Voters in Greeley likely will get to decide Feb. 24 whether to repeal city-approved planned-unit development zoning for the Cascadia and Catalyst projects.
A resolution supporting sending the issue to voters is part of the agenda for the Greeley City Council’s meeting next Tuesday. If it’s approved, city officials have estimated that such a special election would cost around $350,000.
The meeting agenda was posted late Wednesday.
After City Clerk Heidi Leatherwood’s office on Nov. 7 certified the petition drive led by citizens group Greeley Demands Better, the newly elected city council by law was compelled to either repeal the Sept. 16 approval of a planned-unit development encompassing the Cascadia project and city-owned Catalyst entertainment districts or send the question to a special election within 90 days.
After the new mayor and City Council were sworn in Nov. 18, they went into executive session to decide what to do about the repeal question.
The $1.1 billion Catalyst project would include a new arena for the Colorado Eagles minor-league hockey team, a hotel and water park. It would be largely surrounded by Windsor-based Water Valley Co.’s Cascadia commercial and residential development along U.S. Highway 34, east of Weld County Road 17.
The ordinance creating the planned unit development established zoning for 220.568 acres and rezoning for 613.218 acres, totaling 833.786 acres. The properties subject to the PUD are owned either by the City of Greeley, Patriot Energy LLC or VIMA Partners LLC. Patriot and VIMA are entities controlled by Water Valley.
According to the council agenda summary posted Wednesday, if voters repeal the rezoning ordinance, “the City Council will not be able to enact the same ordinance for a period of one year following the repeal. The owners of the affected properties will need to submit one or more new zoning applications to the City to establish zoning or to rezone the parcels. These applications will then be considered by the Planning Commission and the City Council pursuant to the City’s normal procedures.”
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 last week’s municipal ballot. The measure would have rescinded the financing plan for Catalyst approved by the City Council in May, which included the use of “certificates of participation,” using several city-owned buildings as collateral.
But four Greeley residents protested the validity of those petitions as well, triggering an Aug. 26 hearing before city-appointed arbiter Karen Goldman, who ruled five days later that ordinances such as the financing plan 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. However, the judge has not yet ruled on the merits of the case.
On Nov. 5, two of the protesters, former city manager Leonard Wiest and journalist Tom Hacker filed a campaign-finance complaint against a nonprofit group that was formed to shield the identities of donors to the petition drives. The complaint alleges that the nonprofit, We Are Greeley, is an issue committee and as such should be required to submit lists of donors and expenditures to the Greeley City Clerk but has not done so, and thus is in violation of the Fair Campaign Practices Act and the state Constitution.
However, Suzanne Taheri, the Denver-based attorney for the Cascadia opponents, disputed the protesters’ claim, telling BizWest that We are Greeley and other “501(c)(4)s, unlike political action committees (PACs) or super PACs, are not required to reveal their donors to the public.”
