The El Paso County Commission unanimously approved on Tuesday the first plan presented in a multi-million dollar industrial project spearheaded by the international Edw. C. Levy Company on the southwest side of Fort Carson.

Questions remain on how the project will be implemented, as stakeholders will soon need to negotiate responsibilities for providing services to the over 3,000 acre development.

The preliminary “sketch” plan includes a rail spur from a Colorado Springs Utilities line to service Fort Carson, providing redundancy and a security upgrade to the base’s other railyard built in the 1940s. It also includes areas of planned heavy and light industrial use and a small commercial area.

Steve Milliken, a lawyer for the project, said at the meeting on Tuesday that the project filled a gap in industrial land use in El Paso County where that usage would not impact nearby residential areas.

Commissioner Longinos Gonzalez Jr., who has also been involved with the project in an adviser position, said its location was an “ideal situation for this project.”

The location of the area in a undeveloped strip of unincorporated El Paso County between the base and the City of Fountain presents its own challenges to the project, however.

According to Milliken, once preliminary plans are set the next stage of the project would be applying to the county for recognition as a metropolitan district, a “quasi-governmental entity” that opens the way for grant applications and for the district to fund and organize utilities services.

That district would then apply for annexation into Fountain, which in a letter submitted with the project said it would provide utilities services to the development if it met certain conditions when it came to water availability.

Those conditions may have become harder to meet in the past few years since the project was first proposed in 2014. As the city grows, the city’s finite water resources have come under greater scrutiny.

The 2023 letter submitted by Fountain utilities director Dan Blankenship said that, if annexed into the city, the project would potentially be required to obtain its own water rights.

The letter said the city was “working on a policy that would require landowners/developers to obtain water rights that are consistent with the city’s existing water rights portfolio.”

Existing water services would be on a “first come, first served” basis, according to the letter.

Kimberly Bailey, Fountain economic development and urban renewal director, said that the city was still considering whether to approve any annexation. The El Paso Board of Commissioners approved the sketch plan along with a “head nod” informal approval to allow the neighboring city to forgo an annexation impact report.

Milliken said the project stakeholders were aware of the water rights issue.

“This site will have some utilities challenges,” he said. “We’re aware of that, so ultimately this is a regional project. We will solve these utilities problems. I don’t know today for sure whether we will be annexing into the city of Fountain or not.”

He said he could not comment further on alternatives the project might be pursuing, but that he expected a plan to be in place within the next six months.