Monument's Two Interstate Exits Are Growing at Completely Different Speeds

Drive I-25 through Monument this month and you'll pass two commercial projects that tell opposite stories about how growth actually happens here. Near Baptist Road and Jackson Creek Parkway, a 129,000-square-foot Target just got its building permits, alongside a Chick-fil-A the Town of Monument confirms is going up in the same area. Head north to the Monument Hill exit at County Line Road and you'll find a company that has already spent more than $10 million buying 53 acres of land, and still doesn't have permission to build anything on it.

Same corridor. Same town. Two entirely different clocks.

What Just Cleared, and How Fast

The Target news broke on September 3, when KRDO reported that the Pikes Peak Regional Building Department had issued permits for the store, a $22.3 million project on the east side of I-25. The Town of Monument's own website confirms the Chick-fil-A going in nearby. No lawsuit, no recall election, no multi-year zoning fight. A retailer proposed a store in a commercial corridor already built for retail, and the permits followed.

That's the version of growth most people picture when they think about a town adding stores: a company wants to build, the site is already zoned for it, the paperwork clears, construction starts.

The Land Buc-ee's Bought and Still Can't Touch

Two miles north, the picture looks nothing like that.

The proposal for a Buc-ee's travel center at County Line Road and I-25 goes back to December 2024, when Monument Ridge West LLC first sought to annex the parcel into the nearby town of Palmer Lake. What followed was, by any measure, a genuinely bitter fight. Palmer Lake residents packed town meetings, a recall election removed two Board of Trustees members, the mayor resigned, and a lawsuit followed. Concerns ranged from a 120-pump travel center's effect on rural roads to the town's dark sky ordinance to the water demands of a business that size. In February 2026, the developer withdrew its annexation request.

That should have ended it. It didn't.

Two months later, a newly formed entity called Buc-ee's EPCO LLC, tied directly to the chain's Texas headquarters, paid more than $10 million for roughly 53 acres on that same parcel, according to Colorado Sun reporting. The purchase came with water rights attached, enough to pump up to 11 million gallons a year from the Denver and Arapahoe aquifers. The land sits in unincorporated El Paso County, outside Monument's town limits, but state highway 105, County Line Road, Beacon Lite Road, and the I-25 interchange traffic all feed directly into Monument's own streets, which is why the Town Council has kept weighing in even though it has no zoning authority over the parcel itself.

On July 1, 2026, the county's planning and community development director issued what's called Administrative Determination ADM264 and, rather than approving or rejecting the project, said the office was unable to determine whether it qualified as a "convenience store" under the county's Land Development Code. Buc-ee's appealed that determination about a week later. On August 3, the Monument Town Council unanimously signed a letter asking county commissioners to uphold the original determination and deny the appeal, rejecting any classification of the project as a neighborhood convenience store. As of the most recent public reporting, no formal development application has been submitted for the site, and the appeal had not yet been scheduled for a hearing.

Here's the comparison in one place:

Why "Convenience Store" Is Doing All the Work

What's striking about the Buc-ee's site isn't the money involved. The company already owns the land outright. It's that ownership hasn't bought them the ability to build, because the fight isn't about financing or even, at this stage, about public sentiment. It's about a single phrase in an old zoning code.

The parcel sits in a C-1 Commercial district, a designation the Town of Monument's own filings describe as written for limited, neighborhood-serving uses, not for what the town's letter calls "a regional travel center" with extensive fueling operations and a large retail footprint. Buc-ee's position, filed in its appeal, is that the project fits within the convenience store definition already on the books. The county's planning director looked at the same code and said, in effect, that it isn't clear either way.

That ambiguity is the whole story right now. A resident named Deana Claton, watching grading equipment show up on the site back in March, told a local TV crew she felt "complete and total dread" seeing machinery on land the community thought was settled. Kat Gayle, chief legal counsel for the watchdog group Integrity Matters, has argued the company is "insisting on this site because they didn't want to lose." Others in the area see it differently. Meghan Pemberton, who lives in Woodmoor, told FOX21 the project is "a hot topic on local social media," while Nick Bridges, who has since moved out of El Paso County and supports the development, pointed to the sales tax revenue Palmer Lake walked away from, estimated at close to $1 million a year, and said the town "kind of messed up a little bit" by rejecting it.

None of that changes the mechanical fact driving the timeline. Target moved fast because Baptist Road and Jackson Creek Parkway are already zoned for exactly this kind of retail. Buc-ee's is stuck because the C-1 code at County Line Road was never written with a 53-acre travel center in mind, and the argument over what that code actually permits has now outlasted the land purchase itself by more than four months, with no application even filed yet.

If you're trying to read Monument's growth pattern, that's the signal worth watching. It isn't which company has the deeper pockets. It's whether the site in question already fits a zoning category someone wrote a decade or two ago, or whether it requires a county planning director to make a judgment call that then has to survive an appeal.

Front Street Isn't Waiting on Any of This

While the interstate corridor works through permits and appeals, downtown Monument had its own milestone this weekend that had nothing to do with either project. Monu-Palooza X, the tenth annual edition of the town's homegrown music festival, took over Limbach Park today, September 6, with gates opening at 9:30 a.m. The event started in 2017 under organizer Charlie Searle and has grown into what regulars call the biggest date on the Tri-Lakes outdoor music calendar, still anchored on Front Street a short walk from the same downtown blocks it's always used.

That contrast matters more than it might seem. The two projects fighting for space along I-25 are both about what gets built at the edges of town, the exits that outsiders see first. Limbach Park and Front Street are about the version of Monument that residents actually experience day to day, and that version hasn't needed a permit, an appeal, or a determination to keep going into its tenth year.

Growth at the exits and identity downtown are running on separate tracks right now. One is a story about zoning definitions and interstate traffic. The other is a story about a park that fills up every Labor Day weekend regardless of what's happening two miles up the highway.

Both are part of the same town. Neither cancels the other out.

If you're trying to make sense of what any of this means for property values or timing near either corridor, that's the kind of question Strategic Property Advisors works through with clients every week. Reach out to request a market consultation and get a straight read on what's actually changing in your part of Monument.