On a shelf in the county’s development-review archive there is a document that describes the corner of County Line Road and Interstate 25 in some detail. It runs to 172 pages, it was adopted by the El Paso County Planning Commission on an 8–1 vote in October 1999, and it says that major commercial centers and off-ramp service businesses should be discouraged at that intersection. It stopped being part of the county’s master plan on May 26, 2021. We think that was a mistake, and we think the county’s own neighbors demonstrate why.
Start with what the document actually said, because the specifics are the argument.
The 2000 Tri-Lakes Comprehensive Plan divided the planning area into sub-areas. Sub-Area #2 was called Elephant Rock — roughly 1,560 acres bounded by County Line Road on the north, Interstate 25 on the east, the Town of Monument on the south and the Town of Palmer Lake on the west. That is the ground a Buc-ee’s travel center is proposed to occupy.
The plan was not vague about it. It said so three times, and it got blunter each time.
On what belonged at the interchange:
“No additional commercial development is contemplated for the area but small local service businesses may be desirable in the vicinity of Interstate 25 and County Line Road. Major commercial center and off-ramp service businesses should be discouraged at that intersection.“
On the ground running north from Beacon Lite Road, in the sub-area’s land use scenario:
“Major commercial centers and heavy industrial uses are not appropriate in the area adjacent to Beacon Lite between Waconda Way and County Line Road.”
And on why, in the section’s closing summary:
“It is considered highly desirable to retain the rural residential character of the area rather than to allow semi-urban or urban densities or other non-residential or multi-family land uses to impact the overall character of the Elephant Rock Sub-Area.”
And it was not written in ignorance of the zoning. The same section records that land between Beacon Lite Road and I-25 was already “zoned commercial and/or industrial.” The county knew what the map said. It wrote down what it wanted there anyway.
What the plan was, and was not
Two honest qualifications, and we would rather make them ourselves than have them made for us.
The first is that this plan never bound anybody. The county’s Land Development Code says so in terms: § 2.1.3 declares the master plan “advisory only,” and preserves the commissioners’ “considerable discretion in deciding how to apply the Master Plan in making land use decisions.” That language was adopted in June 2016. Nothing the Board did on August 27 was unlawful, and we have not argued otherwise at any point in this series.
The second is that the plan was not a blanket refusal. Its own land use scenario says that “office, light industrial and multifamily” uses near the I-25 corridor would be appropriate, provided they were “incorporated into a natural-like setting.” What it discouraged was a specific thing in a specific place: a major commercial center at that interchange.
That distinction is the whole point. Somebody once sat down and thought carefully about one intersection, and wrote down a judgment about it that a reader can still follow twenty-six years later. That is what small area planning is.
The document named its own protection. The county never built it.
Here is the part that should trouble anyone who cares whether plans mean anything.
The Elephant Rock section identifies what was supposed to safeguard the sub-area. “The influence of the Interstate 25 Visual Overlay,” it says, “will need to be carefully considered to preserve the rural residential character of the Sub-Area.” Chapter V of the same plan proposed that overlay for the I-25 corridor, with guiding principles that included discouraging “conspicuously large surface parking areas.” Proposed action VOL.1.10 directed the county to “incorporate provisions for an I-25 Visual Overlay Zone as part of the El Paso County Land Development Code.”
It never happened. The current code establishes exactly five overlay districts — for commercial aviation, general aviation, rural land use plans, high-rise buildings and wind and solar generation — and not one of them is an I-25 overlay.
So the plan identified the corner, named the tool that would protect it, and instructed the county to write that tool into law. The county did not, for twenty-two years. Then, in 2021, it retired the plan.
May 26, 2021
The instrument is Planning Commission Resolution MP-21-001. Under Colorado law a county master plan is adopted by the planning commission, not the Board of County Commissioners, and that is what happened here: an appointed body voted 8–0 to adopt Your El Paso and, in the same resolution, to supersede, replace and delete all ten of the county’s small area plans. The Woodmen Valley plan of 1977. Ute Pass, 1982. Highway 94, 2003. The Black Forest Preservation Plan Update, 1987. South Central, Ellicott Valley, Southwestern, Falcon/Peyton, Midland/Fountain Creek. And the Tri-Lakes Comprehensive Plan of 1999.
Not everything went. Seven topical elements survived, and so did the drainage basin plans. What the county abolished was the geographic layer — the documents that spoke about particular places.
The resolution calls them “the outdated … small areas plans (1977-2008).”
It is worth noticing how completely they vanished. In the 182 pages of Your El Paso, the phrase “Tri-Lakes Comprehensive Plan” does not appear once. “Tri-Lakes” appears nine times, always as a place, never as a plan. The words “Small Area Plans” appear exactly once in the body of the document, in a subordinate clause on an introductory page, in a sentence that gets the date of the county’s own Policy Plan wrong by a decade. The ten plans are named only in the adoption resolution at the back, on a scanned page with no searchable text.
Eleven boxes for 2,100 square miles
What replaced the ten plans is worth looking at closely, because Your El Paso is not indifferent to this problem. It names it, in its own words, better than we could:
“From Black Forest to Midway to Rush, El Paso County is a community of unique areas joined to create one distinct County. As is true with many large counties, El Paso County has places with different histories and character, often separated by significant distances. Expected growth in population, employment, and development creates a challenge in maintaining all of the County’s one-of-a-kind places.”
The plan states its intent as preserving “existing, differing character areas,” and one of its guiding goals is “maintaining the established character of unique areas throughout the County.” Nobody drafted this document meaning to flatten anything.
The tool it uses is the placetype. There are eleven of them, for the whole county: Rural, Large-Lot, Suburban, Urban Residential, Rural Center, Regional Center, Employment Center, Regional Open Space, Mountain Interface, Military and Utility. The plan explains that the approach “is not focused on the use of a specific parcel, but rather is concerned with the collective mix of uses that establish a place.”
Placetypes are a legitimate and widely used planning tool. They do something the old system did badly — they cover the whole county, including the large parts that never had a small area plan at all. That is a real gain and we said so above.
But notice what a category can and cannot hold. Here is how the Tri-Lakes plan described the ground at County Line Road and Interstate 25:
“The area ranges in elevation from about 7,000 feet to about 7,500 feet and is almost completely underlain by the Dawson Formation. Slopes in the area range from 4% to 30% in the habitable sites and up to steep scarps on the upper slopes of Ben Lomond Mountain. The Sub-area is almost entirely within the south-flowing Monument Creek drainage basin, except for the northern most slopes of Ben Lomond Mountain which are in the north-flowing Carpenter Creek drainage basin. Native vegetation is ecotonal in that it occurs between the plains and the alpine mountain vegetation.”
And, on water: “Most wells are drilled into the Dawson Formation and generally pump less than 10 gallons per minute.”
No placetype says that. No placetype can. The plan’s own account of the Suburban Development pattern covers “more than 28,000 acres (45 square miles) of land in El Paso County,” located “close to Colorado Springs, Monument, Palmer Lake, or Fountain.” A description that must hold true from Fountain to Palmer Lake cannot also carry the elevation, the formation, the two drainage basins or the ten gallons a minute. A category is applied. A description has to be written, once, by somebody who went and looked.
That is the trade the county made, and it is worth being honest that it is a trade rather than a pure loss. Your El Paso describes a county “covering an area greater than 2,100 square miles, roughly the size of Delaware,” in which “urban neighborhoods, agricultural lands, rural communities, and pristine natural areas create a mosaic.” Eleven categories cover that mosaic evenly. Ten plans covered part of it unevenly, in detail, and left the rest with nothing. What the county gained was uniformity of coverage. What it gave up was the only place in its framework where a sentence could be true of exactly one place.
The Tri-Lakes plan did not even treat the Tri-Lakes as one place. It divided its own area into sub-areas — Palmer Lake was Sub-Area #1, Elephant Rock was #2 — because Palmer Lake is not Elephant Rock. That is three levels of resolution: county, planning area, sub-area. The new framework has one.
And this is a genuinely various county. The retired plans were not ten versions of the same document. Ute Pass is a mountain canyon. Ellicott Valley and Highway 94 are eastern plains. Woodmen Valley is a foothills drainage. Black Forest is a ponderosa forest on a divide. The Tri-Lakes is the north gateway between two towns and an interstate. They were adopted across thirty-one years, by different communities, in response to different pressures, and each one existed because somebody argued that their part of the county could not be governed by a rule written for everywhere else.
The county’s case, and an irony it did not intend
The county did not do this thoughtlessly, and its reasoning deserves to be stated. The staff report recommending adoption says the small area plans “date from 1977 to 2008 and are generally considered out of date,” that the old Policy Plan had reached the end of its growth assumptions, and — the strongest point — that it was “not realistic to update each of the small areas plans from both a time and a cost function, while also continuing to leave large areas of the County without a small area plan.” Ten plans covered part of El Paso County. Everywhere else had nothing. A single countywide document covers everyone, and that is a real argument.
It is also worth knowing who made it. The staff report is addressed to the Planning Commission from Mark Gebhart, Deputy Director, and Craig Dossey, Executive Director of the Planning and Community Development Department. Your El Paso credits Dossey first among the department’s staff on its acknowledgements page. The county began the process in late 2018, during his tenure, and the plans it deleted were live until the day it was adopted — the county’s own register of expired documents gives every one of the ten an end date of 5/26/21.
Now turn to the plan’s acknowledgements page, which lists the people who made it. Among the Board of County Commissioners: Mark Waller, District 2, 2018–2021. Among the Planning and Community Development staff: Craig Dossey, Executive Director, and Nina Ruiz, Planning Manager.
On December 3, 2024, Buc-ee’s held a public meeting at Palmer Lake Elementary School to present its plans for the corner. More than 250 people came. According to Our Community News, which covered it, the meeting was moderated by Mark Waller, “former El Paso County commissioner and current development consultant.” Craig Dossey, “former county planning director and now president of Vertex Consulting Services,” presented on the development process and the property’s zoning. He then had “Senior Executive Consultant Nina Ruiz detail the steps remaining before development could begin.”
Vertex went on to present the case for Buc-ee’s before the commissioners on August 27.
So three of the people credited on the master plan that retired the Tri-Lakes Comprehensive Plan have since appeared on behalf of the project at the intersection that plan used to speak for. One of them was a sitting county commissioner while it was being written. Two of them ran the department that wrote it.
Let us be careful about what this is. Nobody has broken a rule. The revolving door between public planning and private consulting is legal, ordinary, and in some respects useful — a county is better served when the people arguing before it understand its code.
But consider what the arrangement produces, and put a name to it, because the record does.
It was Craig Dossey‘s department that asked the Planning Commission to adopt Your El Paso. The staff report making that request went up over his name, as Executive Director, and it stated in its own executive summary that the plan “repeals and/or replaces the existing Policy Plan, Small Area Plans, and Sketch Plans.” Its closing recommendation was adoption. The commission adopted it, and the Tri-Lakes Comprehensive Plan — including the sentence about what belonged at County Line Road and Interstate 25 — ceased to exist as county policy that day.
Three years later, in the cafeteria of Palmer Lake Elementary School, Craig Dossey stood in front of more than 250 of the people who live around that intersection, on behalf of the company that wants to build there, and explained what the zoning at that corner permitted.
He was not wrong about the zoning. That is the point. The zoning was only ever half the answer. The other half — the county’s own written judgment about what that particular corner was for — had been retired on the recommendation of the department he ran.
Everyone in that cafeteria was working from the county’s own record. Only some of them still had access to the part of it that had been deleted.
That is the cost of letting the written record of a place lapse. The knowledge does not vanish. It becomes private.
Three neighbors, three answers
The county could have done this differently, and we do not have to speculate about how, because three neighboring counties show us.
Douglas County faced the same choice with Franktown, an unincorporated village at the junction of Highways 83 and 86 — the same Highway 83 that runs through Black Forest. It had a standalone Franktown Subarea Plan. When Douglas wrote its 2040 Comprehensive Master Plan, adopted by its planning commission in 2019, it did not delete it. The plan says the subarea plan’s “goals, objectives, and policies … have been incorporated into this section of the Comprehensive Master Plan.” Section 4 of that document is titled Rural Communities, and it addresses Franktown, Louviers and Sedalia one at a time. It still says things like “Expansion of the Franktown Village Area boundaries is not supported by this Plan.”
Douglas goes further. Its zoning code contains four base zoning districts written for Sedalia alone — a Sedalia Community District, a Sedalia Downtown District, a Sedalia Highway Commercial District and a Sedalia Mixed Industrial District — along with eight overlay districts, two of them named for individual towns.
Larimer County rewrote its land use code, exactly as El Paso is doing now. The rewrite kept the geography. The code names sub-area plans in its operative text, directing that areas “subject to sub-area plans such as LaPorte and Red Feather Lakes” be reviewed “to ensure consistency with such plans.” An entire article of the code, Article 13, is given over to supplemental regulations for the Estes Valley, with eleven place-prefixed zoning districts and its own zoning map.
Boulder County answers the two objections we expect to hear.
The first objection is that the plans were only advisory, so losing them cost nothing. Boulder’s comprehensive plan describes itself, in its own introduction, as “advisory in nature” — providing “guidance in the decision making process, but not the ‘final word.'” It then carries seven Geographic-Focused Elements: the Plains Planning Area, the Southeast Subregion, the Niwot subregion, the St. Vrain subregion, the Mountain Subregion, and townsite plans for Eldorado Springs and Gold Hill. Advisory status is evidently not a reason to throw them away.
The second objection is that ours were outdated. Boulder’s Southeast Subregion element was adopted in March 1978. Its St. Vrain element was adopted in 1988. They are in the plan that governs Boulder County today.
And Boulder’s land use code contains a Rural Community district available in six named villages — Allenspark, Eldora, Eldorado Springs, Gold Hill, Hygiene and Niwot — plus a district written for Niwot alone, defined block by block, “to recognize the unique semi-rural character of the community, and to apply planning tools to help maintain that character.” Its Neighborhood Conservation Overlay exists, in the code’s own words, “to recognize the diversity of issues and character in individual neighborhoods in the unincorporated parts of Boulder County.”
That sentence is the whole argument, and a neighboring county has already written it into law.
What the new code does, in fairness
El Paso County’s draft code is not the flattening we half expected to find, and readers deserve to know that.
The draft replaces the current commercial districts — which are sorted by market function — with three mixed-use districts sorted by setting: a Rural Mixed-Use Center, a Suburban Mixed-Use Center and an Urban Mixed-Use Center. The rural one contemplates “agriculture-supporting commercial” and larger lots on wells and septic. That is a distinction the code does not currently draw, and it is a good one. The draft also creates two new districts for public, civic and open space land. The county’s stated goal of “tailoring the LDC to work across rural, suburban, and urban settings” is, in that respect, being met.
What the draft does lose is smaller and more specific. It carries forward three of the five overlay districts, giving reasons for dropping the other two. And it folds two districts into a general rural residential category: F-5, Forestry and Recreation, and R-T, Residential-Topographic — the only district in the entire code defined by the shape of the land itself, “intended to accommodate residential use in regions of extreme topographical conditions.” On the Rampart Range edge, that is not a small thing to give up.
Forty-five years of the same sentence
None of this is new, which is the part that should give the county pause.
In 1981, the Black Forest Land Use Committee ran four community meetings and wrote down what people said. Residents worried, in the report’s words, about “the types of development that might be permitted on land already zoned for commercial or industrial uses.” They objected to the county approving zone changes “in advance of need.” They asked for commercial nodes to be established “and permitting no others.” And they observed that land use plans, “however good or however long in existence, have been altered or discarded in favor of economic expediency.”
In 2019, the same three questions were put to seven more meetings. Residents wrote “Keep commercial for neighborhood use” — which is, word for word, the language of the convenience-store definition the Board would spend a hearing interpreting seven years later. They wrote “BoCC does not support adopted plans.” The compiler’s own note reads: “many of these concerns were expressed in 1981 but in 2019 their frequency, scale and intensity has dramatically increased.”
Two years after that, the plans were deleted.
We should be careful here, because the 1981 and 2019 reports are careful. The Black Forest plan, their author writes, “has never been anti-development. Rather, it is a Visionary approach to guide cooperative development over time,” one that “depended on Developer Cooperation and Commissioner Discretion, not just Regulatory minimums.” That is an honest description of how the system was meant to work, and it concedes the county’s strongest point: these plans always relied on discretion being exercised in their favor.
Which is exactly why deleting them matters. Discretion needs something to be exercised toward.
The 1981 report closes with a line about “steel, concrete, plastic and the other forces which homogenize urban America.” Forty-five years on, that is still the fear, and the county has removed the documents that were written to answer it.
“Advisory” is a floor, not a ceiling
One more thing, and it undercuts the objection we have been answering all the way through.
The reason a document like the Tri-Lakes plan is easy to dismiss is that it was only advice. But that is a choice the county made, not a limit the legislature imposed. Colorado law, at C.R.S. § 30-28-106(3)(a), says this:
“The master plan of a county or region is an advisory document to guide land development decisions; however, the master plan or any part thereof may be made binding by inclusion in the county’s or region’s adopted subdivision, zoning, platting, planned unit development, or other similar land development regulations after satisfying notice, due process, and hearing requirements.”
Any part thereof. A county that wants a provision of its plan to have force can put that provision in its code, and the statute expressly contemplates it.
That is precisely what the Tri-Lakes plan asked for. Action VOL.1.10 directed the county to “incorporate provisions for an I-25 Visual Overlay Zone as part of the El Paso County Land Development Code.” The route from advice to rule was named in the plan, and it is the route the statute provides. The county did not take it.
The statute is equally clear that planning in parts is normal. Under § 30-28-108, a planning commission “may adopt the county or regional master plan as a whole by a single resolution or, as the work of making the whole master plan progresses, may adopt parts thereof,” and may “carry any part of it into greater detail from time to time.” Small area plans are not a quirk El Paso outgrew. They are the structure the legislature described, and El Paso used it for four decades.
None of that made retiring them unlawful. It does mean the county had options other than the two it appears to have weighed — keep ten aging documents, or delete them. It could have carried the parts that mattered into greater detail. It could have made the provisions it believed in binding by writing them into the code it is rewriting right now.
What we are asking for
This is not a rerun of the Buc-ee’s appeal. We have reported that hearing and the grounds the Board gave, at length, and where the proposal goes from here is not ours to say. The argument here would hold if that application had never been filed.
We are asking that the county’s rewrite of its land development code — open for comment now, with a Tri-Lakes session scheduled for the Woodmoor Barn on September 21 — restore some way for this county to say, in writing, that County Line Road is not Powers Boulevard and Black Forest is not Falcon. Douglas County does it with four districts for one village. Larimer does it with an article for one valley. Boulder does it block by block.
The Land Development Code was never where the geography lived. It lived in ten documents that are now expired, and the chapter of the new code that would govern how any of this is administered has not been drafted yet. There is still time to put it somewhere.
A plan is only advice. But a county that writes nothing down has not freed itself from bad advice. It has simply stopped saying what it wants, and left every corner to be argued from scratch, by whoever shows up with a lawyer.
We live here too.
Sources & further reading
The Independent’s own coverage: Eight Hours at Centennial Hall: How Buc-ee’s Won Its Appeal, the hour-by-hour account of the August 27 hearing this piece refers to · El Paso County Is Rewriting the Rules the Buc-ee’s Fight Turned On, which reported the draft code and the comment window that is still open.
County record: 2000 Tri-Lakes Comprehensive Plan and Planning Commission Resolution MP-99-001, EDARP project 19529 (file MP99001) · Planning Commission staff report, MP-21-001 · Your El Paso Master Plan and Planning Commission Resolution MP-21-001, recorded June 8, 2021, reception no. 221111439 · El Paso County “Historical Documents (now expired)” · El Paso County Land Development Code §§ 2.1.3, 4.1, 4.2.1, 4.3 and 4.4, and Table 4-1 (Municode) · LDC Modules 1 & 2 consolidated draft, July 14, 2026 · elpasocountyldc.com
Colorado law: C.R.S. § 30-28-106 · C.R.S. § 30-28-108
Peer counties: Douglas County 2040 Comprehensive Master Plan, Section 4: Rural Communities · Douglas County Zoning, Chapter 1 · Larimer County Land Use Code, effective December 8, 2025 · Boulder County Comprehensive Plan · Boulder County Land Use Code, Article 4
Community record: Black Forest Preservation Plan Revision Input Meetings Report, May–June 1981, and the Supplemental Input Meetings Report, July 2019 — both compiled by Judith von Ahlefeldt · Our Community News on the December 2024 Buc-ee’s community meeting
Methodology
The Tri-Lakes Comprehensive Plan is an image-only scan. Its pages were rendered and read as images rather than relied on in machine transcription, because optical character recognition on this document is unreliable: a text search for the phrase “off-ramp service businesses” returns nothing even though the phrase is on the page. The three passages quoted from the Elephant Rock sub-area were each transcribed from the page image and then checked back against it character by character. The adoption resolution inside Your El Paso is likewise an image page, invisible to a text search of that document, and was rendered and read the same way.
The count of five current overlay districts comes from Table 4-1 of the Land Development Code and from the enumeration in § 4.3, which agree. The count of three in the draft comes from the draft’s own Chapter 9 contents and its footnote 32. Peer-county documents were read directly: Douglas County’s Section 4 in full, Boulder County’s comprehensive plan and Article 4 of its land use code, and Larimer County’s comprehensive plan and all 680 pages of its land use code. Four counties were examined; Colorado has sixty-four, and we do not claim El Paso County is unique among them.
Colorado statutes were read as published by FindLaw, current as of January 1, 2025. We have not asked El Paso County why it retired the small area plans rather than folding them into the new master plan, as Douglas County did with Franktown; that question is a fair one and we intend to put it.
Thank you!!!