Falcon Food Store Plans a Highway 24 Rebuild; Family Weighs a Possible Second Location

If you've ever pulled off US 24 for propane before a weekend at the lake, or backed a fifth-wheel into a gravel site for the night, you've probably done it at the Falcon Food Store and the attached Falcon Meadow RV Park. The Ozburn family has run both from the same stretch of highway since 1959, back when Falcon was a ranching stop with more cattle guards than stoplights. For most of that time, the biggest threat to the business was competition. Now it's the road itself.

Two years ago, that threat sounded almost final. Today, it sounds like a family sketching floor plans for what comes next.

What the 2024 Warning Actually Said

In April 2024, the Colorado Department of Transportation sat down with Jim Ozburn, who was running the store at the time, to walk through plans to widen US 24 between Garrett Road and Woodmen Road. What he heard alarmed him enough to say so publicly. The project would pull out the gas pumps, relocate buried power lines, and take enough land to wipe out at least five campsites at the RV park, according to reporting in the New Falcon Herald. Access would shift to right-in, right-out only, meaning anyone leaving the store headed back toward Falcon would have to loop out to Garrett Road just to turn around, or drive up to Falcon Highway and come back through Meridian.

For a business built on convenience, that's not a small change. Ozburn pointed out that propane customers regularly drive out from Colorado Springs specifically for that stop, and that the site handles gasoline transports, Pepsi and Coke semis, and motor homes that need real turning room. His read at the time was blunt: the plan as designed would not keep the store in business.

That quote is the version of this story most people in Falcon have probably already heard, if they've heard anything at all. It's also, as of September 2026, out of date.

What Changed by This Fall

The most recent reporting on the store, published by the New Falcon Herald this month, tells a different story. David Ozburn, who came back to run the RV park with his father in 1983 and now sits at the head of the family business, is talking about the highway project less like a threat and more like a known cost of doing business in a place that's grown up around him. Falcon had nothing out here in 1983, he told the New Falcon Herald. Everybody knew everybody. He also made a point of noting that when Safeway opened nearby years later, it didn't hurt the store's overall business. Competition, in other words, is a problem this family has already solved once.

The road project is a different kind of problem, and the family's plan for it is now specific:

• The current RV park entrance on Highway 24 will close when construction reaches that segment.
• A new entrance will open off Falcon Highway, tied to the backage road CDOT has already designed for that side of the corridor.
• The store itself will be rebuilt near that new entrance.
• The rebuilt store will not have gas pumps. David Ozburn said running pumps is too expensive and would require more staff than the new footprint can support.
• He looked into a contract post office for the new location. Those conversations, in his words, went nowhere.

That last detail matters less for what it changes and more for what it confirms. This isn't a business waiting to see what happens to it. It's a business that has already priced out its options and made calls, including the ones that didn't pan out.

Then and Now, Side by Side

The gap between those two columns is the actual news here. Two years of headlines framed this as a countdown. The family's own words in September 2026 frame it as a relocation with a known address.

Why Losing the Pumps Isn't the Same as Losing the Store

It's worth sitting with the gas pump decision for a second, because it's easy to read as a retreat and it isn't quite that. CDOT's own project page for the Garrett-to-Woodmen segment describes a backage road, roughly half a mile long, built specifically to give properties west of Falcon Highway a way to reach the widened highway without a dangerous left turn across four lanes of traffic. That's the same road the new Falcon Food Store entrance will sit on. The Ozburns aren't guessing where the access point will land. They're building toward a road CDOT has already put on paper.

The rebuild keeps the business focused on what the family plans to carry forward: propane, the convenience store side, and the campground, rather than fuel sales.

For context on why CDOT is doing any of this in the first place: at the project's open house in April 2024, the agency reported that this stretch of US 24 carries about 15,250 vehicles a day, including nearly 700 freight vehicles. That's a lot of trucks moving through a two-lane highway that was designed for a much smaller Falcon. CDOT resident engineer Andy Stecklein has been clear that the current design adds one lane in each direction, bringing the road to four lanes total, not six as an earlier report suggested. County officials confirmed in a February 2026 email that construction on this segment is expected to run from spring 2027 to summer 2029, so the Falcon Food Store you're driving past today is likely still the one you'll be driving past a year from now.

What Actually Changes for You Between Now and 2029

If you're a regular at the store, the practical version of all this is simple. Nothing changes tomorrow. The current entrance, current pumps, and current campsites are still there while CDOT finishes design work and Garrett-to-Woodmen construction remains at least several months out. When it does begin, expect the fuel pumps to disappear first, the RV park to shrink by a handful of sites, and a new, leaner store to open near a Falcon Highway entrance that doesn't exist yet. The family running it will still be Ozburns. Parker, the fourth generation, is already thinking past the highway project entirely, toward a possible second location somewhere else in Colorado once this one is settled.

That's a different story than "the highway is killing a Falcon landmark." It's closer to "a Falcon landmark is doing what it did when Safeway showed up: adjusting the business to survive the next thirty years, not just the next three."

If you want the fuller history of how Falcon got here, our Falcon neighborhood guide covers the area's growth from ranching community to Colorado Springs exurb, and our earlier look at what's actually happening along Meridian Road covers the retail side of this same stretch of highway.

Road projects like this one tend to reshape property values along the corridor long before construction crews show up, and that shift is exactly the kind of local detail we track block by block at Pulse Real Estate Group. If you're curious what a project like the US 24 widening could mean for a specific property near Falcon Highway, reach out and we'll walk through it with you, free home valuation included.