Developer Martin Lind has sued citizens group Greeley Deserves Better and its co-chairs, alleging that “their false and defamatory statements” about his proposed Cascadia mixed-use project and its city-owned Catalyst entertainment district are harming his reputation and business interests.
“In 40 years of my adult professional business, I had never had to resort to litigation to get people to stop lying about me, my family, my business and others,” Lind told BizWest on Wednesday.
His lawsuit demanded a jury trial and is seeking compensatory and punitive damages, but it doesn’t stop there. It also targets the group’s campaign to derail the city-approved financing plan for the $1.1 billion Catalyst project.
“Additionally, the enormous amount of dark money shoved into this through Greeley Deserves Better will now be discovered,” Lind told BizWest, “and we’ll find out who’s behind the curtain trying to keep Greeley from getting this tremendous project.
“They’re deliberate and intentional when they know what they’re saying isn’t true,” Lind said. “The voters, citizens and kids of Greeley deserve to know the truth.”
Responding to Lind’s lawsuit in an email to BizWest on Wednesday afternoon, the group’s attorney, Suzanne Taheri, said “This lawsuit is simply the latest attempt to bully and intimidate average Greeley residents from speaking out against this project. Its financing is a terrible deal for Greeley.
“Ironically, in claiming via lawsuit that he’s not a bully, Mr. Lind proves our point: He’s trying to silence critics of the Cascadia project, particularly concerned Greeley residents, through any means necessary,” Taheri said. “Mr. Lind’s frivolous legal actions will only serve to strengthen the resolve of Greeley residents to speak out against a deal that could cause Greeley to lose its most critical buildings and could compromise public safety in order to finance a water park and hockey arena.”
In the seven-page complaint filed Tuesday in Weld District Court, Lind, who heads Windsor-based Water Valley Co. and is developing the Cascadia project on Greeley’s western edge, charges that Greeley Deserves Better and its co-chairs, Pam Bricker and Dan Wheeler, have been “steering far outside the bounds of robust and vigorous debate on matters of public concern” and “have published scurrilously false demagoguery asserting that Plaintiff has ‘colluded’ in denying fundamental constitutional rights to the people of the City of Greeley and engaged in ‘retaliation’ against businesses in Greeley for their political views, implying some nefarious criminal scheme of extortion and intimidation by the Plaintiff that is entirely alien to who he is and what he stands for.”
The Greeley City Council approved in May a financing plan for the entertainment district dubbed Catalyst on city-owned land near Weld County Road 17 and U.S. 34 on the city’s western edge. The 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, money that would be paid back through the revenue Catalyst would generate. Catalyst would include a hotel, water park and an ice arena that would house Lind’s Colorado Eagles minor-league hockey team, and would anchor Lind’s Cascadia residential and commercial development.
Calling the financing plan too risky, Greeley Deserves Better was formed and collected nearly 1,000 more verified signatures of registered Greeley voters than it needed to place its initial repeal initiative on the November ballot. However, 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 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, but District Judge Allison J. Esser blocked the issue on the day before the Sept. 5 deadline for adding it to the Nov. 4 ballot, contending that the dispute needed further review.
The underlying issues of that lawsuit remain undecided, but Greeley Deserves Better did withdraw a second lawsuit alleging that the Catalyst financing plan violated the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.
Lind’s lawsuit cited a Sept. 19 news release on Greeley Deserves Better’s website that contended that “the City’s actions and clear collusion with project developer Martin Lind has denied Greeley citizens the opportunity to vote on the $1 billion ice rink project.” However, according to the lawsuit, that statement is false because “the Catalyst Project was never the subject of Defendants’ proposed ballot measure question and was never put to a vote of the electorate either through Defendants’ proposed ballot measure question or otherwise.”
The lawsuit also contests Greeley Deserves Better’s charge that “numerous established business leaders and long-time community members expressed fears and instances of retaliation from city officials and project proponents for questioning the Cascadia financing arrangement.”
Lind contends that he “has suffered actual harm to his prospective business dealings as a result of the at-issue statements through the increased costs flowing from third-party reactions to the at-issue statements and through the disruption of Plaintiff’s business dealing based on the at-issue statements.”
A campaign finance report filed Sept. 19 by Greeley Deserves Better included a $3,000 donation from “We Are Greeley,” a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization. The Secretary of State’s website lists the group as having been founded in July with a Fort Lupton post office box for a mailing address but the Greeley street address of a UPS store. It lists Taheri’s law firm as its registered agent.
Taheri said We Are Greeley “provides protection from retaliation for funders and supporters of the repeal effort,” adding that “this organization became necessary after numerous established business leaders and long-time community members expressed fears and instances of retaliation from city officials and project proponents for questioning the Cascadia financing arrangement. The organization allows concerned leaders to support the repeal effort without fear of the bullying that has become a hallmark of the project’s supporters.”
A list of contributors to We Are Greeley was unavailable, but an amended filing that Greeley Deserves Better submitted to the city clerk Sept. 22 showed that We Are Greeley, which critics describe as a “dark-money” group, provided at least $37,800 in cash and in-kind contributions to Greeley Deserves Better, whose initial filing on Sept. 19 did not include the in-kind contributions.
Meanwhile, a newly organized group called Greeley Demands Better has until Oct. 16, a week from Thursday and 30 days after the Greeley City Council’s Sept. 16 vote to approve a planned unit development for more than 833 acres of the Cascadia project, to collect 4,586 valid signatures to place a new issue on the ballot that targets the PUD. That figure is 10% of the 45,858 registered Greeley voters who cast ballots in the last municipal election.
The new referendum would ask voters to repeal the council’s zoning approval, and differs from Greeley Deserves Better’s first ballot issue, an initiative that would have asked voters whether to repeal the financing plan for the project.
Because the validity of Greeley Deserves Better’s initial petition targeting the financing agreement still awaits a court decision, the new zoning issue had to be carried forward by a new issue committee, Greeley Demands Better. That entity is led by Brandon Wark, a candidate for Greeley City Council in Ward 2, and Rhonda Solis, former Greeley Evans School Board member and a former member of the state Board of Education. A news release characterizes Wark as a conservative and Solis as a liberal.
At a media briefing Wednesday morning, Greeley spokesperson Winna Ironkwe said that, “if the petitioners do gather enough signatures and that is certified by our city clerk, that would then pause the process of what could happen on that PUD until there was essentially a vote of the people. So it would have to go to council, and then it would have to be put on either a regular ballot or more likely a special ballot for that to be the determining factor of whether or not certain activities on the PUD would be able to take place.”
However, noting that horizontal infrastructure work for Cascadia has already begun, Ironkwe added that “the work that would be happening there would still continue, so those are more like dirt work and grading, and that is really irrespective of the PUD. The pause that would happen if the petition were successful would not impact something like grading because that is still allowable under what the previous zoning regulations would allow.
“We might have to sort of look at the full timeline of what would happen between now and maybe around March when a special election would take place,” she said.
In other legal action, the Elections Division of the Colorado Secretary of State’s office is still processing a pair of campaign-finance complaints from Greeley Forward, a group that favors the Catalyst financing plan. The complaints include one against Greeley Deserves Better over the timing of a finance report, and one against outside group With Many Hands, a California-based nonprofit that placed paid advertising on social media to promote Greeley Deserves Better’s initial petition drive. That group has been given several extensions of a deadline to either correct alleged violations of state campaign finance laws or show why it hasn’t.
Greeley Forward spokesperson Bill Rigler told BizWest that deadline is now Friday because the state examiners had requested more information.
“Greeley Forward will remain in operation as long as the dark money and outside interest groups continue to push for costly special elections that could cost taxpayers $250,000 or more,” Rigler told BizWest this week.
Greeley Forward’s second of four campaign finance reports, filed with the city last Friday and covering September, listed one campaign contribution of $1,000 from Tom Donkle, the group’s registered agent and manager of Ethos Land & Water Inc. It listed $280.94 in expenses.
Greeley Demands Better’s report listed no contributions, expenses or cash on hand.
Editor’s note: BizWest publisher Christopher Wood contributed to this report.
This article was first published by BizWest, an independent news organization, and is published under a license agreement. © 2025 BizWest Media LLC.
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