Greeley leaders react to ‘stunning visuals’ of Cascadia project

GREELEY — Greeley leaders are still a couple of months away from deciding whether to work with Windsor developer Martin Lind on arguably the biggest project ever to come to Greeley, but many already seem smitten.

The expected billion-dollar project would provide a new arena for Lind’s Colorado Eagles minor-league hockey team, youth hockey rinks, an indoor water park with 12 water slides, a hotel and convention area, spaces for restaurants and shops, and eventually more than 6,000 residential housing units.

Greeley leaders went to an outside firm to evaluate the project’s financial viability and expect results in about four to six weeks.

Lind presented the project to the Greeley City Council Tuesday night, with big visuals and big numbers. He said he’d grown up farming some of the land, which ties him to the area’s success.

“This will be the proverbial large rock in the pond that will have a ripple effect,” he said. “I’m not interested in failure. I have zero interest in promoting a project that won’t have an enormous effect.

“I don’t want to drive by and only turn right because I’m not allowed to go to Greeley anymore.”

Council members met the project with equal vigor, eager to get the project off the ground.

“Your enthusiasm is contagious. For the many people who said to me, ‘Is this for real?’ I hope they’re watching tonight. Damn right it’s for real,” said Mayor John Gates, who was attending virtually from a conference in Tampa, Florida. “The renditions are breathtaking, and it’s clear your staff and our staff have done a yeoman’s work in vetting this project because we are trying really hard to make it happen.

“This is the most exciting thing I’ve seen,” Gates added. “I think that the work we’re all doing is paying off.”

Lind explained that the project, which he would build on 110 acres between Weld County Road 17 and 131st Avenue (a mile west of Colorado Highway 257) north of U.S. Highway 34, was originally planned for Larimer County before the county pulled the plug on their negotiations earlier this year.

But there are still some tough questions to answer. How will a project like this be funded? What role would the city play in terms of incentives or cost-sharing? How will such a project affect downtown Greeley? Will some of the city’s new $65 million in debt for transportation that voters just approved help fund traffic improvements there? Oh, and the arena needs to open by 2028, Lind said.

Lind said the project would elevate all of Greeley, including downtown, and make it a destination rather than a dusty old town. With the city’s 20-year plan at the Greeley-Weld County Airport on the east side of Greeley, he asked council members to visualize his project, which he is calling Cascadia, as a bookend.

Council member Deb DeBoutez asked about the large-scale commercial development that was supposed to be a part of the plan. “When we first started talking, we were talking about large-scale commercial development as part of it, and I don’t see that in the first phases,” she said.

Lind explained that the project was designed to be a magnet to bring more development along the way.

“You have to drive past that field (to get to Cascadia) and that’s all designed for commercial development. That’s over 100 acres that will hold 3 million feet of commercial mixed use,” Lind said. “We are in communication with retailers, but they don’t like this (Weld 17 and U.S. 34) intersection today. They’re not going to come here unless we have assurances that infrastructure and improvements (are there). The attraction of a million visitors is a start, but it doesn’t get a Costco. What does is big master-planned communities that have all the traffic figured out.”

Lind said he’s been asking for 20 years to get that intersection fixed, and it may just take all hands on deck — from the cities that the intersection feeds to the federal government — to find the money to improve traffic flows. The city and Lind have discussed a continuous-flow intersection there that pushes left-turning traffic onto the outside of the through-traffic.

Rachel Flynn, deputy city manager for Greeley, said that once the project becomes more of a reality, the big commercial retailers will come in.

“Greeley constantly has sales-tax leakage,” Lind added. “They lose the cool retailers to Loveland and Fort Collins, and this project reverses that.”

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