Greeley residents kicked the Colorado Eagles out of their new nest in Tuesday’s special election. At least for now.
Ballot proposal 1A was aimed at repealing the zoning permit for the Catalyst and Cascadia projects, which envisioned the city developing and owning a nearly $1 billion entertainment district in West Greeley with a water park, a luxury conference hotel and a new arena for the Colorado Eagles hockey team. It also would have included an adjacent residential development.
Voters on Tuesday approved the ballot proposal by a 54-46% margin, 11,342 votes in favor to 9,506 votes against. The vote does not kill the project, but it likely delays it for at least a year.
Stakeholders and proponents have promised to continue their fight. In fact, they have already filed a lawsuit arguing that the results are unconstitutional.
Still, the victory, temporary or not, thrilled opponents of the project.
“Residents have sent us a pretty clear message as to where they stand,” said Tommy Butler, the most vocal opponent of the project on the Greeley city council and one of two members who voted against it.
“Democracy delivered exactly what Greeley demanded — no more blank checks for risky projects that put public buildings and hardworking families at risk,” Rhonda Solis, co-chair of Greeley Demands Better, the group behind the ballot measure, said in a statement. “Tonight, we begin building the transparent, responsible future our community deserves.”
The city partnered on the project with developer Martin Lind, most known for his Windsor residential project Water Valley, and the Westlake Shopping Center in the center of Greeley that also came to a contentious vote but was approved.
Lind also owns the Eagles. Lind’s Water Valley company was designing the project and would eventually build a residential community, Cascadia, to accompany the district and the retail that the city hoped would follow.
Lind seemed to know what was coming. He sued the city Monday, asking a Weld County judge to declare the ballot measure unconstitutional. He is arguing that the zoning was administrative in nature. That argument blocked opponents’ first proposed ballot measure aimed at repealing the city’s funding mechanism; a district court ruled it unconstitutional.
Lind is now counting on the courts again to keep his project moving. He said Wednesday it was “too early” to comment on the project or the vote.
A long fight
Tuesday’s vote was the latest chapter in a nearly yearlong effort by opponents seeking to block the project on 834 acres of agricultural land.
A group that originally called itself Greeley Deserves Better started a fight in the spring of 2025 when they circulated a petition along with residents Pam Bricker, Dan Wheeler and Mary Metzger, who led their own charge.
The petition sought to repeal the city’s funding mechanism that put up city buildings as collateral to pay for the project. When the district court ruled the petition unconstitutional, the group renamed itself Greeley Deserves Better and circulated another petition to challenge the planned unit development zoning approved by the city council Oct. 30, 2025.
The group collected nearly 14,000 signatures to put ballot proposal 1A before voters.
Catalyst supporters brought up a case out of Telluride, where a group of voters is challenging the city’s approval of another planned unit development zoning. That case sits in the Colorado Supreme Court and could determine whether the vote on 1A was constitutional.
Bill Rigler, the spokesman for Greeley Forward, a group that had urged residents to vote no on 1A, said he and other cohorts were eagerly awaiting the state Supreme Court’s decision after Tuesday’s disappointing result.
“We knew it would take a Herculean effort on our part to overcome the months-long, orchestrated smear campaign against Cascadia,” Rigler said in a statement. “While we are disappointed in these preliminary results, we are grateful to the thousands of Greeley residents who chose facts over fear and optimism over defeatism.”
What happens now?
The yes vote on 1A strips the land of its planned unit development and reverts it to agricultural for now, though the city will still do some work to get it ready for commercial development. That development can’t occur, however, until the land is rezoned, meaning residents won’t see a rogue Trader Joe’s popping up.
The city has several options, including asking the city council to rezone the property that would still allow for commercial projects, but it will have to wait a year to submit Catalyst to the council without major alterations. The city expects to present a financial picture of Catalyst to the council March 3.
The city doesn’t appear eager to back off from developing West Greeley, even land as far west as Catalyst, as city staff believe that Greeley needs a much healthier chunk of northern Colorado’s sales taxes to continue to pay for services, given its rapid population growth.
The council supported the project through its zoning vote and by urging residents to reject the repeal the same day ballots were mailed to residents.
“West Greeley remains an important long-term growth area for the City,” the city said in a statement, “and Council will continue to evaluate future development through established planning, zoning and public review processes.”
Butler said he believed Tuesday’s vote was not intended by residents to be a rejection of retail or other commercial projects out west.
“This wasn’t anti-development at all,” he said. “We will see growth out there regardless. People I talked to even liked this project. They just didn’t like the way it was financed. The pure risk of it for voters was too much. I know our budgets, and I knew we could not afford the downside risk in this project, and it was increasingly riskier every time we got an update.”
Butler said he might support another project if it made sense. In fact, he said, the city already spent millions on the financing and should recoup some of its investment.
“Honestly, they will likely need to build something out there,” Butler said.
The city already signed an agreement with the Colorado Eagles that puts them in Greeley for 40 years starting in 2028-29, presumably in an arena and not, say, the Ice Haus downtown. The city was unable to answer what happens with that lease by Wednesday afternoon, though it is pursuing an answer.
Butler said he believes the $100 million arena for the Eagles is a problem, given its price tag and the unlikelihood that it would produce the sales tax of, say, a Costco.
“It’s too expensive,” Butler said, “and it doesn’t make much money.”
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