With the nine-member West Greeley Citizen Oversight Committee poised to hold its first meeting Thursday to consider the city’s next steps for the proposed Catalyst entertainment district, the mayor and City Council agree that better communication is key.
Over the next eight weeks, committee members will review key components of the project, including legal considerations, zoning and infrastructure, design, financial structure and obligations and the General Improvement District framework. But as council member Johnny Olson put it during a work session Tuesday, “I want to make sure we articulate what the problems are so the committee understands it.”
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Those problems were outlined in a presentation by Deputy City Manager Allena Portis, who presented a detailed slideshow to illustrate the city’s financial situation in the wake of the Feb. 24 special election in which voters overturned planned-unit development zoning for Catalyst and the surrounding Cascadia mixed-use development on the city’s western edge.
The result of that election “specifically increases ‘non-appropriation risk,’” Portis said. “In practical terms, that means investors may view the city’s willingness or ability to support future annual appropriations as less certain. That, in turn, weakens the value of any moral-obligation pledge associated with the financing structure.
“From a market perspective,” she said, “that kind of signal can make debt issuance more difficult, more expensive, or potentially less viable. So this is not simply a policy outcome that has direct implications for financing strength, investor confidence and execution risk.”
Cascadia, a master-planned residential and commercial community at U.S. Highway 34 and Weld County Road 17 that was spearheaded by Windsor-based developer Martin Lind’s Water Valley Co., had been planned to surround the city-owned Catalyst entertainment district, which would include a hotel, Mattel-branded water park and an arena with youth hockey ice sheets that also would be home to the Colorado Eagles, a minor-league hockey team owned by Lind.
The City Council approved last May an ordinance outlining the financing plan for the entertainment district. That plan authorized the use of $115 million worth of certificates of participation to lease several high-profile city facilities as collateral to pay for the plan.
Portis said proceeds from the certificates would have been reimbursed through the general improvement district, water and sewer fees, and a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
That $115 million “would have been reduced to zero by 2027, and those buildings would no longer be used as collateral under this plan.”
Now, she said, the city also has to deal with the rising estimated cost of the project, which has risen from more than $910.6 million in March 2025 to more than $959.4 million as of last February. She said the city is now $127 million short of being to pay off the project’s total cost.
“If we were to abort the project,” Portis said, “we would need an additional partner to assist with the moral-obligation pledge.”
Emphasizing that “the fiscal effects of development in this area extend beyond city revenues alone,” she detailed the impacts to the county and school district as well.
“The oversight committee will review a broad range of issues, including estimated project costs, potential scope changes, financing options, funding options and communication to the public,” Portis said. “That oversight function is intended to provide an additional level of review and help assure that major assumptions, costs and public pricing information continue to be vetted as the project evolves.”
The key is transmitting details of the project to the committee members.
“We need to do much better at communicating a very complicated project,” said acting city manager Brian McBroom.
Mayor Dale Hall said the way to do that is, “Don’t talk in lingo. Don’t talk between two financial people that understand each other. Say it where everyone can understand it.
“We have not been able to explain the lingo of the financial world to the average citizen,” Hall said. “That’s a risk that we’ve always had, and we haven’t done a very good job of it. We use a lot of acronyms.”
The committee, formed after the municipal election to try to improve the transparency that Catalyst opponents said city government lacked, then must convey those complicated financial concepts to the Greeley populace.
“Without question, we have to do a better job of explaining what is a very complicated financial structure. It’s essential in deciding how we move forward,” Hall said. “The goal of the oversight committee is absolutely to help us translate this information in a way that will make sense to the community at large. They’re going to get a massive dose of this information, and part of the charge of this committee is to help us translate it. You’ve got to put it into a framework of people’s understanding where you can use everyday nomenclature.”
The city-staff-written resolution for the oversight committee stated that, “as a result of the referendum, the Catalyst Project must be revised due to the inability to obtain funding within the time frame that was originally contemplated” and that it “includes complex delivery considerations, project controls and financial structure topics that City Council believes will benefit from regular review by a dedicated citizens’ committee.”
