zoned in 1955, when “the neighborhood was cows and farming.” The code lets a rezoning pass if the character of the neighborhood has substantially changed since the land was last zoned, and in his view it plainly had. The master plan’s call for large lots in its Black Forest/North Central priority area was “potentially a mapping error.” As for fitting in: “compatibility does not mean the same. If compatibility meant the same, none of the development in the county would ever occur.”
He argued, too, that the land would never be built to its limits. An AT&T easement and others leave 5.19 of the 7.79 northern acres buildable, he said, and 6.7 of the 7.56 southern ones. Traffic would be 51% lower than under the requests denied in July. And the school next door had already remade the corner: “the presence of Monument Academy changed everything.” Dunston, speaking after Dossey’s rebuttal, said of half-acre or one-acre lots on land between the school, Highway 83 and Walker Road that “nobody would want to live there,” and “you’d be a fool in the marketplace to try to build that.”
What the majority read
The commissioners who voted no had mostly read the same documents Dossey had, and reached a different answer. Moraes pressed on the code’s requirement that a new district be compatible with its neighbors “in all directions.” If this density could not go elsewhere in the Tri-Lakes, he asked, “how is it compatible in all directions?” The nearest RM-12 district is 5.12 miles to the west, by Interstate 25, according to the staff report. If the priority area was mapped in error, he said in deliberation, “there are other remedies”; rezoning against it is not one of them. A planned unit development, he added, would let the applicant do exactly what it wanted, under tighter design rules.
Schuettpelz did the sums on the small lots. Paired homes in RS-5000 could put “six houses on a half acre,” against one house on a half-acre lot in the densest part of Walden. He doubted, too, that the refiling should have been accepted at all. Swapping RM-30 for RS-5000 and keeping an RM-12 did not, to him, amount to the “substantial change” the code requires before a denied application may return. “So I question whether the application is even valid,” he said, before accepting that it was properly before them. Whitney called the new filing “a tweak here and a tweak there.” He gave four reasons for his vote and a fifth that is not formally among the criteria: “the quality and the quantity of opposition to these ought to count for something. Otherwise, why have public hearings?”
Byers questioned the order of things. A half-acre subdivision that Dunston plans south of the school, not yet approved, would be a natural step down in density; seeking the densest zoning first meant, Byers said, that “the applications have come in out of order.” Dossey replied that in “the game SimCity” a town grows outward from its center, and conceded, “In a perfect world, sure.” When Bailey’s turn came to speak, he began: “I don’t play SimCity. I’m not that weird.”
Trowbridge said he has lived half his life in the Black Forest area. Highway 83, he said, has long marked the boundary between Black Forest and the Tri-Lakes, and names like Walden and Shamrock Hills “are clearly intended to evoke a rural, not suburban area.” He found the requests failed both the master-plan and the compatibility criteria.
The two votes for
Bailey looked at the same map and saw “a classic kind of infill project,” an odd parcel inside the pocket of suburban development around Walden. Compatibility “is not necessarily adjacency,” he said; it is a question about “the broader area.” Brittain Jack said her grandchildren attend Monument Academy and that she had watched her granddaughter run cross-country on the trails there. “I don’t see how you can make the argument that there’s not compatibility here,” she said.
What the record shows
Three things said for the applicant do not match the county’s own files.
The first is the sewage plant. Dossey told Brittain Jack that Walden’s new treatment plant “can treat up to 110,000” gallons a day. The state’s approval of the plant’s design, dated Oct. 29 and added to the county file on Nov. 3, puts its capacity at 150,000 gallons a day. The 110,000 figure is the limit in the present plant’s permit; the county’s file on the replacement puts present flows at 32,000 to 56,000 gallons a day. The state’s letter adds that it “does not constitute approval for construction,” which waits on an engineer’s certification. Dunston told the commission, “all those approvals are granted.”
The plant’s record came up from the other side as well. Ren Trudell, a Woodmoor resident who said he spent the first 20 years of his career in water and wastewater treatment, told the commission that on the applicant’s assurances of capacity, “state and county records say otherwise.” Much of what he cited is in the record. The plant’s phosphorus limit took effect on Nov. 1, 2024, after the state had extended the deadline once at Walden’s request; on Feb. 25 the state denied the company’s request to remove the limit, and on March 30 it denied reconsideration. EPA’s compliance database flags a violation at the plant in every quarter since October 2023, though it does not list the plant in significant noncompliance. The rest checks out too. In a September filing with the state, Walden Corporation said “the existing facility remains unable to meet the limits” and asked for until Jan. 1, 2030, when it expects the new plant to come online, to comply. And a 2018 report by its engineers, JPS Engineering, put the present plant’s permitted capacity at 110,000 gallons a day, “sufficient for service to 550 single-family units,” against commitments of about 442 through the build-out of Walden Preserve 2.
The second is the intersection. Dossey said Highway 83, Highway 105 and Walker Road meet at level of service E today and that “with the development it will continue to be E, no change … they’re not failing by definition.” The applicant’s own traffic study, by LSC Transportation Consultants, rates the westbound through-and-right movement there at level of service F, the worst grade, in the morning peak, “with or without the addition of site-generated traffic.”
The third is the count. Dunston put the most the two districts could hold at 90 homes and 60, “150 max.” At the densities in the staff report, the northern parcel’s ceiling is about 93 homes and the southern parcel’s between 65 and 93, before roads and open space: 158 to 187 in all, by the Independent’s calculation. The traffic study plans for 131.
The applicant also leaned on Monument Academy as the step between Walden and the new homes. The school has stepped back from the fight. In July its board wrote to commissioners that “both applications should be denied” and that “Monument Academy is more than an adjacent property.” Asked by the Independent on Oct. 29 whether it would take a position this time, the board’s president, Lindsay Clinton, replied that “the board has chosen not to take a position regarding the refiled requests.”
The room
No one spoke in favor. Fifteen people spoke against, most of them from Walden, and many closed on a version of the same line: “Same land, same reasons to deny.” By the hearing, the county’s portal held 92 written comments on the RS-5000 request and 86 on the RM-12 request, every one opposed; the staff report, compiled a week earlier, carried 57 and 22. Trowbridge said the commission had received “a whole bunch of new comments this morning” and called a recess so that members could read them. He had been up “until like 10:30 last night” with the earlier ones.
Dunston said he counted many of the speakers as friends: “a lot of people who spoke today, I really like, and they’re good friends.” He put some of the opposition down to how opposition now organizes. “You got Nextdoor, you got Facebook neighborhood and all this stuff, and people can create websites and the biggest and highest and worst fear prevails,” he said, and good people end up “finding other reasons because they’re smart and they know how to go into chat GPT and they know how to give eloquent speeches against something.”
The Board of County Commissioners hears both requests on Dec. 10. It will hear two readings of the same 15 acres. “We’re just filling out the island,” Bailey said. Trowbridge saw it differently: “It’s not an infill to me. It’s on the edge.”
Sources & further reading
The Independent’s own coverage: At Highway 83 and Walker, One Rezoning Would Change the Test for the Next, on the intersection’s four corners and how an approval here would bear on the next request · The Walker Road Rezoning Came Back with New Numbers and the Old Argument, on the refiling and how much of the denied letters it reused · At Highway 83 and Walker Road, a Setback for Density, the commission’s 6-1 recommendation in June · Vertex Consulting Files Its Rezonings With the Department It Came From, on the applicant’s consultants
County record: P2611, RS-5000 (EDARP) · P2612, RM-12 (EDARP) · Planning Commission staff report, Oct. 29, 2026 · Planning Commission hearing video, Nov. 5, 2026 · Walden wastewater plant replacement, PPR2538 (EDARP)
State record: Walden Corporation, application to modify permit certification COX631032, September 2026 (records obtained by the Independent) · Water Quality Control Division, denial of Walden Corporation’s request to remove the phosphorus limit, Feb. 25, 2026, and order denying reconsideration, March 30, 2026 (records obtained by the Independent) · Water Quality Control Division, process design report approval, Oct. 29, 2026
Federal record: EPA ECHO, detailed facility report for the Walden wastewater plant (permit COX631032)
Methodology
This article draws on the county’s video of the Nov. 5 hearing. The recording carried no captions, so the Independent transcribed it with automatic speech recognition, using the Whisper model on its own computer. Machine transcription misrenders names, garbles figures and carries no speaker labels, so speakers were identified from the chair’s roll calls and their own introductions, names were checked against the agenda, the staff report and the county’s draft resolutions, and figures come from the county’s documents wherever the documents carry them. Quotations were checked against the recording.
Comment counts are the entries on the county’s EDARP portal for each file as of 2:40 p.m. on Nov. 5. An entry is not a person: the portal shows commenters by first name and last initial, many people commented on both requests, and a few commented more than once. The staff report’s compilation was assembled about a week earlier and holds fewer.
The plant’s compliance history comes from EPA’s ECHO database (data extracted Oct. 30, 2026), which records a violation for any quarter in which one was identified, including reporting violations, from the state’s Feb. 25 and March 30 decisions, and from Walden’s September 2026 application to the state, which the Independent obtained from the state’s public records portal.
The zoning ceilings multiply each parcel’s acreage by the densities the staff report gives for each district: 12 homes an acre for RM-12, and about 8.7 an acre for single-family lots or 12.4 for two-family homes in RS-5000. They ignore roads, easements and open space, which would lower them. They measure what the zoning would allow, not what anyone plans to build.
Using this reporting? Credit The Monument Independent and link to this article: https://monumentindependent.com/news/walker-road-rezoning-planning-commission-7-2/. Our guidelines are at Using Our Reporting.
