After a successful protest of an earlier petition effort related to the $1.1 billion Cascadia development in west Greeley, four Greeley residents Friday filed another protest, this one against a petition that on Wednesday was ruled “initially insufficient” by the city clerk.
Former Greeley city manager Leonard Wiest, along with John DeWitt, Tom Hacker and Zach Bliven, filed the protest just after 3 p.m., seeking to nullify a petition campaign to overturn the Greeley City Council’s Sept. 16 approval of a planned-unit development for 833 acres encompassing the Cascadia and Catalyst projects.
Catalyst would include a new arena for the Colorado Eagles minor-league hockey team, a hotel and water park. It would be largely surrounded by the Cascadia mixed-use development along U.S. Highway 34, east of Weld County Road 17.
City Clerk Heidi Leatherwood on Wednesday found that a signature-gathering effort to overturn the PUD approval fell 32 valid signatures short. An issue committee, Greeley Demands Better, needed 4,586 valid signatures to force a special election on overturning the approval. The group submitted 7,763 signatures, but Leatherwood determined that many of the signers were not registered to vote in Greeley, or had other issues, such as address mismatch, duplication, illegible/not readable or were incomplete.
Petition organizers have five days to “cure” the insufficiency or to submit new signatures from individuals who had not yet signed the petition. But with an Oct. 31 deadline to protest the effort, the four residents filed their protest with the city clerk Friday afternoon.
“Greeley’s local law requires that any election protest against the referendum petition must be filed before the petition’s representatives have submitted whatever cure materials they intend to submit,” the protest letter stated.
“Therefore, in an abundance of caution, and so as to preserve their rights in the event the City Clerk later reverses her determination of insufficiency and determines that the subject petition is sufficient, and with an expectation that a hearing on this Verified Protest under Greeley Municipal Code § 2-89(c) will allow all parties to present competent evidence on the question of whether the referendum petition has garnered a sufficient number of valid signatures, Protesters here challenge the sufficiency of the referendum petition on the grounds that the 197 petition sections submitted to the City Clerk are riven with wholesale invalidity, containing vast numbers of signature lines that purport to be registered Greeley voters but who are nothing of the sort, appearing nowhere on Greeley’s roll of registered voters, as well as individuals who had no standing to sign the petition in the first place because they do not reside within the City of Greeley, as well as signature lines that are illegible or incomplete.”
The protest cited “invalidity rates exceeding more than 65% for some of the petition sections,” with many of those petition sections completed by paid, out-of-state signature gatherers. The protesters questioned entire sections circulated by signature gathers from Arizona, California, Colorado and Oregon.
“With invalidity rates of 72%, 68%, 66%, 52% and 50% for these professional circulators who were responsible for the vast bulk of petition sections submitted by the Designated Representatives, it is apparent that the work of these circulators cannot and should not be relied upon. The submissions by these circulators are suspect on their face because of the extraordinary rates of invalidity,” the protesters wrote.
The protesters are challenging 93 petition sections, totaling 3,814 signature lines.
“All of the signature lines in all 93 of these petition sections are suspect and should be disregarded because of the demonstrated pattern of invalid signature lines collected by these five paid circulators,” the protest stated.
Hacker told BizWest that he had “engaged with some of the paid (signature) harvesters … and the gaps in their knowledge of the issue was just astounding. It was purely an amateur operation,” he said.
“The bottom line for me is still that Greeley has swung and missed so many times over the last five decades or so — opportunities that would have helped the city so much. And here’s another. That land out there is going to develop sooner than people think, and if it is not along the lines of this project, then we’ll have more of the same: apartments, storage units, recreation-vehicle storage lots, that kind of thing. It is destined to be the lowest use instead of the highest use. And that would be really unfortunate.”
In a statement provided to BizWest, Wiest noted that the ordinance “was adopted after years of planning and public input. To challenge that decision, petitioners must meet a clear legal standard. Instead, we saw extraordinarily high error rates, signatures from people who don’t live in Greeley, and circulators who made little to no effort to verify eligibility. Our protest is about ensuring that decisions impacting our city are made by Greeley voters, not by outside groups pushing misinformation or cutting corners. We hope this action reinforces that if you want to challenge a city decision, you must do it honestly, transparently, and within the law.”
Bliven said in a statement that the four filed the protest “to protect Greeley’s democratic process from anonymous outside money and from paid signature gatherers who submitted extraordinary rates of invalid signatures in two consecutive efforts. As BizWest reported, contributions from a Fort Lupton-registered Dark Money group called ‘We Are Greeley’ have exceeded $100,000 from anonymous donors who are evading public disclosure, along with an additional $20,000 illegal contribution by ‘With Many Hands’ that is currently under investigation by the Secretary of State. Greeley decisions should be made by Greeley voters, not special interests hiding behind a curtain.”
Suzanne Taheri, an attorney representing Greeley Demands Better, criticized the city clerk’s rulings on signatures.
“The only thing shocking about the rejected signature rate is that the city and the developer have shown a lack of integrity throughout this entire process,” Taheri said in a statement emailed to BizWest. “All we want is to allow Greeley citizens a vote on this $1 billion Cascadia project. They’ve done everything in their power to stop Greeley citizens and Greeley Demands Better from being heard. We will continue to fight for the rights of our residents on due-process, accountability, and transparency from our elected leaders.
“The high rate of rejected signatures is primarily a reflection of the Greeley City Clerk who continues to violate the law set forth by the Colorado Secretary of State rules on signature validation. One example, includes a large amount of signatures that were invalidated simply because an apartment unit was not present in the address. This is egregious and disenfranchises the voice of the renting community in Greeley. Overall, this is simply another sad and desperate tactic by our opponents.”
Prior petition failed — for now
Another issue committee, Greeley Deserves Better, had collected nearly 1,000 more verified signatures of registered Greeley voters than needed to place a different repeal question on the November ballot. The measure would have rescinded the financing plan for Catalyst.
But the same four Greeley residents protested the validity of the petitions, triggering an Aug. 26 hearing before city-appointed arbiter Karen Goldman, who ruled five days later that ordinances such as the one passed by the City Council in May to approve the financing plan for the west Greeley project were administrative in nature, not legislative, and thus cannot be repealed by voters under state law.
Greeley Deserves Better then asked Weld District Court to overturn Goldman’s ruling, which a judge declined to do, denying an injunction that would have placed the measure on the Nov. 4 ballot. But the judge has not yet ruled on the merits of the case.
