Citizens group Greeley Deserves Better, which last summer tried to place a question on the Nov. 4 ballot that would have derailed the city’s financing plan for a west Greeley entertainment district, has asked Weld District Court to dismiss developer Martin Lind’s defamation lawsuit against it.
Lind had sued Greeley Deserves Better and its co-chairs, Pam Bricker and Dan Wheeler, in October, 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. But Bricker and Wheeler, in a 26-page motion filed Tuesday that followed their seven-page response filed Nov. 28, asked the court to dismiss Lind’s lawsuit “with prejudice,” listing dozens of actions they claim support their contention that Lind colluded with city officials to push through the project and deny opponents’ bids to derail it.
In legal terms, “with prejudice” means that a case, claim or lawsuit is dismissed permanently, preventing the party from bringing the exact same issue to court again.
Through their Denver-based attorney, Suzanne Taheri, Greeley Deserves Better asserted in its motion that Lind’s lawsuit was a violation of Colorado’s 2019 SLAPP Act. SLAPP, or Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, refers to lawsuits filed by powerful entities against individuals or groups to silence their criticism or opposition on matters of public interest, using costly litigation as a weapon to intimidate, drain resources and create a chilling effect on free speech, rather than seeking legal victory.
In this case, Bricker and Wheeler argued, “a mega-millionaire real estate developer, who stands to net upwards of $30 million per year from the Catalyst development project, approved by the Greeley City Council, is displeased that members of the local community have the audacity to question the economics of that proposed project for Greeley taxpayers. So, those taxpayers petitioned the city government and the courts to put the question to a public vote. In Plaintiff’s view, not only must such efforts be stopped (as this Court did, barring the public vote that Defendants had requested on November 4), but those who proposed it must also be punished, through having to defend this frivolous defamation suit. That way, not only these individuals will be chilled from continuing their opposition to Plaintiff’s lucrative real estate deal, but ALL OTHERS, who similarly question the economic rationality of the project for the City of Greeley will be silenced by the fear of similar retribution.”
Lind’s 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 in October, “and we’ll find out who’s behind the curtain trying to keep Greeley from getting this tremendous project.”
In the seven-page complaint he filed 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, Bricker and 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 that 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. Goldman also rejected Greeley Deserves Better’s contention that the protest violated the SLAPP Act.
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.
Since then, a newly organized group called Greeley Demands Better was formed and successfully placed a question on a Feb. 24 special election ballot that asks voters to repeal the Greeley City Council’s Sept. 16 vote to approve a planned unit development for more than 833 acres of the Cascadia project.
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, one against nonprofit We Are Greeley, 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.
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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