Two land trusts have signed an open letter against the Buc-ee’s proposed for Monument Hill. Neither can stop it. What they can do is make it harder to decide quietly—because one of them holds the paper on the 17,700 acres across the road.

Another voice has entered the long argument over the travel center proposed at Interstate 25 and County Line Road. This one owns the view.

In an open letter published this month under the title “The True Cost of Buc-ee’s,” Rebecca Jewett, president and chief executive of Palmer Land Conservancy, and Erik Glenn, executive director of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust, argue that a 24-hour travel center at the top of Monument Hill would lean on things that do not stop at a property line. “A shared aquifer, a regional highway, a migration corridor,” they write: “these don’t stop at a parcel line, and neither should the public’s right to understand how a project of this scale will affect them.” They are careful about what they are not asking for. They do not ask El Paso County to override the site’s zoning—they say so explicitly. They ask only that it not decide the matter quietly. Whatever comes next, they write, “decisions of this magnitude should not occur behind closed doors.”

The letter is advocacy, and does not pretend otherwise. It calculates no water draw and models no traffic; its sharpest line—that the project would “reduce the value” of the conservation investments made by the citizens of El Paso and Douglas counties and the state of Colorado—is an institutional judgment rather than a measured finding. Nor is it aimed at a docket: no hearing on the appeal has been noticed, so there is not yet a record to file it into. It was written for the public instead.

What separates it from a year of public objection is standing. The signatories hold deeds and easements. One of them is legally responsible, in perpetuity, for the land immediately north of the site.

From city parks to a regional conservancy

Palmer Land Conservancy is the older of the two, and the one whose work is concentrated in this region. It did not begin as a countervailing force to development. It began as a helper to a parks department. Founded in 1977 as the volunteer-led William J. Palmer Parks Foundation, its original purpose was to help the City of Colorado Springs’ parks and recreation department identify and acquire new public parks and open spaces. It became Palmer Land Trust in 2000, and Palmer Land Conservancy in 2020, each renaming an admission that the work had outgrown the old description.

It now counts 138,000 protected acres—by its own reckoning the 17th-largest land trust in the country—including 20 public parks and open spaces. The work runs under four headings: Land for People, for parks and urban green space; Land for Food, for farms and ranches; Land for Nature, for wildlife, biodiversity, waterways and wetlands; and Water for Life, the unglamorous arithmetic of dividing western water between cities and irrigators.

The portfolio contains a good deal of what people in Colorado Springs think of as simply there: Red Rock Canyon, Section 16, Ute Valley. Nearer Monument, the conservancy helped permanently protect 189 acres inside the Forest Lakes development—open space and wildlife habitat above an 867-acre residentially zoned complex slated for some 400 homes, about a mile from access to Pike National Forest. Palmer lists the project as completed, and describes itself there as having “partnered with the developer.” That is the organization’s own answer to the charge that land trusts exist to stop growth. The subdivision proceeds. The ridge above it does not.

Ms Jewett has led the organization since 2014. She holds a master’s in environmental and natural-resources law and policy from the University of Denver and a political-science degree from Colorado College. A volunteer board oversees the work; it is currently chaired by William “BJ” Hybl Jr., president and chief operating officer of Griffis/Blessing, a Colorado Springs real-estate and property-management firm.

The legal entity is still the William J. Palmer Parks Foundation, tax-exempt since 1978. Its most recent federal filing, for the fiscal year ended June 2025, reports $3.41m in revenue, $3.23m in expenses and $7.94m in net assets, with contributions supplying 86% of the income. By the standards of the interests that build travel centers, this is a small organization. Its leverage is not money. It is paper that never expires.

The neighbor to the north

Mr Glenn’s organization is not commenting on the neighborhood. It is the neighborhood. The Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust holds and enforces the conservation easement over Greenland Ranch, whose southern boundary is the northern horizon from the proposed Buc-ee’s site.

A conservation easement is frequently misunderstood in the Tri-Lakes, so it is worth stating plainly what one is and is not. It does not transfer ownership. It does not, by itself, open private ground to the public. It is a permanent legal agreement that extinguishes future development rights while the land stays privately owned and—in Greenland’s case—privately worked as a cattle ranch. Someone has to hold that agreement and enforce it against every subsequent owner, forever. Since 2020, that someone has been CCALT.

The Greenland easement covers more than 17,700 acres east of Interstate 25 in Douglas County, on the oldest operating cattle ranch on the Front Range. It dates to July 26th 2000, when the cable magnate John Malone bought the ranch to take it off the market; in his own account he paid $55m for the land and contributed a further $23m, alongside the state and The Conservation Fund, to buy the easements. Douglas County simultaneously acquired roughly 3,600 acres west of the interstate and opened it as Greenland Open Space. The public paid its share: the conservation was underwritten by a dedicated Douglas County sales tax and by what was at the time the largest grant Great Outdoors Colorado had ever made, a record that stood for eighteen years. That is the public investment the open letter says a travel center would devalue. The phrase is not rhetorical. The easement passed to CCALT in July 2020 from its original co-holders, The Conservation Fund and Douglas County. Three years later the trust also took on the easement over the adjoining 6,409-acre JA Ranch at Larkspur—better than 24,000 contiguous acres of working ranch, under one trust’s enforcement, forming the green gap that keeps Denver and Colorado Springs from becoming a single conurbation.

CCALT was created in 1995 by the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association—the first land trust formed by a state livestock association, a model since copied in six other states. It now reports work with more than 500 families across more than 840,000 acres. Its interest in Monument Hill is therefore not sentimental and not abstract. It is the party obliged to keep the ground across County Line Road undeveloped after everyone now arguing is dead.

As this newspaper has reported, however, the easement stops where the deed stops. It can hold tens of thousands of acres against conventional development to the north. It has nothing whatever to say about what El Paso County permits to the south. Water, light and traffic are less punctilious about the line.

A public process is coming—for one question

There is a procedural distinction here worth keeping straight, because much of the public argument has run past it.

Buc-ee’s is not currently asking the county to approve a development. Its appeal, filed on July 2nd, puts one narrow question to the Board of County Commissioners: whether a roughly 74,000-square-foot travel center with 120 fueling positions, as the company’s own filings describe it, is a “convenience store” under the Land Development Code—or similar enough to one to be allowed in the parcel’s C-1 zone, a district the county’s own explainer describes as “obsolete.” As this newspaper reported when the determination came out, the comparables table the county’s own staff assembled—26 convenience-store and gas-station approvals countywide—topped out near 5,500 square feet, and not one of them sat in C-1.

Meggan Herington, the county’s planning and community development executive director, concluded on July 1st that she could not tell. The appeal moves the question to the commissioners, whom the code names the “ultimate interpreter” of what its use categories mean. The county says the appeal will be heard in public. It was not on the July 23rd land-use agenda, and as of July 25th no date had been announced. Whatever the board decides settles classification and nothing else: not grading, drainage, access, utilities, lighting, landscaping or hours of operation.

That makes the letter’s warning about closed doors half retrospective and half prospective. Buc-ee’s first route—an administrative determination decided in writing by one appointed official—required no notice to neighbors and no hearing at all. Its appeal will get one. The questions the conservancies actually raise would arrive later still, in reviews that only happen if the commissioners first decide the use is permitted.

Some of those questions, meanwhile, are being answered elsewhere without a hearing anywhere. In March the Colorado Division of Water Resources approved two wells for the property, one into the Denver aquifer and one into the Arapahoe, together permitted to withdraw nearly 33 acre-feet—about 10.7m gallons—a year. Earthmoving equipment has been working the site under a separate grading permit; the open letter notes that “bulldozers and excavators have been seen on the site” while officials send “mixed signals.” None of that required anyone to decide what the building is.

None of this settles the merits, and conservation work north of County Line Road confers no authority over private commercial property south of it. What the letter changes is the composition of the argument. Two organizations whose entire occupation is negotiating the boundary between what an owner may do and what the neighbors must live with have now taken a position, and they are against the project as proposed.

Their more durable point is the smaller one. A travel center on Monument Hill will be decided one way or the other. What the letter asks is that it be decided where people can watch.

Related Monument Independent coverage

Sources & further reading

Methodology

This article is based on the open letter itself, the primary organizational and regulatory records listed below, and this newspaper’s continuing file on case ADM264. Figures describing the proposed travel center—roughly 74,000 square feet, 120 fueling positions—come from Buc-ee’s own appeal filings and the county’s administrative determination record for case ADM264, and match the figures this newspaper has reported and confirmed throughout its coverage of the project. Financial figures for Palmer Land Conservancy are taken from the organization’s most recent publicly available Form 990 as posted by ProPublica. Acreage and transaction figures for Greenland Ranch and the JA Ranch are as reported by Great Outdoors Colorado, the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust and, for the purchase price, Mr Malone’s published memoir.

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