Favorite Stories from Summer

• Interfaith Camp Brings Douglas County Youth Together

• Funding Douglas County Schools: The Numbers Behind the Asks

• Sterling Ranch Meets Water Efficiency Targets

• CO Politics: Douglas County measure to expand county commission advances to November ballot

• CBS/Olivia Young: Leaders in Colorado county grant $19 million tax break to controversial data center; “The math doesn’t make sense.”

• Colorado Times Recorder: 20 Days Before Opening, Douglas County’s Newest Charter School Has No Occupancy Permit and 135 Empty Seats

Douglas County and a Series of Unfortunate Ethical Dilemmas

The Douglas County Director of Communications, Caroline Frizell, began commenting on Lantern articles when we published information about the $19,000,000 tax incentive Commissioners delivered to a data center in Parker. Shortly after that, Frizell reached out via email to establish two-way communications between the Douglas County Government and The Lantern, and a day or two later we published our article about how Commissioners gave a no-bid contract for Zebulon to a financial advisor with close ties to the Sterling Ranch Community Authority Board (CAB).

The Lantern established a policy with the County, based on the SPJ Code of Ethics, that we do not want quotes and comments from the County Commissioners until they take steps in good faith to allow free, open public comment at their meetings. In short: The Lantern should not have access to the Commissioners that the general public does not enjoy.

Frizell indicated the story about the no-bid contract had inaccuracies, I am waiting to hear what those are, but we did publish her replies to the questions we posed in the article.

In the meantime, Frizell offered to field any questions we have so I sent four questions on critical topics The Lantern has covered. I think it’s worth calling out the Commissioners and Frizell have been subscribed to The Lantern for a year and are only just now reaching out. The no-bid contract article clearly struck a nerve.

And I want to explain why I posed a question on the Chatfield Basin Wastewater Treatment plant. Sterling Ranch is basically at its limit for wastewater processing and without new capacity, building additional homes is not feasible. Sterling Ranch/Dominion Water have agreements with Roxborough Water and are working on other partnerships for wastewater treatment. The County Commissioners are planning to use Federal ARPA money to build the wastewater plant Sterling Ranch developers need to move forward. The Chatfield Basin wastewater project is a really interesting entry in the story of Sterling Ranch, the County Commissioners, water, and money.

It is worth noting the County communications staff reached out to The Lantern for a better dialogue and it’s The Lantern placing a restriction on that communication, not the County. So they deserve credit for making that outreach and The Lantern deserves at least some scrutiny over whether our policy is fair. The Lantern allows comments on our articles, the County* disables comments on its social media posts. The Commissioners have three microphones, news cameras, and control of agenda and public comment to broadcast their message; should The Lantern receive a privilege of access that ordinary citizens don’t have? That doesn’t seem equitable.

It’s not our job to alert the County about what we’re working on.

(*The County government controlled by the Commissioners disables comments; the Sheriff’s Office and County Clerk have separate, official accounts that do allow comment)

Sterling Ranch, The CAB, Dominion Water, and “The Tangle”

It came to my attention that Harold Smethills, in a Sterling Ranch CAB meeting, said The Lantern was putting out inaccuracies about the relationship Sterling Ranch has with the advisory firm Stifel.

“Sterling Ranch” is a tough term to unpack but I am sympathetic to the point he’s trying to make and I want to clarify and talk about how we, The Lantern, can do better and how we cannot do better.

Harold Smethills is the principal owner of Sterling Ranch Development Company. He sits on the Sterling Ranch Community Authority Board (CAB), which is where he made the comment. He and his son Brock Smethills also sit on the Board of Directors of Dominion Water, which supplies Sterling Ranch.

Harold made the point that Stifel doesn’t advise his private company, Sterling Ranch Development, but does advise the Sterling Ranch CAB - which is a separate, government entity. We relied on emails from Douglas County staff showing that Stifel was giving the County a better deal than they give the Sterling Ranch CAB to establish the relationship between the three parties.

The CAB is formed by intergovernmental agreement between several metro districts, which are elected, government boards. Dominion Water is a government entity, its board is elected, and is de facto controlled by the principal owners of Sterling Ranch Development Company.

The Lantern does use “Sterling Ranch” as shorthand for the homes and community, the private development company, the government CAB and metro districts, and even Dominion Water. Perhaps that is too broad, perhaps it’s a distinction without a difference. We try to make sure it’s clear in articles what entity we’re describing, if it’s ever unclear or we get it wrong - we’ll correct it.

I went through the article and added the abbreviation “CAB” where appropriate and made a correction comment in the article’s header. I take getting it right seriously and I don’t want readers misinformed or confused.

At the CAB meeting, Smethills said The Lantern is trying to “weave some type of conspiracy” together by conflating all these entities. I don’t think there’s a conspiracy, in that I don’t think they’re hiding the plans. But if you want to weave them all together… I would just say it doesn’t take much yarn.

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The Lantern posted an article about a No-Bid Contract Awarded to Zebulon Advisors, and the Douglas County Communications Director responded. This is the first instance of an official from the Douglas County Government responding to a Lantern article.

The email response came from Caroline Frizell, who began commenting on Lantern articles this week, only when we released information about the $19 million tax break Commissioners gave to a data center in Parker.

In the email reply, Frizell accuses The Lantern of violating the SPJ Code of Ethics. Adhering to an ethical standard is a requirement of joining press associations.

In bold below are the questions that appeared in our article with Frizell’s reply on behalf of Douglas County.

Will general fund sales tax be used to support Zebulon construction until it generates revenue?

Douglas County does not collect general fund sales tax. Douglas County voters approved a sales and use tax of 0.17% allocated to Parks, Open Space Acquisitions, Open Space Operations and Maintenance, and Historic Resources. The Parks portion of this 0.17% sales and use tax will fund the annual lease payments while the facility is under construction. Once the facility is open, operating revenues will fund the annual lease payments.

Under what provision of the county’s Purchasing Policy was a $137,500 professional services contract awarded without competitive bids?

Section 7 of the County’s Purchasing Policy allows for procurement of “professional services selected from a pre-qualified vendor list if the pre-qualified list was created as a result of a formal process.” Stifel was most recently selected through a competitive Request for Qualifications (RFQs) process issued by the County in 2021. That RFQ was for the purpose of assembling a “short list” of qualified firms that could be utilized as needed for public finance advising in support of the Board and special district financial review. Prior to that, George K Baum and Company (acquired by Stifel in 2019) acted as a trusted public finance advisor to the County for many years, including a competitive selection in 2016.

Why did the County Commissioners delay approving a contract with Stifel for almost a year?

When the Zebulon project was initially proposed, a range of ownership and operating structures were under consideration. Potential options included a public-private partnership with an operator in which the financing would be private, a county contribution to a Sterling Ranch Community Authority Board-owned and financed project, or a County owned and financed project. Throughout 2026 and into 2026, all three options were explored. The County moved forward with the Stifel contract when it was determined that County ownership and financing was the most suitable option.

What answer, if any, did Finance Director Christie Guthrie receive to her March 27, 2026 question about an RFP, and who decided the item would proceed to the March 31 agenda without a competitive bid?

Staff from the County Manager’s office discussed purchasing policy compliance as described in this email with the Finance Director prior to publication of the March 31^st agenda.

Did the county assess Stifel’s work for Sterling Ranch-affiliated entities as a conflict before retaining the firm as its fiduciary?

Stifel’s work for Douglas County is specific to the roles described in its agreement for financial advisory services. In that role, Stifel will provide advice and analysis on pricing and structure of Certificates of Participation (COPs); coordinate with bond counsel, underwriters, consultants and accountants; and coordinate scheduling and logistical aspects of bringing COPs to market. In this role, Stifel does not and will not advise the County on real estate matters, infrastructure provision or any aspect of its interactions with the Sterling Ranch Community Activity Board, Sterling Ranch Development Company, or other affiliated entities.

Why does the executed agreement cover $65 million in debt plus County Revitalization Act (CRA) bonds when the county’s public materials detail a $100 million funding requirement and no CRA involvement?

The agreement presented to the Board of County Commissioners on March 31, 2026 specified neither an amount nor a reference to CRA bonds. The County explored a variety of funding amounts and structures. As identified in public materials, the County intends to proceed with a COP issuance of approximately $100M, with final amounts and structure to be determined through upcoming due diligence.

What was the nature of the conflict of interest that prevented Piper Sandler from participating in the RFP process?

Piper Sandler resigned its role as the County’s financial advisor citing an interest in acting in an underwriter role with the County’s COP issuance.

When did the Board of County Commissioners first discuss the Stifel engagement — in work sessions or executive sessions — before the sole public vote on March 31, 2026?

Staff and the Board evaluated a range of financing options in the summer and fall of 2025, during which time the Board of County Commissioners was appraised of the County’s long-standing relationship with Stifel as a public finance advisor.

Will any Federal funding benefit the Zebulon project and trigger audit requirements from a U.S. Inspector General that would press the G-23 and G-42 rules issues?

No Federal funding is expected to be used for the Zebulon project. The blog post’s discussion of Rules G-23 and G-42 are a mischaracterization of the requirements and a misunderstanding of the standard disclaimers that appear on all Stifel emails. As indicated in the first sentence of the disclaimer, Stifel does not owe a fiduciary duty when it is serving or proposing to serve as underwriter or placement agent. Stifel was not serving or proposing to serve in those roles, and absent those qualifying conditions, it owes a fiduciary duty.

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Today, the Douglas County Clerk and Recorder issued a Statement of Sufficiency, certifying that the 3-to-5 Initiative has qualified for the November 2026 ballot.

In March, signature collection began for the 3-to-5 DougCo Petition, aimed at expanding the Douglas County Board of Commissioners from three members to five and electing at least some of those five commissioners by district. Douglas County currently has three county commissioners elected at-large and serving a population of more than 400,000 residents.

“This is a victory for the people of Douglas County,” said Angela Thomas, spokesperson for the 3-to-5 Initiative. “Thousands of residents took the time to learn about this proposal, ask thoughtful questions, and make an informed decision to sign our petition. Today, their voices have been heard.”

Learn more at the campaign website.

All documents provided by Douglas County for the relevant CORA Requests are being made accessible at this link. Many files are email communications from Microsoft Outlook, you can view them with any .msg file viewer but we use Encryptomatic.

The original version of this article conflated Sterling Ranch Development Company with the Sterling Ranch Community Authority Board (CAB) and has been edited for clarity.

On March 31, 2026, the Douglas County Board of Commissioners convened a special business meeting and approved a contract agreement retaining Stifel, Nicolaus & Company as the county’s financial advisor for the proposed Zebulon Regional Sports Complex. The contract was for planning the issuance of Certificates of Participation (public debt) that county materials describe as $100 million over 30 years. The contract fee: $137,500.

The vote to approve the contract took just a few minutes in March, but the paper trail of Stifel’s work for the county dates back almost a year before commissioners formally hired them. Because the contract was for a financial advisor with a fiduciary duty to its client, it means that during the time before the March 31 contract, at least 9 months, Stifel may have been conducting financial advisory work without a fiduciary duty to Douglas County.

Stifel also advises the Sterling Ranch Community Authority Board (CAB), and the debt it was working on for Douglas County will eventually fund both Zebulon and a contract awarded to SR Construction LLC., an entity associated with Sterling Ranch Development Company.

Emails and documents produced in response to a CORA request show that Stifel transmitted a signable financial advisory agreement to County Manager Doug DeBord and Budget Director Martha Marshall on June 12, 2025. Six days later, Marshall reported to DeBord that the fee had been agreed to. Through the fall and winter that followed, before any public agenda item that approved the contract, Stifel was advising county staff, building a financing strategy, and modeling repayment structures for Zebulon debt. But the contract was not approved until March 31, 2026 in a special business meeting covering a range of Zebulon issues.

The records reviewed by The Lantern contain no request for proposals, no competitive bidding, and no documented justification for the selection of Stifel. A separate records request seeking exactly those documents was fulfilled by the county on April 20, 2026; the records produced in response to that request contain no correspondence detailing any competitive, public contract bid commonly known as a Request for Proposal (RFP).

Distilling the Problem

This story is driven by a timeline that has been in motion for over a year and was pieced together from a broad records request. It is also filled with technical, legal, and ethical questions. Before diving into the narrative, we want to provide a high-level overview of the issues.

Conflict of Interest: Should Douglas County be engaging a consultant to structure county debt when that consultant also works for the Sterling Ranch CAB, the entity that received a $12 million construction contract from taxpayers to build the project being financed by that same county debt? Many lawyers, financial advisors, and consultants have client entanglements that are resolved by disclosures and legal requirements. Without disclosures in any scenario, let alone on the public payroll, a situation like this one could look on its face as if the web of people involved are coordinating using taxpayer dollars to march toward lucrative profits.

No Bid Contracts: Government contracts are often awarded in a competitive bidding process, and Douglas County certainly knows how to award contracts by putting out Requests for Proposals that are publicly accessible. The theory is that governments should seek competitive bids to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars and to discourage cronyism when awarding government money. When the County issues a sole source contract, its own Purchasing Policy is to provide written justification. All sole source purchases must be approved by the County Manager. The County Commissioners appear to have engaged Stifel as a financial consultant without seeking other offers. Stifel has an existing relationship with the Sterling Ranch CAB, sat down with county officials and Sterling Ranch principals to discuss strategy, and the work Stifel did for the county will fund a contract awarded to a Sterling Ranch entity. If you are Stifel in that room, how you ostensibly serve both clients (at least one of whom if not both are heavily reliant on taxpayers) is at a minimum a complicated scenario.

Working Without Approval: Stifel appears to have conducted significant work for Douglas County for the better part of a year without a contract in place that would have clarified or safeguarded the county’s interests. Keeping the process, decisions, and information related to county government out of the public eye for months is an issue the County Commissioners are already grappling with at the Colorado Supreme Court.

Advising With Potential Motive: Until Stifel had an executed contract, it is not clear they had any fiduciary responsibility to give the county advice in the best interest of taxpayers. Nonetheless, Stifel was giving the county advice. Stifel’s own disclosures call into question how and when they intended to benefit from the deal they structured. Federal regulations prohibit scenarios that are entirely possible given the timeline of events. It’s a startling level of legal exposure for Stifel and Douglas County that could have been easily avoided by executing a contract in a timely manner with required disclosures or by selecting almost any other financial advisor.

No Competitive Bids, Rushed Into Service

The most direct evidence that the selection bypassed the county’s normal process comes from inside the county’s own Finance Department.

On March 27, 2026, the same day the Stifel agreement was submitted into the county’s agenda publishing system (Legistar) for a March 31 meeting, Director of Finance Christie Guthrie emailed Martha Marshall and Kim Hirsch, a county budget officer: “Did you post an RFP for Financial Advisory Services? I am seeing a contract in Legistar for Stifel.” Guthrie added that she understood Piper Sandler, another public finance firm, “had a conflicting interest and so we couldn’t use them,” and asked whether that had changed. “I just want to be sure we have gone back out to bid if needed,” she wrote.

No reply to Guthrie’s question appears in the records the county produced. Four days later, at its March 31, 2026 business meeting, the Commissioners approved the agreement with Stifel.

The contract fee was negotiated almost a year before the contract was approved. In a June 18, 2025 email to DeBord, Marshall described a meeting with the Stifel team about compensation: Stifel’s proposal was “$137,500 which is 50% of the price they charge the CAB for their bond issues.” The Sterling Ranch Community Authority Board (often abbreviated as “CAB”), is the government entity that issues bonds for Sterling Ranch development. Marshall added that the agreement’s “current language was phased to meet regulatory requirements in an effort to get the agreement underway as soon as possible.” Nevertheless, more than nine months lapsed before the agreement was approved by the Commissioners.

A Servant of Two Masters

The fee discussion matters for a second reason. It establishes that the firm the county hired as its fiduciary advisor had a pre-existing and ongoing client relationship on the other side of the Zebulon project: Sterling Ranch.

The Zebulon sports complex sits on land the county acquired in a swap with Sterling Ranch. The site’s grading and infrastructure work went to SR Construction LLC (i.e. Sterling Ranch Construction) in a roughly $12 million agreement approved the same night as the Stifel contract. And calendar records from December 2025 show Stifel’s team — managing director Josh Benninghoff, director Stacey Mast, and associate Hadley Seymour — were included on a “County/Sterling Ranch call” with Sterling Ranch principals Brock Smethills and Tim DePeder, Brownstein Hyatt attorney Carolynne White (it is not clear who Brownstein Hyatt represents on the call), and county leadership. In other words: county commissioners and Sterling Ranch owners sat down with a consultant that advises multiple stakeholders in the issuance of taxpayer-funded debt for a discussion that would eventually benefit Sterling Ranch for the construction of Zebulon.

The Minutiae of Two Very Important Rules

The Dodd-Frank Act was signed into law in 2010. This legislation was designed to usher in new financial and consumer protection rules and included regulations for municipal governments. Two of those rules are related to this narrative: Rule G-23 and G-42.

The Dodd-Frank Act describes roles a firm cannot occupy at the same time. Rule G-23 prohibits the same firm from serving as both municipal advisor and underwriter on the same debt issuance. Under Rule G-42, a municipal advisor owes its government client a fiduciary duty, a legal obligation to put the government’s interests first, disclose material conflicts in writing, and recommend only what is suitable for the government client. An underwriter (the firm that sells government bonds to the market) buys the securities from Douglas County to resell them. Federal rules require firms handling one side of the transaction to make significant disclosures about their role and potential conflicts of interest.

Stifel attached disclaimers to its emails, the language stating the firm “is not acting as an advisor,” “does not owe a fiduciary duty,” and “seeks to serve as an underwriter on a future transaction.” Stifel repeatedly signaled in documents that it was wearing the hat of a firm that may benefit from selling Douglas County’s debt later while advising on how to structure that debt. Rules G-23 and G-42 seek to prohibit that.

For roughly four months, from December 2025 to February 2026, Stifel supplied the county the kind of advice a financial advisor provides, without an executed contract and while the disclaimers on its correspondence declared that no advisory duty applied and that the firm might be angling for the underwriting role to eventually sell the County’s debt. A fiduciary responsibility (under Rule G-42) did not necessarily materialize until the contract took effect on March 31, 2026…months after Stifel had already been advising the county on a major financial transaction Stifel could theoretically have benefitted from later.

Conflict disclosures attached to the executed Stifel agreement run several pages, but they are generic. They disclose that Stifel is a full-service financial institution and they do not disclose Stifel’s work for the Sterling Ranch CAB, even though the county’s own correspondence shows staff knew of that relationship when their fee was set. Whether Federal law required a more specific disclosure here is a legal question The Lantern cannot resolve; whether the county evaluated the relationship as a conflict before hiring Stifel is unknown but was not included in their response to the relevant CORA request.

The disclosures do identify one other item: a September 2024 SEC cease-and-desist order against Stifel, in which the firm admitted its personnel used off-channel communications in violation of federal recordkeeping rules and paid a $35 million fine.

Advice Given Without a Fiduciary Duty

From December 2025 through March 2026, before the Commissioners approved the agreement, Stifel was functioning, in practice, as the county’s advisor. In February 2026, Stifel produced a financing calendar and delivered repayment scenarios for a debt issuance at 20-, 25-, and 30-year terms. In March 2026, Marshall told DeBord she was postponing an internal meeting because, “I’ve been in contact with Stifel as questions arise,” indicating communications with Stifel were routinely happening before contract approval.

Yet every one of those Stifel emails carried the firm’s disclaimer under Rule G-23 that Stifel “is not acting as an advisor to you and does not owe a fiduciary duty,” is “acting for its own interests,” and “is serving as an underwriter, or seeks to serve as an underwriter on a future transaction.”

For months the county was taking debt-structuring advice from a firm that was formally disavowing any obligation to put the county’s interests first.

What The Public Is Told vs. What Documents Show

The Lantern’s examination of records provided by the county reveals that internal records diverge from public information about the financing of Zebulon in at least three ways: size of debt obligation, repayment plan, and authorship of county communications.

Size of Debt Obligation

The executed agreement covers Certificates of Participation “estimated to be issued in the principal amount of $65,000,000.” An agenda summary, Stifel’s own models, and talking points from a March 31 presentation describe a $100 million debt obligation. Talking points drafted by Marshall on March 22 state the County Revitalization Authority’s (CRA) funding mechanisms would not be used for Phase 1 construction of Zebulon, but the county’s advisory contract expressly contemplates CRA bonds for this step in building Zebulon.

How to close the funding gap, what amount is actually needed, and what entities will be funding Zebulon are open questions.

Repayment Plan

Certificates of Participation are “not considered debt under TABOR” and therefore require no voter approval. In internal correspondence, Marshall advised DeBord that she was concerned initial payments “will need to come solely from sales tax until the facility starts generating revenue.” This suggests county staff are at least contemplating that general fund revenues will need to prop up Zebulon construction for a period of time.

The county also seems to have selected a 30-year escalating-payment structure on the expectation that “we’ll likely restructure the debt in 10-15 years...so we won’t be faced with the higher payments in the later years.” This would probably be interesting information for the investors buying Douglas County’s debt: that the County does not ultimately envision paying escalating debt payments.

The current County Commissioners are, therefore, moving taxpayers into a debt structure that they reasonably expect to be unaffordable in decades to come without refinancing. The county has also discussed relying on revenues from sales tax for a significant period of time to make the Zebulon math work.

The Quiet Part Out Loud

On April 6, Marshall asked Stifel to draft the answer to a citizen’s question — “What is the difference between a bond and COPs?” — for posting on the county’s website. The response emphasized that COPs “do not require voter approval,” and was forwarded verbatim to county communications staff. The county’s public-facing material on Zebulon financing is being written by a third party consulting firm, and it seems to admit that COPs are being used because of a hesitation to take Zebulon debt approval to voters.

The Hour After a CORA Request

One final timestamp is worth noting. The CORA request that produced these records, which specifically sought an explanation for selecting Stifel, was transmitted to the County Commissioners at 2:49 p.m. on April 30, 2026. At 3:35pm, about 45 minutes after the CORA request was filed, DeBord forwarded two documents to Marshall and Deputy County Manager Dan Avery: the June 2025 fee email and the June 2025 Stifel agreement transmittal. The timing of those forwarded documents confirms that the county knew precisely where the origin of the Stifel agreement was: not in March 2026, when the public first saw it, but the previous June. This suggests that county leadership knew they were operating without a signed contract with Stifel for months. They did not have to search deep for the records requested and, indeed, seem to have sprinted into action over the CORA request.

Questions We Need Answered

• Will general fund sales tax be used to support Zebulon construction until it generates revenue?
  

• Under what provision of the county’s Purchasing Policy was a $137,500 professional services contract awarded without competitive bids?
  

• Why did the County Commissioners delay approving a contract with Stifel for almost a year?
  

• What answer, if any, did Finance Director Christie Guthrie receive to her March 27, 2026 question about an RFP, and who decided the item would proceed to the March 31 agenda without a competitive bid?
  

• Did the county assess Stifel’s work for Sterling Ranch-affiliated entities as a conflict before retaining the firm as its fiduciary?
  

• Why does the executed agreement cover $65 million in debt plus County Revitalization Act (CRA) bonds when the county’s public materials detail a $100 million funding requirement and no CRA involvement?
  

• What was the nature of the conflict of interest that prevented Piper Sandler from participating in the RFP process?
  

• When did the Board of County Commissioners first discuss the Stifel engagement — in work sessions or executive sessions — before the sole public vote on March 31, 2026?

• Will any Federal funding benefit the Zebulon project and trigger audit requirements from a U.S. Inspector General that would press the G-23 and G-42 rules issues?

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A.I. Disclosure

The Lantern used Claude Fable 5 to review the massive documents package produced by Douglas County for our CORA request. Without it our volunteer team simply could not get through the processing, so this tool enabled us to do something we otherwise could not do. As with all Lantern writing, our drafts are peer-reviewed before publication. We are providing the entire document package to the public.

I just came from the August 11th County Commissioners meeting and, like all the ones I’ve seen before, it leaves you with more questions than answers. Today I attended because Commissioners were discussing the $19 million tax incentive that they ultimately did approve for a data center in Parker.

Throughout the discussion the point was made that County Commissioners would approve any request to waive the Business Personal Property Tax (BPPT) that comes before them. That begs the question: why don’t they just eliminate the tax for everyone the way Jefferson County has already done. Jefferson County Commissioners are all Democrats by the way. Which I mention because the Douglas County Commissioners repeatedly mention their conservative, anti-tax bonafides yet their liberal peers in JeffCo are out way ahead of them on eliminating a major business tax obligation… and somehow the DougCo Commissioners can’t find their way to that solution with six hands and three microphones.

I’m sure they will now though.

If you suspend your disbelief for a moment, they’re otherwise making a good point. It is a regressive tax that is unfairly distributed. It hurts small-businesses the most and massive corporations have the most to gain from a waiver. Rather than open the flood gates to businesses in Douglas County applying for an exemption… just nix the levy. Problem solved.

If you’re not a tax accountant, a quick briefing on the BPPT. It’s a Colorado tax on machinery, equipment, furniture and other movable goods you use for commercial purposes. Counties collect their portion of the tax as do other jurisdictions. On today’s agenda the county, from their view, was just following their policy of dolling out a tax benefit if you come to them on bended knee.

Perhaps they don’t eliminate the tax because they could only take credit for that once, whereas carting in applicants to approve their waiver request allows you to give out patronage indefinitely.

Some cocktail napkin math I need to confirm says the BPPT represents about 1%-2% of the county’s overall revenue. That’s one of the reasons they can so liberally waive it. Even if that calculation isn’t quite right the BPPT clearly is not mission critical to funding county operations, but it would buy a lot of firefighting, school resource officers, and youth sports complex contamination remediation. So if you’re going to have it at all… either apply it fairly or we have ways to use it.

The Commissioners made a point to shift the blame for the existence of the data center to the Town of Parker. In that they are correct, the BOCC did not approve it and they cannot easily prohibit it. You don’t get the sense that they would stop a data center, in fact Commissioner Teal waxed at length about his role in economic development, but they would like you to know this one is not on them. If one comes to town it sure seems like they will rubber stamp a data center in unincorporated Douglas County.

Hot Topic: Public Comment

The topic of how Commissioners have curtailed public comment came up repeatedly. I want to clarify that issue for folks. The Commissioners have eliminated open public comment, which is to say your ability to comment on any topic whatsoever. Instead they limit comments to items on their agenda.

No county neighboring Douglas County does this. In Elbert, Arapahoe, Jefferson, or Teller you can come speak to any issue. That is also the case for every city or town council I have checked in Douglas County. The benefit of that is that you can put forward problems that might not be on the agenda or weigh-in on a public issue that does not happen to be on the list for discussion that day. Indeed the 1st Amendment envisions this right as the ability to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Commissioners have also plainly cherry picked who comments in the past, using sign-up sheets to usher supporters to the front of the line and then conveniently run out of time for opposition. So the playbook is this: eliminate free comment, control limited comment.

In January they also suggested they would host “office hours” for citizens to meet with them. Eight months later and no office hours.

The ability to come before your elected officials and levy your complaints strikes at the heart of what a democracy should be. If elected officials are deciding what you get to speak about… then they are controlling your speech. I don’t know how George Teal, Abe Laydon, and Kevin Van Winkle are able to reconcile their purported love of freedom with a systemic infringement on speech. Laydon took a swing and said today what they don’t allow in public comment is “political theatre.”

With as much respect as I can muster: then stop taking a picture with everyone you congratulate at your meetings. That’s political theatre. That’s using public office to stand next to people who have achieved something and share their stage. That’s the first 30-45 minutes of every meeting. You allow Zebulon “supporters” (many of them non-voting children) you cart in to bring in noisy signage against your own sign policies for… you guessed it… political theatre. Taxpayers are funding professional production videos of the Commissioners at the rodeo cosplaying as cowboys. Genuinely, if ironically, entertaining theatre.

You cannot bring the performative acts you like to town and then cry foul when the circus shows up.

Commissioners… you took a 71-29 blowout loss at the ballot box in June 2025 and burnt $700,000 of taxpayer money in the process. It’s pretty clear the reason you’re controlling public comment is that you cannot withstand opening the floodgate of criticism on any number of issues. And who knows what schemes are still to come.

The Douglas County Board of Commissioners will consider an incentive package for the Flexential data center in Parker during its regular business meeting on Tuesday, August 11th at 1:30pm. The action will be Item F on their consent agenda. Items on the consent agenda are not individually discussed under a presumption that the actions are non-controversial and no commissioners would wish to debate them; they are passed in one vote rather than individually voting on each item. Consent agendas are often used for pro forma actions like approving minor expense reimbursements or sending required correspondence.

The incentive package includes a $19,323,400 exemption from the business personal property tax (BPPT) portion of Flexential’s county tax bill spread out over a 35-year period, about $552,000 per year in benefits.

Data centers have been roundly criticized for consumption of energy and water while providing very few jobs per dollar invested. According to county documents, the Flexiential center in Parker will create about 16 jobs and therefore receive $1.2 million from county coffers per job created.

Dueling bills to incentivize and restrict data centers failed at the Colorado legislature this year. Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, recently placed a moratorium on new data centers pending extensive further reviews in his state.

Douglas County Commissioners significantly curtailed public comment for their regular business meetings earlier this year.

According to preliminary numbers, a petition to require citizen approval of annexations into the City of Castle Pines has qualified for the November 2026 ballot. Two questions will be put before voters; the major question is whether to require annexations over 20 acres be approved not just by City Council but also by voters at the next regular election. This would give the electorate of Castle Pines an effective veto over major annexations, in addition to requirements under state law and city ordinance.

The initiative began after Ventana Capital attempted to annex Crowsnest into the City of Castle Pines in late 2025. People Against Annexing Crowsnest (PAAC) formed during that attempt and went on to lead the ballot initiative to require voter approval of annexations. To qualify for the ballot, organizers had to submit 1,344 valid signatures. PAAC organized petition circulators at grocery stores, community events, and neighborhood meetings.

Ventana later withdrew their annexation application with Castle Pines. The City of Castle Pines placed an emergency moratorium on annexations and is currently developing an annexation policy. Ventana is now seeking to develop the land as part of unincorporated Douglas County. The Douglas County Planning Commission punted on the proposal at their most recent meeting.

Ventana officials have argued that the area has other planned developments similar to their proposals. Parker and Castle Rock, both officials and residents, have expressed concerns about road capacity, wildlife protection, open space preservation, and water utilities. Ventana donated $50,000 to support the failed Home Rule campaign in June 2025 and is also developing The Range development near Zebulon. Louviers Water district has indicated concerns about how negotiations between The Range and Dominion Water are negatively impacting Louviers water infrastructure needs. In 2025, Ventana sued the City of Castle Pines in a failed attempt to build a 24-hour McDonalds.

The second of two ballot questions going before Castle Pines voters would close a 180-day loophole for annexations. The window for annexations without voter approval would be created by a delay in the primary annexation question going into effect.

City of Castle Pines staff must process official certification of the petition and transmit information to the Douglas County Clerk. A majority of voters in Castle Pines must approve the questions for the citizen approval requirement to become law.

Elections will be held on November 3rd, 2026, ballots will start arriving by mail in October. For more information on the November election visit DouglasVotes.com.

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Note: Barrett Rothe, Editor of The Lantern, is a resident of Castle Pines and helped collect signatures for the ballot initiative.

Douglas County Libraries has made upgrading and replacing library facilities a priority of the past decade - and has done so entirely within its annual revenues - no tax increases or bond measures.

Guiding that work is the Library’s Facilities Master Plan, which sets maintenance standards for existing buildings and establishes design and size specifications for new construction. The plan ensures consistency across the library system and gives residents, municipalities, and community partners a clear picture of what to expect from their local library.

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In September of 2022, the Library Board adopted the updated 2030 Facilities Master Plan identifying a new DCL-owned building in the Roxborough/Sterling Ranch area as the next priority for library service. Completion of this building would achieve the goal of bringing all facilities up to current practice standards, ending the current lease situation at the Roxborough library location, and right-sizing library service for the growing population in northwest Douglas County. [Note: see pages 29-63 of the January 29, 2025 Board Business Meeting Packet, and pages 25-29 of the January 28, 2026 Board Annual Business Meeting]

In January 2025, Executive Library Director, Bob Pasicznyuk, presented the Board of Trustees with the plan’s priorities for new construction, identifying three communities slated for expanded library service:

1. Northwest Douglas County in or near the Sterling Ranch development

2. Lone Tree’s Ridgegate East community

3. The Canyons area east of I-25 in Castle Pines

The top priority: a new library for Northwest Douglas County.

Why a New Library Is Needed

The current library serving the northwest part of the county is a roughly 5,200 square foot, second-floor rental space in the Roxborough Safeway retail strip. It has served the community for approximately 19 years.

By the numbers, it is the most undersized library in the county. The facility provides just 0.29 square feet of useable library space per person - about 30% less than the next smallest branch, the Castle Rock library, which offers 0.41 square feet per person, based on the population in the area.

The gap is expected to widen significantly. Population in Northwest Douglas County is projected to increase between 50-100% by 2040. If that growth materializes and no new facility is built, the usable space per person at the current Roxborough branch would drop to about 0.15 square feet - making an already constrained facility far less able to service its community.

Beyond space limitations, the facility does not meet the standards the Board of Trustees has established for library facilities in the district, as it does not offer things like large-scale event hall rentals, audio/video recording studios, Adobe Creation Stations, in-house laptops, and exam proctoring, based on the offerings at each location identified on the Library’s website.

Square Feet of Library Per Capita

The Plan

The Board approved a plan to construct a new 16,000-square-foot library in the Sterling Ranch development in January 2025. The new facility would be more than three times the size of the currently leased facility in Roxborough - and the new building would be owned not leased.

The new building would offer a 2-story structure, and include amenities and services consistent with other Douglas County Library branches, many of which are not currently available to northwest county residents.

The site - just under 3 acres located near Titan Road and across from the first planned Sterling Ranch elementary school - was donated by Sterling Ranch developers. It is large enough to accommodate a future expansion to 30,000 square feet if community growth warrants it. The design also allows for phased additions, so capacity can be added as population and resources allow.

The library’s capital reserves are sufficient to fund the project. When the plan was approved in January 2025, construction was planned for 2026, with the anticipated completion and opening in 2027 at a cost of $21.65 million.

At the January 2025 Board meeting, the Board approved the project, scope, timeline and budget.

The Site Selection Process

The January 2025 annual board meeting included public comment on the new library. Two community members expressed support for the new, larger library, without preference on location. One community member asked that the library maintain a presence in Roxborough and offered to donate a different plot of land through the Chatfield Farms HOA that could be used for a new location in Roxborough.

The Board asked for an independent comparative evaluation of both sites: the planned Sterling Ranch location and the newly offered Roxborough alternative. That evaluation was completed by Fransen Pittman, and reported at the February 2025 board meeting.

Staff identified several concerns with the newly offered Roxborough site:

• The land is currently zoned as a drainage site, and had stormwater containment requirements

• It was inconveniently located

• Accessibility was poor, as the only access point was through the Safeway shopping area

• Parking would have been a challenge

Based on those findings - and the fact that the projected population growth is more concentrated around the Sterling Ranch area - staff recommended proceeding with the Sterling Ranch site. The library board was grateful for the generous offer from the Chatfield Farms HOA, but the results of the study confirmed it would not be an ideal location.The Board voted unanimously to move forward with the original land, and entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with the Sterling Ranch developers for the land donation.

What This Means for Roxborough Residents

In September, 2025 the Board approved an extension of the current lease for the Roxborough location to account for the time to build the new Sterling Ranch facility. Once the new facility is open, DCL plans to transition all operations in northwest Douglas County to the new location.

Learn More: Attend A Library Board Meeting

The Library Board is a member of the Partnership of Douglas County Governments and participates in their meetings.

Library Board Business Meetings are held the last Wednesday of each month (excluding July and November) in Lone Tree, 5:30PM. Public comment is welcomed.

Board Study Sessions: 4:00pm before Board business meetings, as needed.

Executive Committee Meetings: Monthly, typically the Thursday two weeks prior to Board Business meetings in Castle Pines at 8:00am.

Data centers are increasingly at the center of public debate, as they power the artificial intelligence (AI) technology weaving itself into nearly every aspect of our lives—from business and shopping to web searches. These facilities require vast amounts of electricity and water, raising concerns about their environmental impact and effects on local utility bills.

If you’ve ever used ChatGPT, Claude, or clicked “AI Mode” in your browser, you’ve tapped into the computing power housed in a data center. As AI use grows, these centers demand even more resources — training a large AI model can require billions of calculations per second, sustained for years.

To keep up, data centers rely on specialized hardware and software. One key piece of hardware is the graphics processing unit (GPU), a chip originally built to render images and video quickly, which turns out to be great at the kind of rapid math AI needs. On the software side, AI models use an approach called “transformers,” which lets a computer look at many pieces of information at once instead of one at a time — a bit like reading an entire sentence in one glance instead of letter by letter. This is what allows AI models to respond so quickly.

But that speed comes at a cost: all this computing power requires a growing amount of electricity and water to run.

Residents often express concern or opposition to data centers, especially when one is proposed in their own community. According to a March 2026 Gallup poll, “Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these projects, with 7% strongly in favor.”

Many cities and towns have shied away from recruiting or approving new data center requests. For example, Denver recently enacted a one-year moratorium on new data center construction and permitting, halting the acceptance of zoning permits and site development plans while a task force drafts new regulations on energy use, water consumption, noise, and placement.

In contrast, Parker approved the Flexential data center project in 2021. The $192 million, 249,000-square-foot facility—located at 15255 Compark Blvd in north Parker—will be the largest in the Denver area and is expected to be operational by January 2027. Flexential followed the town’s standard development and public hearing process before beginning construction in late 2024. Core Electric Cooperative, an electric utility in Douglas County, will supply the facility’s power, and the Town of Parker collaborated on necessary zoning changes to accommodate the project.

Currently, Parker and Douglas County do not have restrictions or moratoriums on building data centers. All developers must still navigate local zoning codes, site development plans, building codes, and intensive reviews based on their planned development. According to 9News, the new Flexential facility will feature a 22.5-megawatt capacity and advanced, zero-water-consumption liquid-cooling systems.

This will be Flexential’s fifth data center in the Denver area. The new facility will be geared primarily towards businesses in the manufacturing, healthcare and financial services sectors based on the various contracts they will have with users of the data center.

The List of Concerns

While the list of concerns includes things like traffic, land use, and approval processes, the largest concerns about the emergence and building of data centers fall into 3 major buckets: power, water, and the environment.

Power

CORE Electric Cooperative will provide 22.5 megawatts (MW) of continuous power to the Parker data center, which is equivalent to the usage by roughly 15,750 Douglas County homes. CORE states this power is from available excess capacity. Census.gov says there are about 155,446 homes in Douglas County so 15,750 home equivalent is about 10% of DougCo’s current energy requirement - it’s a significant addition.

According to the Town of Parker, the data center will not increase electric rates for Parker residents or other CORE members. The Town of Parker also states that the data center will pay for its own infrastructure and energy.

But that’s not the case everywhere, and the differences from one jurisdiction to the next fuel concerns. As AI becomes more entrenched in our day-to-day lives, the demand for power could surge from the data centers processing AI. According to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI), data center power demands are contributing to higher energy bills because to cover the investments needed to accommodate the surge in data center requests, many utilities are passing on the costs to their consumers through higher monthly utility bills. According to EESI, Utilities requested more than $29 billion in rate increases in the first half of 2025, double the amount requested in the first half of 2024.

According to a study released in 2024 by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), data centers could consume up to 9% of U.S. electricity generation by 2030—more than double the amount currently used. This could create regional supply challenges, among other issues.

CORE states they purchase wholesale power from Xcel Energy and the Western Area Power Administration. They also receive additional power from Comanche Unit 3, a supercritical, pulverized coal plant located in Pueblo and operated by Xcel Energy. And this is where some of the concern lies: using coal to generate electricity.

In response to state and local legislative requirements, CORE submitted a Clean Energy Plan to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment in late 2023. The plan outlined their path to an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, from a 2005 baseline, in line with House Bill 19-1261, which was Colorado’s effort to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.

Since filing the Clean Energy Plan, CORE reports that changes in the energy landscape and market have forced them to adjust their timelines and near-term expectations—in other words, they will not meet the commitments outlined in their plan. Although CORE initially secured contracts for new wind and solar projects, they now report that transmission system constraints and recent changes in federal renewable tax incentives have made these projects financially unworkable.

Ultimately, it remains to be seen what CORE’s emissions will do over time, and if they will ultimately pass on the costs of the infrastructure investments to their customers.

Water

AI data center servers produce massive heat, especially as companies increasingly integrate the advanced technologies of “transformers”, mentioned above, into their operations in addition to the large banks of computer hardware. Consider the heat a personal computer radiates after working for hours. Now multiply that by thousands of high-powered, densely packed servers conducting intense processing, 24/7/365.

Due to the high computation rate, servers must be constantly cooled, often using fresh water. If a data center also has on-site power plant facilities, water usage increases even further. EESI estimates that a 100-word AI prompt uses about one bottle of water, that large data centers can use up to 5 million gallons of water per day, or 1.8 billion gallons annually. To put that in context, Parker Water and Sanitation District currently provides an average of 7.8 million gallons of water a day to its users.

Recently, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made headlines by displaying jars of the brown, polluted drinking water from Morgan County, Georgia during a House Committee on Energy and Commerce meeting. County residents point to a data center campus and its considerable construction projects as the culprit, though Meta claims their independent groundwater study found no impacts from the center’s operation and construction.

Food & Water Watch, an organization who states their mission is to fight for safe and healthy food, clean water, and livable climate, issued an article in March 2026, titled The Top 10 Reasons Data Centers Must Be Stopped. One of their main reasons is water usage: “Data centers also use massive amounts of water for cooling their servers, which run super-hot. We estimate that by 2028, U.S. data center water needs (just for cooling) could be as high as the indoor needs of 18.5 million U.S. households.”

Data Center Cooling Options

Industry estimates show that roughly 75–90% of data centers worldwide rely on water-based cooling as their primary method.Only about 10%–25% are completely water-free

According to Connect CRE and the Denver Business Journal, the Flexential Parker data center will be using a non-evaporative, closed-loop cooling system that requires no water for server cooling. This means that, in theory, the widespread concerns about water usage, a very limited resource in Douglas County, do not appear to be a concern. It is being reported that the site’s water hookups will only be for bathrooms and water fountains.

Environmental Impacts

While it is common for tech companies to deny environmental impacts by citing independent studies, the scale and speed of the current data center buildout is unprecedented.

The World Resources Institute reports that some data centers house gas power on-site for day-to-day operations, creating continuous air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Diesel-fueled backup generators also release harmful air pollutants, including fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and nitrogen oxides (NOx), linked to respiratory disease, heart disease, asthma and other serious health risks.

Noise is also an issue. Data center construction, rooftop cooling systems, and backup generators can be disruptively noisy. Smaller diesel generators reportedly reach 85 decibels, levels that can harm hearing. Larger industrial units can approach 100 decibels — equivalent to a motorcycle or jackhammer.

This noise can last for hours or days at a time.

To address this, some data center developers and local governments are beginning to use measures such as natural acoustic barriers, greater setbacks from homes, and improved insulation for backup generators.

Several sources report that the Parker data center will have backup generators, but they will only be used during a power outage, keeping noise levels low routinely.

According to Jackson Hoeke with Geddry, an independent reporting channel, many data centers provide their own power, but often through diesel generators that negatively impact air quality. One notable case is Amazon’s data centers polluting Canton, Mississippi. According to the Mississippi Free Press, the construction of a new data center led to not just noise pollution and heavy machinery keeping nearby families up at night, but significantly worse air quality due to dust and diesel fumes that caused respiratory illnesses in residents. In order to avoid the smallest disruptions in service, the Canton data centers must be powered by hundreds of these diesel generators. These generators release nitrogen oxides and benzene, among other pollutants. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) exposure to diesel exhaust can lead to serious health conditions like asthma and respiratory illnesses and can worsen existing heart and lung disease, especially in children and the elderly. These conditions can result in increased numbers of emergency room visits, hospital admissions, absences from work and school, and premature deaths. When the expansions to the Canton complex are complete, there will be over 300 diesel generators producing 240 tons of nitrogen oxide and 140 tons of carbon monoxide per year according to Amazon’s permit applications, and none of that electricity generated will go to the residents of the city.

Other Concerns

According to the Town of Parker:

• The Flexential data center will not have a significant impact on traffic volume, nor will it emit pollution that will affect nearby residents and businesses.

• Like all developments within Parker, the data center will be required to follow the Town’s noise ordinance (limited to a maximum of 60 dB between the hours of 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. and 55 dB from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.). Any noise generated by this data center is expected to be limited.

Why People Want Data Centers

Among the 25% of people who support the construction of data centers, the reasons for that support vary. According to Gallup, two-thirds of those in favor of building data centers in their area cite the economic benefits, including 55% who mention increased job opportunities specifically. Others mention increased tax revenue (13%), housing and infrastructure development, and general economic benefits.

Smaller shares of data center proponents mention the potential benefits of AI to technology or themselves, personally.

According to the World Resources Institute, data center development can create real economic opportunities. Construction generates hundreds of well-paying — though temporary — jobs for technicians, electricians and other local building trade workers. There are also good-paying opportunities for full-time staff, like technicians, security staff and facility managers. But those permanent jobs typically are fairly limited. A review of more than 1,200 U.S. data centers found that even the largest employ fewer than 150 permanent workers, and sometimes as few as 25.

Colorado State Policy Backdrop

The state legislature has been active on this front. There were two competing data center bills in the 2026 Colorado legislature, and both failed — Colorado ended the session with no new statewide data center regulations at all.

HB26-1030 — Data Center & Utility Modernization (sponsored by Rep. Alex Valdez and Rep. A. Valdez)

• Industry/labor-backed bill, formally titled the “Colorado Data Center Workforce, Clean Energy, Grid Modernization, and Consumer and Environmental Protection Act.”

• Would have offered a 100% state sales and use tax exemption for up to 20 years for certified data centers on computer equipment, software, and energy systems, with a possible extension of 10 years based on satisfaction of post-certification requirements, and required operators to invest a minimum of $250 million in data center infrastructure within five years, create new full-time jobs, and meet detailed labor and wage standards. Spencer Fane

• Outcome: Postponed indefinitely. Valdez presented an amended version to strengthen environmental guardrails, then proposed it be postponed indefinitely, and the House Energy and Environment committee voted it down 11-2. Colorado Public Radio

SB26-102 — Large-Load Data Centers / Accountability measure (sponsored by Sen. Cathy Kipp and Rep. Kyle Brown)

• Consumer/environmental-backed bill. Rather than tax breaks, it would have required developers to use and develop renewable energy, pay for the full cost of their electricity and any grid investments they require and practice smart water consumption. NRDC

• It defined “large-load data centers” as a new data center with a peak load over 30 megawatts, or multiple new centers with a combined peak load over 60 megawatts, or existing centers that add that much load, and would have directed the Public Utilities Commission to determine by June 30, 2030 whether 100% hourly matching (of energy use to renewable generation) was technically and economically feasible for these data centers. Colorado General AssemblyColorado General Assembly

• Outcome: Also died. The bill was assigned to the Senate Transportation and Energy Committee, where the nine-member committee voted unanimously to postpone it indefinitely. Spencer Fane

Why both failed: Lawmakers spent nearly a year trying to negotiate a compromise pairing incentives with guardrails, but competing bills — one backed by business groups, and the other by consumer and environmental advocates — both failed to advance from committee in the final days of the session, and negotiations over a compromise measure didn’t produce an agreement lawmakers would accept. These were also among the most fought-over bills of the year — HB-1030 and SB-102 had 196 individual lobbyists registered on one or both bills, on behalf of 150 clients. Colorado Newsline

What’s filling the gap: With no state-level rules passed, local governments including Weld County, Larimer County, the City and County of Denver, and Logan County have moved forward on their own zoning ordinances, special-use permits, and moratoriums — Logan County’s rules, for example, apply to any data center facility with a nameplate capacity of 1 megawatt or more. Spencer Fane

Implications

For AI usage to expand in the U.S., data centers that can handle the necessary computing power will have to be built. The centers that have already been built are usually funded by the large technology companies seeking to offer AI services. But most Americans appear to be adopting a “not in my backyard” attitude to building additional data centers, and that attitude is especially intense, given that nearly half “strongly oppose” that construction.

Overcoming this opposition stands as a major hurdle in the expansion of AI computing. The intensity of opposition means that proposed data centers are likely to spur grassroots activism from local residents as well as legal challenges. It also indicates that AI infrastructure could become an important campaign issue in local and state elections this year, and politicians who favor data centers in their area are likely taking a politically risky stance. [Source: Gallup]

Who is Flexential?

Flexential was created in 2018 with the acquisition of Denver-based ViaWest, a national data center developer, by Charlotte-based Peak 10. The $1.7 billion purchase of ViaWest created a national company with 40 data centers in 21 metropolitan areas.

Last week, a remarkable youth faith event happened in Douglas County. Representatives from seven faith traditions—Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, and Brahma Kumaris communities—gathered to launch the region’s first Friendship Camp, a collaborative initiative born from the Interfaith Coalition of Douglas County and led by the Highlands Ranch Islamic Association and Holy Companion, an Episcopal Church in Sterling Ranch.

Children from kindergarten through eighth grade and 32 volunteers, dedicated one week designed to build what organizers call “meaningful relationships across generations and faith traditions.”

A Space Built on Shared Values

Sister Rida Zafar of the Highlands Ranch Islamic Association described the impact in terms that captured the spirit of the gathering. “Friendship Camp 2026 has been that beautiful safe space for the Muslim community where they have felt belonging, and been seen and cherished by their fellow faith community members,” she said. “From the daily opening ceremony, to shared lunches, team building games, and STEAM activities, everything was crafted precisely and wonderfully to help teach and encourage practice of shared values of gratitude, forgiveness, courage and respect for nature by children of all faiths.”

The camp’s design reflected this intention. Beyond the structured activities, participants were invited to explore one another’s traditions with curiosity. That kind of openness is what Rev. Lauren Grubaugh Thomas, Interfaith President and camp co-chair, believes will shape the region’s future.

A Moment of Prayer Across Faiths

Perhaps the most memorable moment came when a 12-year-old camper invited everyone present to observe the Muslim call to prayer. As his voice carried the ancient affirmations in Arabic, a tangible shift rippled through the room. From kindergarteners to adults, participants entered their own prayer traditions and meditation practice with open hearts—deepening their own faith while building respectful relationships with neighbors of other traditions.

It was the kind of bridge-building that doesn’t often happen outside carefully curated spaces.

Making It Sustainable

The camp’s success relied on genuine community investment. Just a week before camp began, Holy Companion received the news that it had been awarded a $40,000 United Thank Offering Grant from The Episcopal Church. Combined with contributions from faith communities, individual donors, and other grants, the funding ensured that every child who wanted to attend could do so and invested resources to sustain the program in years ahead.

Looking forward, Grubaugh voiced hope given the positive week that unfolded. “The young leaders nurtured by Friendship Camp will, together, be ambassadors of a kinder Douglas County, where neighbors of any or no faith will be embraced as sacred neighbors,” she said.

In a world often fractured along lines of belief, Douglas County’s first Friendship Camp offered a different model: one where children and adults discovered that their differences make space for deeper connection, not division.

About the Organizations

The Interfaith Coalition of Douglas County develops programs for children, youth, and adults, creating opportunities for people of all ages to encounter their “Sacred Neighbors” with joyful curiosity and deep respect.

The Highlands Ranch Islamic Association, founded in 2023, serves the growing Muslim community of Highlands Ranch and the surrounding area.

Holy Companion is a new Episcopal faith community in Sterling Ranch and a Special Congregation of the Episcopal Church in Colorado. The community seeks to companion one another on the journey of faith through inclusive worship, meaningful relationships, and service to neighbors.

This week’s study session agenda for the County Commissioner’s includes the line item, “Follow Up for a Potential Feasibility Study of Small Modular Reactor Nuclear Sites in Douglas County.”

The Lantern has heard rumors of this topic for about a week, and the release of this week’s study session agenda confirms them. It should be noted this agenda item is for a “potential feasibility study” and not a final approval of a new, nuclear power initiative from the Commissioners.

This week’s agenda follows a trend of the Board of County Commissioners saving controversial items for holiday weeks - when it is harder for the public to attend. The agenda also includes a provision to provide funding for a charter school in Sterling Ranch and to approve funding a firework celebration in Highlands Ranch after local governments there nixed plans due to wildfire risk during a drought.

Small, modular nuclear reactors have been proposed as a solution to the rising demand for data centers. Data centers would have their own nuclear reactors, much smaller than typical nuclear power plants, and be effectively independent from the main power grid. The debate about the pros and cons of nuclear power have been raging since the discovery of atomic energy. Nuclear power provides an emissions-free source of reliable electricity and requires less land to produce a larger amount of power than other fuels. The downsides include larger upfront costs, toxic waste production, and the potential for massive disasters.

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As a 20 year resident of Parker, I have watched Douglas County grow and prosper over that time. My sons went to school here and my husband and I are now retired here. The population of Douglas County has grown from 260,870 in 2006 to 405,741 in 2026. In 2019 the budget for the county was $421.1 million. In 2026 the budget has grown to $650 million. That is an increase in the budget of over $228 million in just 7 years.

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The population and the budget have grown and will keep growing. The one thing that hasn’t grown is the voice of the voters. This county still only has 3 commissioners. Douglas County has had the same number of commissioners since the creation of the county. With a 3 commissioner board, a majority of 2 can decide anything that comes before the board including our $650 million budget. Do you think that only 2 people should be able to decide where our $650,000,000 goes? This does not seem like fair representation for a county of over 400,000 residents.

Due to the growth in both population and budget, there is now a grassroots effort to get an initiative on the November ballot so the voters of Douglas County can decide if they want to expand from the current 3 commissioners to 5 commissioners. There is a petition circulating in Douglas County to get this on the ballot. This is democracy in action. Your signature on this petition is your voice in local matters. The voters should decide this issue.

Please learn more about this petition at 3to5Dougco.com. There is a schedule on the website that lets you know where the petition carriers will be and when. This is a nonpartisan initiative. Petition carriers are Republican, Democrat and Unaffiliated voters who want the voters to have a voice in the county.

As a resident and taxpayer, I want my voice heard. I have signed the petition and also became a petition carrier because it was that important to me.

Look for the 3 to 5 petition. We are already halfway to our goal. All signatures need to be collected by July 15th. As we approach July 4th let’s celebrate democracy by getting this on the ballot.

Kim Carroll
Parker

Most of us have heard that “public schools are funded through taxes” — but few have ever looked closely at what that actually means. When DCSD says it can’t afford competitive teacher salaries, or that programs have waitlists, what’s really going on?

DCSD at a glance: a nearly $1 billion operation

The Douglas County School District is Colorado’s third-largest, serving more than 61,000 students from preschool through twelfth grade. Its annual budget sits at $965 million.

Funding sources include:

• local property and ownership taxes (~59%, or $631.8M)

• state tax dollars (~38%, or $402.8M)

• federal sources (~3%, or $31.5M) (Source: CDE Financial Transparency)

Local taxes carry the heaviest load, contributing nearly six in every ten dollars the district spends, or 59% of the total budget. State funding fills most of the gap while federal dollars, often earmarked for specific programs, represent a small slice.

Local funding tools: beyond local, state and federal funding: voter-approved dollars

On top of state and federal funds, Douglas County voters can — and do — approve additional local revenue through two distinct mechanisms: mill levy overrides and bond measures. Understanding the difference matters, because they serve different purposes.

What are mill levy overrides and bond measures?

Mill Levy Overrides (MLOs) are voter-approved increases in property taxes that provide additional local revenue for ongoing expenses

• operating expenses, such as staff salaries

• benefits

• classroom technology.

Bonds are voter-approved general obligation bonds — taxpayer-funded debt used solely for capital needs, such as:

• constructing new schools

• building repairs

• technology upgrades.

Simply put: Bonds are for building, while Mill Levy Overrides are for operations.

If voters do not approve MLOs or bonds, then the school district must make do with the funding they receive from other sources.

According to the Colorado Department of Education, Douglas County spends about $16,096 - $16,589 per student per year, against the $15,589 - $16,096 funding it receives.

This funding is:

• About 1.4% lower than the state average

• 8.5% less than Cherry Creek

• 14.5% less than Denver

• The same as Jefferson County

The per-pupil funding to spending gap has a real-world consequence: teacher pay. Despite a 9% increase in pay funded by the 2023 voter-approved mill levy override, Douglas County teacher salaries are still 7% below regional levels — a gap that has persisted for more than a decade. The district has consistently fallen behind neighboring Denver-area districts since roughly 2012, when the school board ended collective bargaining and froze negotiations.

The result has been elevated staff turnover between 19-20%, making it harder to maintain the experienced, stable teaching workforce that research consistently links to student outcomes. According to a study by the Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis on the impact of teach turnover, “results indicate that students in grade-levels with higher turnover score lower in english, language, arts (ELA) and math, and that this effect is particularly strong in schools with more low-performing and black students. Moreover, the results suggest that there is a disruptive effect of turnover beyond changing the distribution in teacher quality.”

With the 2023 increase to teacher’s salaries, the District has seen turnover fall to about 13%.

The current funding sources of local property taxes, state tax dollars, and federal sources are designed to cover the majority of the schools operating expenses, but not capital improvements or building repairs. This is where a school district can get into budget trouble: not enough funding for maintenance to existing buildings and construction of new ones.

The recent history of DCSD funding requests

DCSD has gone to voters periodically over the past two decades, with mixed timing and results. Understanding that history helps explain the bind the district finds itself in today.

2006 Bond & MLO approved: Voters approved funding to manage district growth

2006 - 2018 NO Requests: No additional funding requests were made for more than a decade. During this period, capital improvement needs quietly accumulated - deferred maintenance, aging infrastructure, and growing enrollment pressure that the base funding formula couldn’t fully address.

2018 Bond approved: Bond measure approved to resume capital improvements after the long gap

2023 Mill Levy Override approved: Voter-approved $60 million toward teacher and staff pay increases, applied retroactively to the start of the 2023 school year. Teacher pay rose 9%, though it remains 7% below market rate. The District also added 7 Security Resource Officers using MLO funds. Staff hiring and retention improved noticeably, from a 19-20% turnover rate to 13%.

2024 Bond approved: Douglas County was one of more than 30 Colorado school districts to go to voters in 2024. Voters approved a $490M bond to address a $300M backlog of capital needs - new schools in growing neighborhoods, consolidations and repurposing in older ones, security upgrades, and Career & Technical Education pathways. This bond did not raise property taxes; instead, it restructured existing debt to direct more money to the district.

This interactive map let’s users dive into how the district has been putting that money to work and drill down to school-level projects.

Colorado is still behind

According to an Education Week Quality Counts 2021 article, per pupil spending in Colorado has steadily declined relative to the US average (the blue line in the graph below). In the mid-90’s, the gap was less than $500 per student. By 2017-18, the gap increased to between $2,200 to more than $3,000.

2025 legislation rewrites the school finance formula

In 2025, Colorado passed the Colorado School Finance Act (HB25-1320), which built on a prior school funding formula (HB24-1448). The new law starts with statewide, base per-pupil funding at $8,691.80 for 2025-26. Then the state layers in additional funding based on factors that reflect each district’s demographics and characteristics, an attempt to make funding more equitable across the state over a 7-year phased-in timeline.

HB25-1320 created a roughly $380 per-pupil funding increase — with rural schools and student-centered priorities at the front of the line.

The increase is notable because it comes despite declining statewide enrollment trends. The new formula phases in gradually through the 2030–31 school year, giving districts time to plan around the changes.

Douglas County Growth: building schools where the children are

Even as the district consolidates and closes schools in some areas, two fast-growing communities are creating urgent demand for new ones: Sterling Ranch (northwest Douglas County) and RidgeGate East (Lone Tree). Both are new developments with no existing school infrastructure — and both are attracting younger families, widening the gap between where kids live and where seats are available.

Douglas County Superintendent Erin Kane has described the apparent contradiction directly: as new communities grow, and as longtime residents in established neighborhoods age in place, the district must simultaneously open schools in some places and close or repurpose them in others. Both fast-growing communities plan to open new elementary schools in Fall 2026. In addition, the District is expanding Sierra Middle School in Parker, and the Legacy Campus in Lone Tree.

Concurrently, to address declining enrollment in Highlands Ranch, six elementary schools will consolidate into three for the 2026-2027 school year.

What comes next: a projected $15 million hole — and another funding ask on the horizon?

The District is projecting a $15 million shortfall in its operating budget for the 2027–28 school year, driven by a broader state budget shortfall estimated at more than $1.2 billion. The District operates under a balanced budget mandate dictated by both Colorado state law and local school board policy.

Against the backdrop of two growing communities without schools, a teacher pay gap that still sits 7% below market, and a capital backlog that took a decade to accumulate, district leadership is now considering going back to voters with an off-cycle funding request in 2026.

The 12-year gap between 2006 and 2018 is a cautionary tale: without consistent investment, needs don’t disappear… they compound.

The Question:

For more than a decade after 2006, the district made no additional funding requests. On the surface, the quiet looked like fiscal restraint. Beneath it, a backlog was building.

Capital improvement needs tend to accumulate gradually and largely out of public view — deferred maintenance on aging facilities, infrastructure that is past its useful life, and enrollment growth that the base funding formula was never designed to fully absorb. Each year without a bond measure or MLO was another year those needs grew more expensive to address.

By the time the district came back to voters in 2018, the bill had come due. The size and scope of that bond measure, and the extraordinary funding tools that followed, reflected not just the district’s current needs but the compounded cost of more than a decade of deferred action.

So the question facing Douglas County voters isn’t simply whether to spend more. It’s whether the cost of not acting is even higher in both the short term and the long term. Does the school really require another MLO to help with these costs.

Excerpts from DCSD Presentation on Potential 2026 MLO

Click here for full presentation.

Sources & Reading

• DCSD Financial Transparency Dashboard

• Denver Gazette: DCSD Financial Future

• DCSD Annual Budget

• Colorado School Finance Law (C.R.S. 22-44-105)

• DCSD Growth & Decline Data

• Legacy Campus Addition Project

• Sierra Middle School Addition Project

• HB24-1448: School Finance Formula

• HB25-1320: Colorado School Finance Act

• DCSD Bond Projects Interactive Map

• Colorado Community Media: DCSD Education News

• Stanford CEPA: Teacher Turnover Impact

• Douglas County News Press

• Colorado Department of Education Financial Transparency

• Chalkbeat: Bond & MLO Explainer

A question hanging over Sterling Ranch has been whether the community’s signature promise — building homes that use dramatically less water than standard Colorado suburban development — was real or just a developer’s marketing claim.

New water delivery records obtained by the Lantern from Aurora Water suggest that, at current scale, the development is meeting its efficiency standards. But the data raises different questions about the debts incurred to develop Sterling Ranch.

Aurora Water supplied Dominion Water & Sanitation District — the entity that delivers water to Sterling Ranch — a total of 533 acre-feet of water in 2025, under three separate intergovernmental agreements. With approximately 2,980 homes in Sterling Ranch by the end of December 2025, according to figures provided by the community’s developers to the Denver Business Journal, that works out to roughly 0.179 acre-feet per home, per year.

That figure is consistent with Sterling Ranch’s publicly stated efficiency target of 0.18 acre-feet per home annually, and is well below the 0.25 acre-feet per home threshold that Colorado’s Chief Engineer identified as the state’s standard of concern in a letter sent to Sterling Ranch last year.

As the Lantern reported in January 2026, that letter rebuked Sterling Ranch’s application to add 4,000 more homes beyond its current approvals, writing that it was “unclear” whether the demands associated with the expansion would meet the 0.25 acre-feet limitation. The state’s concern was about future scale. The 2025 data speaks to present performance — and on that measure, Sterling Ranch appears to be delivering on its water efficiency claims.

A note on the methodology: the Aurora Water figures represent wholesale delivery to Dominion, not metered end-use at the home level. System losses, construction water use, and any water delivered to non-residential Sterling Ranch customers sit between those two numbers. The developer-provided home sales figure, while plausible, is not an independently verified utility count; in any event it does not appear that Sterling Ranch is wildly over its water usage targets.

The More Pressing Question: Where Are the Expected New Homes?

The finding on water efficiency, however, is not the most consequential number in Dominion’s 2025 financial filings. That distinction belongs to a line item that received no public attention: tap fees.

Tap fees are one-time charges collected by Dominion each time a new home connects to the water system. They are, in effect, a direct measure of how many new homes were built and hooked up in a given year. Dominion’s 2026 budget — filed with Douglas County and the Colorado Division of Local Government as part of the district’s 2025 Annual Report — shows that Dominion collected approximately $8.3 million in Sterling Ranch water tap fees in 2025.

The budget for that year had projected $13.6 million.

That is a $5.3 million shortfall — a 39 percent miss against the district’s own projection. Sewer tap fees tell the same story: budgeted at $3.5 million, actual collections came in at roughly $1.85 million.

Combined, Dominion collected approximately $7.1 million less in new-connection tap fees in 2025 than it had planned. It is a direct measure of how many fewer homes were built and connected to the water system than the district anticipated.

Why That Shortfall Matters Beyond One Year’s Budget

To understand why a water district’s tap fee shortfall has consequences beyond its own balance sheet, you need to understand how Sterling Ranch’s infrastructure was financed — and who is on the hook if the plan does not work.

As the Lantern previously reported, Colorado’s metro district structure allows developers to finance public infrastructure — roads, water lines, sewer systems — through bonds repaid by future homeowners through property taxes. Sterling Ranch Development currently controls the metro district board, sets the debt, and issues the bonds. Residents inherit both the infrastructure and the obligation to repay it.

Sterling Ranch’s financial architecture goes further. Dominion Water & Sanitation District is not just the water provider for Sterling Ranch — it is a developer-controlled entity carrying $266 million in bond obligations through 2052, at interest rates above 5 percent. Annual debt service on those bonds alone is projected at approximately $9.9 million per year through 2052. On top of that sit three additional promissory notes, totaling more than $57 million in principal, bearing interest rates of 6.5 to 7.5 percent.

Dominion funds this debt primarily through tap fees on new homes and service fees from existing ones. It does not levy a property tax — its own 2025 Annual Report budget resolution states explicitly that “the District does not have the legal ability to certify a mill levy under its Service Plan.”

The implication is that Dominion’s ability to service its debt depends on Sterling Ranch continuing to build homes at or above the pace the district’s budget assumes. When construction lags — as the 2025 tap fee figures indicate it did — the financial cushion narrows.

The 2026 budget projects water tap fee revenue of $14.9 million, an 80 percent increase over 2025 actual collections. Whether that rebound materializes depends on whether new construction accelerates substantially from last year’s pace. Property tax payments and debt obligations do not wait on construction delays.

The Structural Pattern

This is not a problem unique to Sterling Ranch. The Lantern has documented the same basic architecture across Douglas County: developer-controlled special districts that finance infrastructure through debt, then depend on continued construction to service it. When growth slows, the pressure on the debt plan builds quickly. Parry Park Water and Sanitation District’s current high water rates are a cautionary tale about how residents pay the price when neighborhoods fail to achieve their buildout targets.

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What distinguishes Sterling Ranch is scale and the added complexity of water. Dominion is simultaneously a water utility navigating state efficiency scrutiny, a bond issuer carrying more than $250 million dollars in debt, and an entity whose board is controlled by the same family developing the land it serves.

The Douglas County Commissioners approved Sterling Ranch to build more homes in part based on per-home water efficiency projections. Those projections are built on data that Dominion — controlled by Sterling Ranch’s developers — is responsible for tracking and reporting.

The 2025 water delivery data, at face value, suggests the efficiency model is working. But the same year’s financial data raises a different question: if home construction continues to run below projections, how long can a debt structure that is dependent on growth work?

Sources & Suggested Reading

• Aurora Water / Dominion Water Contract Usage & Billing Summary 2025

• Dominion Water & Sanitation District 2025 Annual Information Report

• “Following The Water: How Douglas County Relies On Water It Does Not Control” — The Douglas County Lantern, January 2026.

• “The Meadows of Castle Rock: $454 Million in Debt” — The Douglas County Lantern, April 2026.

• Colorado Department of Natural Resources Letter to Sterling Ranch, January 2026.

• “Sterling Ranch, master-planned community in Douglas County, CO, nears 3,000 homes sold” — Denver Business Journal, January 2026.

• “Community split on Sterling Ranch rezoning amendment” — Douglas County News-Press / Castle Rock News-Press, February 2026.

What Are License Plate Readers?

License plate readers (LPRs), also known as automated license plate readers (ALPRs), have been in use for roughly 50 years. They originated in the United Kingdom in 1976 as a tool to combat terrorism, but did not see widespread adoption until the 1990s and 2000s, when the cost of the technology dropped significantly. [1]

In casual conversation, people often call them “Flock cameras,” but Flock Safety is simply one brand among several. Other LPR providers include Leonardo/ELSAG, Insight LPR, and Axon.

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Over the past couple of decades, law enforcement use of LPRs has increased. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2020 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statitistics Survey, larger law enforcement offices were more likely to use LPR technology: nearly 90% of sheriff’s offices with 500 or more sworn deputies reported using the technology, and 100% of police departments serving > 1 million residents reported using LPRs. For comparison, Douglas County Sheriff’s Office has 638 full time equivalent officers.

LPRs in Douglas County

The Douglas County Sheriff’s office currently has 35 LPRs across unincorporated Douglas County, first installed in 2022. In addition, all municipalities within the county use them as well, adopted at varying times:

• Lone Tree: 16 cameras, first installed in 2024

• Parker: 11 cameras, initially installed in 2022

• Castle Rock: 32 cameras, installed in 2021

Some law enforcement vehicles are also equipped with mobile LPR systems capable of alerting officers to nearby license plates associated with stolen vehicles, wanted persons, or other law enforcement notifications while on patrol or conducting proactive checks of business parking lots. Many of the area law enforcement agencies began using mobile LPRs before they installed stationary ones. For example, Castle Rock began using mobile LPRs as early as 2016.

What They Capture — and What They Don’t

LPRs photograph or video the rear license plates of vehicles as they drive past the camera.

They do not photograph or record the faces of drivers or passengers. They do not use facial recognition, or capture gender or race. The data collected include a license plate image or video, along with the date, time, and location of the vehicle when the photo was taken. The Flock Safety system clearly communicates on their website what data they capture via their Usage and Privacy Policy.

How They Work

When a vehicle drives past an LPR, the camera captures a photo of the license plate. That image is then automatically compared against a series of state and national databases, including:

• NCIC — the National Crime Information Center

• CCIC — the Colorado Crime Information Center

• NCMEC — the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (including AMBER and Silver Alerts)

These databases contain what are known as “hot lists” — records of license plates associated with vehicles of interest. If a captured plate matches one on a hot list, the LPR system sends a real-time alert to a law enforcement officer. Hot list matches can include:

• Vehicles linked to stolen property

• Active crimes or felony warrants

• Missing persons (AMBER/Silver alerts)

• Significant administrative violations, such as suspended registrations

Who Uses LPRs?

LPRs are primarily a law enforcement tool, placed by government entities on streets and roadways. But LPRs can also be a valuable tool for private entities: Park Meadows Mall has cameras on its property; homeowner associations in the metro area use them to monitor who accesses their communities.

When non-government organizations use LPRs, they typically set up agreements to automatically share their LPR data with law enforcement agencies so when there is a vehicle in the area that has a hit on the “hot list,” law enforcement can quickly act on this information based on the law enforcement agency’s policies.

How Law Enforcement Acts on the Data

A match on the hot list does not result in automatic action. The LPR system notifies an officer, who then decides how to respond based on the severity of the situation and available staffing.

Because the vehicle is moving when the plate is captured, officers cannot know exactly where it is by the time they respond. As one law enforcement official put it: they at least know which part of the haystack to search.

Crucially, even after a vehicle is located, officers must independently verify all relevant information before taking any action — confirming the vehicle type and model, checking its registration, and identifying who is in the vehicle. The LPR alert is a starting point, not a conclusion.

This process is similar to the familiar practice of an officer “running a plate” during a traffic stop. What LPRs do is automate that initial check and dramatically increase its speed. The same follow-up requirements still apply.

Other Law Enforcement Uses

Finding someone with an outstanding warrant is the most common use of LPR data, but the technology has also proven valuable in solving crimes after the fact.

In one notable local case, a shooting occurred at a retail establishment, and the suspect fled in a vehicle. Law enforcement requested a list from the LPR company of all vehicles captured in the area at the time of the incident. By cross-referencing that list with other evidence, investigators were able to identify and arrest the shooter. Law enforcement said it was highly unlikely they would have found the suspect without that data.

Colorado is in the top five states for vehicle thefts per 100,000 residents [Source]. LPRs improve the chances of locating a stolen vehicle that has been reported to law enforcement.

The Numbers

The scale of LPR activity is significant. According to Castle Rock’s public dashboard, in the 30 days leading up to May 14, 2026, the city recorded 806,001 unique plate reads. Of those, 11,485 resulted in a hot list match — about 1.4% of all reads.

According to a 2025 Denver7 article, the Douglas County Sheriff stated that LPRs had helped make at least 60 arrests in the county. In a public statement, Sheriff Weekly noted that the technology had helped catch suspects in cases involving robbery, murder, kidnapping, rape, and the identification of registered sex offenders near schools.

You can see where cameras are located by accessing various online databases. An example of one of these databases is deflock.org.

Some municipalities have pages on their websites to inform their communities about their LPR usage and policies. Here is an example from Castle Rock. We did not find similar pages for Parker, Lone Tree or Douglas County. Highlands Ranch does not have its own police force since it is unincorporated; the Douglas County Sheriff patrols Highlands Ranch.

What Are the Concerns?

The primary concerns against LPRs center on privacy violations, the potential for mass surveillance, and mission creep. Critics argue that logging every vehicle’s movement creates a trackable record of people’s lives with a warrant, raising constitutional concerns.

• Mass Surveillance and the Fourth Amendment: Critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union, argue that deploying expansive networks of cameras creates a dragnet that tracks innocent, everyday citizens rather than just targeted suspects. This continuous tracking risks building a “mosaic” of personal habits, which critics claim violates reasonable expectations of privacy without judicial oversight.

• Data Sharing and “Mission Creep”: Some law enforcement agencies share data with outside entities, based on their state or local laws. Privacy advocates argue this leads to mission creep - where data intended for investigating violent crimes or stolen vehicles is used by federal agencies for Immigration Enforcement, or by out-of-state jurisdictions for other civil or criminal offenses.

• Security Risks: All centralized databases are vulnerable to data breaches and cyberattacks. A database that stores millions of plate scans and vehicle images is of significant concern for exposure.

• Impacts to First Amendment Rights: The knowledge that someone’s activities are being recorded by the government can deter citizens from exercising their first amendment rights, such as participating in vehicle-based protests or visiting specific religious or political organizations.

• Accuracy and Reliability: Some critics point to historical errors in license plate recognition that can lead to false “hits,” potentially causing unnecessary traffic stops.

Because of these concerns, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, at least 16 states have statutes that expressly address the use of LPRs or the retention of data collected by LPRs.

Using and Regulating LPR Data

LPR companies own and control the data collected by their systems, carefully limiting who can access it. For example, while a business or HOA may host license plate readers on its property, it typically does not have direct access to the collected data. Instead, the data is only shared with law enforcement when a vehicle matches an entry in a law enforcement database.

Even without direct access, these systems can still provide value to businesses and HOAs by helping law enforcement quickly identify and locate vehicles or individuals in the area that might otherwise go undetected.

LPR companies typically retain data for 30 days, after which it is permanently deleted and cannot be retrieved, unless there is a specific reason to keep specific data as required by law enforcement or a court order.

In 2024, Colorado passed Colorado Revised Statute 24-72-113, which placed a limit on the retention of passive surveillance records used by a government entity. Passive surveillance records has a broad meaning in this statute, but is focused on recording devices positioned to capture moving or still pictures or images of human activity [emphasis added] on a routine basis or for security or other purposes. This statute limited access to one year after the creation of the passive surveillance record; it also allowed access up to three years if there has been a notice of a claim filed, an accident or other incident that may cause the record to become evidence in a proceeding.

Still, the concern is real enough that Colorado’s 2026 legislative session saw the introduction of Senate Bill 26-070, which aimed to regulate how LPR data is accessed and used by government agencies. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Amabile of Boulder, framed it as a response to constituent demand: her constituents and others do not want to live in a society where their movements are constantly monitored and tracked.

The bill ultimately did not advance, largely due to strong opposition from law enforcement and a veto threat from the governor. Law enforcement’s core objection was a provision that would have required agencies to obtain a warrant before accessing LPR data older than 72 hours. The concern: to get a warrant, officers must already have probable cause — meaning they must already know enough to identify a suspect. In cases like the shooting described above, officers used LPR data precisely because they did not yet have a suspect. Additionally, not all crimes are discovered within a 72-hour window, which would have made older data effectively inaccessible in many investigations.

At the federal level, there is currently no specific legislative framework governing law enforcement use of LPRs, though existing laws and policies around law enforcement investigations do apply. [Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48160]

In Colorado, it remains to be seen if state legislators will try again to regulate LPR data in the future.

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Additional Resources:

• https://www.denvergazette.com/outtherecolorado/2025/10/22/curious-if-youre-being-watched-by-flock-cameras-in-colorado-map-tracks-1091-locations-statewide/

• Parker Police Department 2024 Annual Report: https://www.parkerpolice.org/DocumentCenter/View/24545/2024-Parker-Police-Department-Annual-Report?bidId=

Correction on The Meadows!

Before we go any further I want to lay out an important correction with regard to The Meadows in an article I wrote on Metro Districts in Douglas County. The original version of the article implied a total bond debt (about $454 million) would be due in full in June 2029. That is wildly not correct. I misinterpreted what actually happens for The Meadows bonds; in three years the interest stops accruing for the bonds, the bonds themselves do not mature and become due at that time. There should be no significant impact to homeowner tax bills, but they will continue to pay for a bond debt that is structured to last beyond most of our lifetimes.

The issue and mistake is really about “is there going to be a huge payment due in June 2029?” The answer is no. Simply put: I alone misunderstood what I read and assumed that if interest stopped accruing, the bond matured and became payable.

I am embarrassed about making that mistake but, notably, this is the first substantive correction we’ve needed to send for The Lantern in our first year of existence. (I also mis-identified which commissioner district belonged to an open county planning commission months ago - and it haunts me - but we caught it quickly.)

A Quick Plug

Check out this local newsletter covering Douglas County hosted on Axios. Longtime local journalist Robert Sanchez is running it and we at The Lantern like it a lot. Are we competitors? Perhaps. But I like to think more, quality, local journalism is great for the whole ecosphere.

Read more

If you live in a master-planned neighborhood in Douglas County, the largest single line on your property tax bill probably isn’t the county. It isn’t the school district either. It is, in many cases, a metropolitan district that you have likely never voted for, that was created before your home was built, and whose original board members were the developer and their employees.

Across Colorado, there are nearly 2,500 metropolitan districts. Douglas County, where master-planned development has exploded the population from roughly 60,000 in 1990 to more than 380,000 today, is one of the most metro-district-dense counties in the country. Some of those districts are well-run, low-tax local governments that quietly deliver parks and trails for a fraction of what a city would charge. Others have authorized more than a billion dollars in debt that residents will be paying off long after their grandchildren are homeowners.

This is a rundown of how Colorado metro districts work, what they actually do for the communities of Douglas County, and where the model has produced both its biggest successes and significant fiscal disasters.

What A Metro District Actually Is

A metropolitan district is a quasi-municipal local government authorized under state law. They are created by petition to a county or municipality, governed by a service plan, and run by an elected board of directors. It can issue tax-exempt municipal bonds, levy a property tax on every parcel inside its boundaries, and operate public infrastructure — streets, water and sewer lines, parks, trails, recreation centers, and in some cases security and covenant enforcement.

The development case for metro districts is straightforward. New subdivisions need infrastructure before homes exist, and infrastructure is expensive. The Colorado Association of Home Builders estimates that paying for it up front would add $30,000 to $40,000 to every home. A metro district lets the developer borrow against the future tax base, build the infrastructure, and pass the cost to the homeowners who use it through a long-term property tax. In theory, growth pays its own way and home prices stay lower while property taxes on new homes subsidize the development.

A mill levy is the unit of measure. One mill equals $1 of tax for every $1,000 of assessed value. Assessed value and appraised value (what you might sell your home for) are not the same dollar amount. On a Douglas County home with an actual value of $700,000, one mill comes out to about $47 per year. A 50-mill metro district levy on that same home is about $2,345 per year — every year.

That math is where the criticism starts.

The Structural Problem

When a metro district is first organized, almost no one lives there. The developer and their associates often hold every seat on the board because they are the only eligible electors — they own the dirt. From those seats, they set the debt ceiling, approve bonds, negotiate the bond terms, hire the lawyers, and in many cases buy the bonds themselves through affiliated entities. The interest payments on those bonds are then secured by the most reliable collateral imaginable: a property tax on a piece of land a future homeowner will pay every year for decades.

State Sen. Lisa Frizell, a Castle Rock Republican who lives in The Meadows, has said publicly she has “seen a lot of kind of shady dealings by metro districts over the years.” John Henderson, who co-founded Coloradans for Metro District Reform, has put it more plainly, calling the structure “a lifetime annuity that pays out, guaranteed by the most secure source of revenue you can imagine — taxes.”

State Sen. Mike Weissman has said the authorized debt of Colorado’s metro districts now exceeds $1 trillion. About 100 new metro districts are approved every year. Most of the homeowners inside them have no idea what their service plan says, who their bondholder is, or how long they will be paying.

Three reform efforts at the state Capitol — most recently HB 25-1079, which would have brought special district board members under the Independent Ethics Commission — have died in three consecutive legislative sessions, killed in the Senate after passing the House.

Highlands Ranch: The Model When It Works

Highlands Ranch is the example metro district reformers point to when they want to argue the structure can produce good outcomes. Founded in 1981 on a 22,000-acre cattle ranch, the community is now home to roughly 100,000 residents. Because Highlands Ranch is unincorporated (no city council or mayor), the Highlands Ranch Metro District is the local government that actually shows up in the daily lives of residents.

Its 2024 mill levy is 10.110 mills — reduced from 11.205 mills the year before in response to the surge in residential property values, and well below the voter-authorized cap of 12.750 mills. For a $700,000 home, that works out to roughly $475 per year. For that, residents get 26 public parks, four dog parks, the parkway landscaping that defines the look of the community, street and infrastructure services, and operational support for the 8,200-acre Backcountry Wilderness Area, a conservation property managed jointly with the Highlands Ranch Community Association.

A few things explain why Highlands Ranch worked. The original developer, Mission Viejo Company and its successors, built infrastructure before the metro district structure became a vehicle for massive bond issuance. The community transitioned to resident-controlled boards relatively quickly. Voters capped the mill levy. And the district kept its scope to operations and parks rather than chasing the kind of compounding-interest debt structures that would later define the worst metro district stories in the county. The Centennial Water and Sanitation District (recently renamed Highlands Ranch Water & Sanitation) has been similarly disciplined, building real surface water and reuse infrastructure rather than relying entirely on the depleting Denver Basin aquifers.

There are legitimate criticisms of Highlands Ranch — Backcountry development and the relationship between the District and the Highlands Ranch Community Association — but the district’s tax structure is not comparatively and objectively outstanding. Whatever else can be said, Highlands Ranch homeowners are getting a remarkable amount of public infrastructure for a fraction of what other Douglas County residents pay in taxes.

Highlands Ranch is the comparison case for everything that follows.

The Meadows and Founders Village: Living With Restructured Debt from the Reagan Administration

On the other end of the county, in northwest Castle Rock, sits The Meadows with roughly 7,500 homes. About a third of every property tax bill in the Meadows is servicing a debt that began as $57 million in infrastructure bonds in the 1980s and has, by the most recent accounting, grown to $454 million.

Not one dollar of original principal has been paid down in 35 years.

The mechanics of that problem are simple. The original 1986 bonds were restructured in 1991 and again in 1993. The October 1993 plan was approved by the Town of Castle Rock with a a target 30-year payoff. Two months later, in December 1993, the seven district boards — then controlled by individuals affiliated with the developer and the bondholders — entered into a separate agreement that converted the bonds into compounding-interest debt with options for no or partial payment of interest as it accrued. Castle Rock has stated, when shown the December 1993 documents by Castle Rock resident Jim Garcia, that it had not previously seen them.

Meadows homeowners have paid more than $200 million in metro district taxes since the late 1980s. The debt is bigger now than when they started. The bondholder, an entity called Castle Rock Bonds LLC, is reportedly seeking around $600 million in total tax revenue before the debt will be discharged.

The 35-mill rate on each of the seven Meadows districts is fixed and cannot be increased — a real protection for current homeowners. But the rate is also why developers across Colorado are now seeking 70-to-95-mill authorizations on new developments rather than building under Meadows-style fixed caps. After a CBS Colorado investigation in February 2025, Meadows residents organized, ran for the boards, and in May 2025 took control of five of the seven districts. The exception was District 4, the master district controlling the bond debt, where residents who tried to run were told by metro district attorneys that their properties were excluded from district boundaries and they were therefore ineligible. The newly resident-controlled boards have retained counsel and are reviewing options.

[The original version of this article stated debt owed by The Meadows would be due in full in June 2029, a corrected and clarified explanation is below]

Compounding interest on the 1993-restructured bonds is set to continue accruing through June 1, 2029. At that point, interest will stop accruing, but this is not a lump-sum payment trigger. Instead, property tax collections will continue indefinitely at the same mill levy rate—35 mills—that has been in place for the past 40 years. There will be no change to homeowner taxes on that date, but under the current bond structure, tax collections will never cease. The Meadows bonds were restructured in 1993 to collect tax revenue for roughly 100 years—meaning the debt and the taxes funding it will outlast current homeowners.

Founders Village

The other Castle Rock community living with restructured 1980s bond debt is Founders Village, governed by the Founders Village Metropolitan District and Villages at Castle Rock Metropolitan District No. 4. The district’s 2024 mill levy is 94.56 mills — the highest single metro district levy in Douglas County, and roughly nine times what Highlands Ranch residents pay. For a $700,000 Founders Village home, that one line on the tax bill is approximately $4,440 per year. After all other authorities are added in (e.g. schools), the district’s combined mill levy clears 164 mills.

The mill levy for Founders Village is computed annually under terms set by the 1991 Chapter 9 bankruptcy plan, which restructured the original 1986 bonds into a 40-year obligation. According to the district’s own public communications, the bond debt is on track to be discharged in 2031, after which the district intends to adopt a significantly lower mill levy, and residents would see a meaningful drop in their overall property taxes in 2032. That 40-year clock is the kind of dismal timeline Founders Village got stuck with in bankruptcy court decades ago; now that kind of timeline is the opening gambit for metro districts like Dawson Trails and Sterling Ranch.

Castle Pines North: Bankruptcy, Water, and Surrender

Castle Pines North Metropolitan District, established in 1984 to serve what is now part of the City of Castle Pines, filed Chapter 9 bankruptcy in 1991. After an early-1990s housing collapse left the district unable to service its debt, the district restructured under bankruptcy supervision and spent the next two decades aggressively paying their balance. Then a different problem arrived: the Denver Basin aquifers the district relied on were drawing down. Residents rejected a $49 million bond proposal in 2018 to fund renewable water infrastructure (which would have come with a $103 million repayment cost), with about 70% voting no.

In 2023, the district transferred parks, recreation, open space, and stormwater responsibilities to the City of Castle Pines under an intergovernmental agreement, dropping its mill levy from 19 to 7 mills. Today the district’s 2024 mill levy is 3.5 mills — it remains the wholesale water and wastewater provider for the area but no longer carries the parks burden.

The district is now stable. But it took 30 years of aggressive payment, a bankruptcy court, a water crisis, and eventual transferring responsibilities to the City of Castle Pines - which did not exist when the metro district was created - to arrive at something that looks like a solution.

Sterling Ranch: A New District with Old Conflicts

Sterling Ranch, the master-planned community in northwest Douglas County between Roxborough and Chatfield Reservoir, is structured under a Community Authority Board governing seven numbered metro districts. Its mill levies are some of the highest in the county for active, new construction. Sterling Ranch Colorado Metropolitan District No. 3 alone certified 33.284 mills for general operations and 62.238 mills for debt service in its most recent budget cycle — a combined 95.5 mills, before any other taxing authority is added. The marketing material describes this as the equivalent of HOA dues. The math says these levies average about $4,500 per year on a typical Sterling Ranch home, before adding other taxes for schools, the county, and other districts like fire departments.

Douglas County approved Sterling Ranch on the strength of unusually low projected per-home water use — about 0.18 acre-feet per year, well below the typical suburban 0.25-to-0.50 acre-feet. Those projections are monitored by Dominion Water and Sanitation District, which is itself controlled by the Sterling Ranch Development Company. The same people who benefit financially from approving more homes also run the government entity that monitors whether the homes can be supported by the water supply they oversee.

In a January 2026 letter, Colorado’s State Engineer wrote to Sterling Ranch saying its application to add 4,000 more units “did not provide required information” and that, based on what was submitted, “it is unclear if the… demands associated with the additional 4,000 units that are part of this Amendment will meet the 0.25 [acre-foot per year] limitation.” Aurora Water, which supplies Dominion Water through a long-term agreement, is now the primary upstream source for the Sterling Ranch development. The metro district’s financial structure only works if the new homes get built and start paying taxes. The availability of water increasingly determines whether the homes can be sustained.

Dawson Trails And The Next Generation of Metro Districts

If The Meadows is the cautionary tale of the 1980s and Sterling Ranch is the cautionary tale of the 2010s, the test of whether anything has been learned is now under construction at Dawson Trails.

Dawson Trails is a roughly 2,000-acre development on the south end of Castle Rock, anchored by an incoming Costco and a new Crystal Valley Parkway interchange on Interstate 25. The amended service plan, approved by the Town of Castle Rock on September 6, 2022, authorizes the Dawson Trails Metro Districts Nos. 1 through 7 to incur an aggregate $1,062,390,000 (call it $1 billion) in debt. The seven districts share a single mill levy number: each is currently levying 74.044 mills. That’s about 7 times what residents in Highlands Ranch pay. The Dawson Trails districts will serve 5,850 approved homes plus 3.2 million square feet of commercial space.

More than a billion dollars in authorized debt. Mill levies in the 70s. A 50-year debt-service window written into the service plan.

Interestingly, five mills per year are remitted to the town in any year debt service taxes are imposed, which gives the town a financial incentive to keep the Dawson Trails structure going. Castle Rock is more or less receiving a dividend for allowing Dawson Trails to exist.

Other newer districts are operating in the same range. Crowfoot Valley Ranch No. 2 sits at 80.47 mills. Canyons Metro District No. 2 at 71.73. Crystal Crossing, Solitude, and Lincoln Meadows are all in the 50s. These are the mill levies developers are now seeking and that the Board of County Commissioners and town councils are approving — two and three times what Highlands Ranch residents pay, and at the upper end of what The Meadows residents have been paying for four decades without any principal reduction.

Arguments For Reform Are Visible in the Data

Advocates for metro district reform want to see safeguards like 40-year bond term limits, debt mill levy caps, financial advisor certifications, and statutory transparency requirements.

This table lists selected Douglas County metropolitan districts, the city or unincorporated area they sit in, their 2024 collection-year mill levy, and a summary of the services they provide. It is not exhaustive, but it covers the largest residential master-planned communities and is a representative sample.

A few things stand out when the data are in one place. The lowest-mill districts in the county are the oldest, most resident-controlled ones with mature bond debt either paid off or close to it. The highest-mill districts in the county are either the 1986-era bond restructurings still working out from under their compounding interest, or the brand-new districts being approved with high debt and high taxes. The middle of the chart — mature suburban metro districts at 20 to 40 mills — is where the model arguably works as designed.

Buyers who do not understand which type of metro district they are buying into are at a real disadvantage. State law requires metro district disclosure on property transfers, but the disclosures are written by the industry, and most buyers never read past the dollar figure on the listing.

What the County and Town Governments Are Doing: Not Much

Douglas County’s Board of County Commissioners has reduced the county portion of the property tax bill in six of the last eight years — most recently delivering $37.8 million in tax relief by lowering the county mill levy by 3.679 mills. That is a real reduction, and it deserves to be reported as one. It is also a reduction on a portion of the bill that, in many of the affected neighborhoods, is roughly one-fifth the size of the metro district line directly above it.

The town councils of Castle Rock, Parker, Castle Pines, and Lone Tree are the bodies that approve service plans for new metro districts inside their boundaries. The Board of County Commissioners approves them in unincorporated areas. The Colorado Department of Local Affairs maintains a registry but exercises no operational oversight. State Sens. Frizell, Brooks, and Weissman have called for a performance audit of DOLA’s metro district oversight. The audit has not yet happened.

The Town of Castle Rock, when presented with the original December 1993 documents that materially altered the Meadows bond structure, responded by retaining outside counsel rather than substantively engaging with the more than 7,500 homeowners affected. It has not publicly explained its own oversight role during the intervening decades.

Questions We Need Answered

• Who actually owns Castle Rock Bonds LLC, the entity collecting the interest payments from Meadows homeowners?

• How many of the Dawson Trails bonds, when issued, will be purchased by entities affiliated with the developer Westside Investment Partners or its principals? (The same dynamic that produced The Meadows)

• What is the County Commissioners’ standard for approving service plans in unincorporated Douglas County, and how does it compare to the published policies in Aurora and Colorado Springs that cap combined debt mill levies at 50 mills?

• What happens to Sterling Ranch’s ability to service debt if it cannot build the homes it planned for due to a lack of water?

Sources & Suggested Reading

• Douglas County Assessor: 2024 Tax Districts and Mill Levies (PDF)

• Douglas County Clerk: Special District Public Notices Archive

• Colorado Department of Local Affairs — Special Districts Brief Review

• Highlands Ranch Metro District Lowers Mill Levy (Highlands Ranch Metro District news)

• Founders Village Metro District: Addressing Questions About Bond Debt (PDF)

• Castle Pines North Metropolitan District

• Castle Pines North history (Castle Pines Connection)

• Sterling Ranch Community Authority Board: Property Taxes

• Dawson Trails Metropolitan District Nos. 1–7 — Service Plan & HB25-1219 Information

• Coloradans for Metro District Reform

• Metro District Education Coalition: Knowledge Center

• CBS Colorado: The Meadows neighborhood metro district investigation

• Colorado Politics: Metro district reform bill bars developers from buying own bonds

• Colorado Capitol Watch: HB25-1079

Concerned citizens in Castle Pines are circulating the first ever citizen-led petition in their city to amend the 2019 home rule charter. The grassroots effort has come on the heels of the controversial Crowsnest annexation request that was ultimately withdrawn by the developer, Ventana Capital. That withdrawal coincided with a 120-day moratorium on annexations from the City and Council directing staff to draft a formal annexation policy for their review by July 17.

Concerns about Crowsnest led Castle Pines residents to pack their City Council meetings in February and March. Many of those same residents are now collecting signatures for a ballot initiative that would require voters to approve any future annexation. If the petition gathers enough signatures, Castle Pines voters will decide whether to approve two charter amendments when they vote in November.

What Are the Amendments?

Amendment 1: Voter Approval for Large Annexations

Amendment 1 would require the approval of registered Castle Pines voters for any future land annexation of 20 acres or more—including multiple parcels placed together.

Amendment 2: Ratification of Recent Annexations

Amendment 2 would require that any parcel over 20 acres annexed within 180 days prior to Amendment 1 going into effect would be referred back to the voters for final ratification. In effect, this amendment would close a temporary, six-month loophole and discourage developers from seeking annexations before Amendment 1 takes effect.

Why These Amendments and Why Now?

City staff has until mid-July to present the City Council with a draft annexation policy. Organizer Donna Packard, a Castle Pines resident, explained, “The timing of these petitions has been managed carefully and in coordination with the City Clerk’s office to ensure that the proposed Amendments to the city’s Charter would not trigger a special election and all the costs that would come along with that. The City Clerk’s office has been extremely helpful to us throughout this process.”

Amendment 2 was designed to ensure accountability to voters for any annexation decisions the City Council might make between the adoption of the annexation policy (as early as July or August) and the November election. Packard noted that, if there have been no annexations in the 180 days prior to voter approval, City Council could deem Amendment 2 moot.

“Castle Pines leadership is busy developing a solid, well thought out annexation policy which will guide our leaders and developers to craft annexations that are consistent with our Comprehensive Plan,” Packard said. “At the same time, we are busy making sure citizens have the ability to approve annexations that add value to our community and disapprove those that do not.”

The Amendments’ supporters argue there’s no guarantee that a formal annexation policy will address their concerns and provide the government accountability they are seeking in annexation decisions for Castle Pines. They believe the amendments will create an important check on the power of the City Council and motivate council members to be directly accountable to voters for balancing the City’s growth with its ability to provide community services (e.g., water, fire, police, schools) and maintain the City’s character.

Organizer Lorrie Ball added, “We want people to understand that these petitions are not just a response to the withdrawn Crowsnest request. That annexation proposal raised important questions. Why are there no policies and fee structures for annexations? How will annexations support our Comprehensive Plan and the strategic Economic Development Plan that is currently being developed? These Amendments are about giving citizens a voice to hold our leaders accountable for adhering to standards that can be applied to all future annexation questions.”

Packard summed it up, “This is a way for voters to weigh-in on their concerns related to thoughtful development, guided by strategic economic development plans and a comprehensive plan for the community.”

How do other communities approve annexation?

Most communities in Colorado approve annexations through local elected officials like City Councils. But there’s very recent precedent for voter approval of annexation. In September 2025, nearly 70% of the voters in the town of Palmer Lake approved a new ordinance to require voter approval for future annexations. That vote came after the town’s elected officials approved eligibility for the flagpole annexation of a Buc-ee’s and also resulted in the recall of two of those officials.

People who oppose the Amendments are skeptical that development will ever happen if it requires a vote of approval from current residents. They argue that City Councils are elected to make those kinds of decisions.

Some Colorado Springs City Council members agree. Although the mechanics of voter approval were different, the Karman Line annexation in Colorado Springs also resulted in a petition for a special election in which voters overwhelmingly reversed the City Council’s annexation approval. One Colorado Springs City Council member defended annexation approval by elected officials instead of by voters saying, “There are a lot of very important milestones and boxes that need to be checked along the way. Everything from utility infrastructure, the cost of utilities, who pays for the utility expense or infrastructure cost.”

Is Castle Pines Checking All the Boxes?

Crowsnest was the first major annexation decision since the City’s charter was adopted in 2019, and the City Council missed checking two critical boxes for making an annexation decision.

Annexation Policy

Despite having no formal policy guiding annexation decisions, the Council unanimously declared Crowsnest “eligible for annexation to the City of Castle Pines” on February 24. At their annual retreat on March 7, the Council discussed annexation. Then, at their next public meeting on March 24, they directed staff to draft an Annexation Policy after finding “that a Council-adopted annexation policy, in addition to the statutorily-required Three-Mile Plan, is necessary to provide direction to potential applicants and staff on when and how the City may want to expand its boundaries.” Just one month after declaring Crowsnest eligible for annexation, the Council decided it needed more clarification on the criteria for eligibility.

Three-Mile Plan

An annexation policy wasn’t the only thing the City was missing. There was also no current Three-Mile Plan on February 24, 2026. A Three-Mile Plan is an annexation master plan for the area in a three mile radius from a municipality’s current boundaries. According to state statute, prior to the final adoption of an annexation resolution, a municipality:

• Must have a Three-Mile Plan in place.

• That plan must be updated at least once a year.

• And it should be part of the municipality’s Comprehensive Plan.

According to the Colorado Department of Local Affairs, “The failure to have a plan prior to the completion of an annexation could open a municipality up to litigation.”

The most recent Comprehensive Plan for the City of Castle Pines was adopted on June 24, 2021. That was before many of the homes in the Canyons - an expansion of Castle Pines east of I-25 - were built. That 2021 Comprehensive Plan reports that the most recent Three-Mile Plan at that time was from 2013. There is no evidence of an updated three-mile plan on the City’s website since that date.

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The Castle Pines Planning Commission approved the adoption of an updated Three Mile Plan on April 23, 2026. That updated plan was on the agenda for presentation at the May 12 City Council Meeting.

These facts together suggest that there was no updated Three-Mile Plan in place at the time of the February 24, 2026 City Council resolution to declare Crowsnest eligible for annexation.

Citizen-Initiated Petitions

On April 7, the City Council passed Emergency Ordinance 26-05 to define procedures for dealing with citizen-initiated petitions; this was in response to citizens seeking guidance on Amendments 1 and 2. The need for the emergency ordinance suggests that when staff members received requests for information on how to set up petitions, they had no defined policies or procedures in place to guide their responses.

What happens next?

Supporters of Amendments 1 and 2 must collect 1,344 signatures to get each Amendment on the ballot. Packard and Ball say circulators are carrying petitions for both amendments and are working all over Castle Pines to collect signatures. They refer residents to FAQs and a schedule of signing events on the group’s website. August 4 is the final deadline to return petitions, and if enough signatures are verified, the Amendments will appear on the November ballot for city residents.

The questions we need answered:

• Why was there no Three-Mile Plan more current than 2013 when the City Council approved eligibility for Crowsnest on February 24?

• If the Crowsnest Annexation had received final approval without a current Three-Mile Plan, what exposure to litigation could have resulted for Castle Pines?

Related Stories

• Castle Pines considers controversial Crowsnest annexation

• Crowsnest annexation request withdrawn

Democrats and Republicans don’t agree about much in Douglas County, but the “3 to 5 Petition” has rare, bipartisan support in the county. The goal of the petition is to let Douglas County voters decide whether the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) should expand from its current three members to become a five-member board.

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Happy May and a belated monthly recap from The Lantern!

I want to start with suggested reading. Louviers Water District reached a major milestone in its journey to improved water quality. Meanwhile, former county commissioner Lora Thomas, Rep. Bob Marshall, and Julie Gooden dispatched a settlement offer to the Board of County Commissioners after the Commissioners were found to have violated Colorado’s Open Meeting Laws when they initiated their Home Rule election last year.

Pulse Check

The Lantern is doing very well heading into summer! We will soon announce a new addition to the writing team, we picked up our publishing pace to be more in-line with what we want it to be, and we’re working on stories and series that add a tremendous amount of value to the community discourse.

We are staggeringly close to celebrating our first anniversary and as we head into our second year it’s clear we are going to focus on county government, water, education, metro districts, and human interest stories that have a difficult time gaining traction with larger channels. Have an idea, tip, or want to write a guest piece? Email me at editor@dougcolantern.org.

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