A building permit for a Target store on the east side of I-25 near Baptist Road became public this week, and it settles one thing for certain: the retail center everyone has been talking about since a community meeting back in mid-2025 is now a real construction project, not a proposal on a screen. It does not settle the other thing everyone keeps repeating, which is when the doors open. That date has been sitting untouched in press coverage since before the site had a permit at all, and nobody has gone back to check it against what's actually happening at Baptist Road and Jackson Creek Parkway.
The Permit Is New. The Number Behind It Is Not.
The Pikes Peak Regional Building Department posted the filing on Thursday, September 3: a 129,000-square-foot store, a $22.3 million project cost, sited on the east side of I-25 close to Baptist Road and Jackson Creek Parkway, just south of the existing Home Depot and Walmart. That's the first hard paperwork this project has generated in over a year of public discussion.
What's easy to miss is that the size isn't new information at all. Back in June 2025, when Legacy Development Partners first brought the concept to an informal community meeting, the plan already called for a 129,000-square-foot "Major A" anchor retailer, with a separate 16,000-square-foot "Major B" space alongside it. Nobody outside the room knew the name of that anchor yet. The building department's filing this month simply confirms that the number in the earliest sketch and the number now stamped by a permit are the same building. The plan didn't grow or shrink over fifteen months. It just got a name and a signature.
What Two Industry Sources Can't Agree On
Here's where the story gets more interesting than a routine permit update. Since the land deal closed in April 2026, every piece of trade coverage on this project has repeated the same headline figure: a grand opening in October 2027. That date traces back to the original announcement when Legacy Development Partners and The Garrett Cos. acquired the 30-acre site at Baptist Road and I-25, financed with equity sourced through the Fort Worth-based Telis Group and construction financing from Bank of Texas.
But check a live commercial listing for the same property, updated a month later in May 2026, and the delivery window reads "summer 2027," not October. Two professional sources, describing the same 30-acre parcel, in the same season, land three months apart on when it opens.
| Source | Date Reported | Stated Opening Window |
|---|---|---|
| Land acquisition announcement | April 2026 | October 2027 |
| Trade press follow-up | May 2026 | October 2027 (targeted) |
| Commercial leasing listing | Updated May 28, 2026 | Summer 2027 |
| Building permit filing | September 3, 2026 | Not specified |
Notice what's missing from that last row. The one document that reflects actual dirt work and actual dollars committed doesn't give a date at all. The October 2027 figure that keeps circulating was set the day the land closed, before there was a single permit application, and it has simply been copied forward ever since. That's not a lie. It's a placeholder that outlived the moment it was written for, and nobody has had a reason to update it because nobody local was asking.
One Monument resident summed up the local mood back when the tenant list first leaked in April:
"We are definitely Target girls living in a Walmart world up here."
That's the appetite driving this. It's also exactly why a stale opening date is worth flagging: excitement makes a repeated number feel more solid than it is.
What's Actually Confirmed, in Plain Terms
Strip away the marketing language and here's what has paperwork behind it as of this week:
- A 129,000-square-foot Target, permitted September 3, 2026, at a stated cost of $22.3 million.
- The site sits on the east side of I-25 near Baptist Road and Jackson Creek Parkway, directly south of the existing Home Depot and Walmart that anchor Monument Marketplace.
- A Chick-fil-A is planned in the same immediate area, according to the Town of Monument's own project listing.
- The broader development, branded Legacy at Jackson Landing, is a 30-acre parcel with room for up to 225,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space at full build-out.
- Marshalls and HomeGoods are named as tenants across multiple sources, including the developer's own leasing materials.
What's Still Just a Plan
Just as important is what has not been nailed down, because this is where residents tend to fill in blanks with assumption:
- The full 225,000-square-foot build-out is a ceiling, not a confirmed footprint. Only the Target and the Chick-fil-A pad have permits right now.
- "Additional retailers and restaurants" were described as being in active negotiations as of May 2026. No new names have surfaced since.
- Firehouse Subs remains on every tenant list published so far, but like the rest of the shop space, it has not shown up in a building permit yet.
- The earliest version of the project sketched a possible four-story hotel on the southern end of the site, something a nearby resident raised concerns about at the 2025 meeting over views and light pollution. That component has not appeared in any coverage since the land closed, and it isn't clear if it survived into the current plan.
- No opening date has been reissued to match the permit. Whatever month the doors actually open, the number circulating right now was written before this month's paperwork existed.
What You'll Actually See Driving Through This Fall
If you're on Jackson Creek Parkway this fall, the Target site itself will look like an early grading and utility phase, consistent with a permit that's only days old. But it's not the only thing moving in that stretch. Directly across the highway, a mini-golf course is currently under construction, which means the corridor between Baptist Road and the interstate is seeing two unrelated projects break ground within sight of each other at the same time.
The road itself is also mid-upgrade. Jackson Creek Parkway has a widening project on the books between Higby Road and Highway 105 that adds five-foot bike lanes, medians, sidewalks, and dark-sky lighting, along with new gateway signage for the town. That work traces back to a federal Surface Transportation grant the town secured years ago, and it's a separate budget line from the private retail development, but the two are converging on the same few hundred yards of pavement.
That overlap matters practically. Back at the 2025 community meeting, residents specifically flagged the Blevins Buckle Trail connection into Jackson Creek Parkway as dangerous without a timed signal, and developers agreed to install one as part of the retail project's traffic mitigation. If you're used to that stretch feeling open, expect it to feel busier and more constrained before it feels finished. Construction zones rarely make things easier before they make them better.
The Thing Worth Watching Isn't the Calendar
If you want to track this project honestly, watch the Town of Monument's development projects page for the next round of permits, not the next press release repeating "October 2027." Permits are dated to the day something happens. Marketing copy is dated to the day someone wrote it down and then stopped checking.
The Target is real. The Chick-fil-A pad is real. The rest of the 225,000 square feet, and the exact month you'll be able to walk into any of it, is still a plan waiting on the same kind of paperwork that just landed this week.
If you're weighing what a growing retail corridor like this means for your own property, whether you're thinking about selling into it or buying near it, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks these filings as they land, not months after the fact. Colorado Springs Collective keeps an eye on exactly this kind of local development because it shapes how Monument actually lives day to day, not just how it shows up in a listing description.
Request Your Home Valuation and let's talk about what's actually changing in your corner of Monument.
