Elbert County planning commission recommends denial of Xcel Energy Colorado Pathways permits

The Elbert County Planning Commission on an extended hearing night recommended denial of Xcel Energy's land-use applications for a 345-kilovolt transmission segment that would cross Elbert County as part of the Colorado Pathways project, saying the applications were incomplete and raised unresolved public-safety, environmental and property-rights concerns.

Commissioners voted 9-0 to recommend denial of the major permit (application 1041-2024-9235) and separately voted 9-0 to recommend denial of the Special Use by Review (SUR-2024-9236). The motions cited multiple sections of Elbert County's zoning rules and repeated staff findings that required materials and signed fire-protection agreements were not in the record.

Why it matters: The county recommendation is an advisory step in local land-use review; Xcel Energy has a parallel certificate process at the Colorado Public Utilities Commission (PUC). If the county denies the permits the company could pursue administrative or legal remedies; commissioners and county staff said unresolved questions about emergency planning, eminent domain filings and mitigation made the applications ill-suited for approval now.

Xcel Energy representatives repeatedly defended the project as a statewide reliability and transmission initiative intended to increase redundancy into the Front Range. Parker Rosack, identified in the hearing as Xcel's senior manager of transmission engineering, said the line's purpose included moving generation from the southeast into the front-range grid and providing alternate paths in the event of outages.

"The plan typically is to replace [retired thermal units] with solar and wind generation," Rosack said when commissioners asked what would backfill retiring fossil units that now feed the Harvest Mile substation. He also described construction sequencing and said detailed natural-resource surveys would be completed closer to construction.

Commissioners and county staff pressed multiple topics in detail: the accuracy and completeness of the project's visual simulations (KOPs); the project's claimed tax benefit; whether Xcel had authority and had initiated condemnation actions; where construction water would come from; the applicant's evidence on wildlife and cultural-resource surveys; community outreach results; the county fee owed under its SUR schedule; and…