Weld County officials are set to announce new judicial center spot 

GREELEY — The Weld County commissioners are expected to announce their decision Monday on where they plan to build a new judicial center.

Officials have discussed two key spots for a new judicial center — on an upgraded civic campus in downtown Greeley where the City of Greeley and Greeley-Evans School District 6 already have offices, or on 100 acres of land the county already owns on the north side of O Street on the city’s northern edge.

The commissioners on June 11 said that they had authorized county facilities director Patrick O’Neill and Jeff Darnell, president and CEO of Windsor-based Level 5 Collaborative “to negotiate potential property trades to accommodate the possible location of the new Justice Center in downtown Greeley.”

County staffers are expected to make a presentation about the options at 10 a.m. Monday at the Weld County Administration Building, 1150 O St., Greeley. The commissioners will announce their decision after the presentation, according to the press release.

“As a board, we have performed our due diligence to explore options for the judicial center being located downtown or on the county’s O Street property,” Perry Buck, the commissioner chair, said in the press release. “The firms the county hired to handle the negotiation of land and demolition costs are doing a great job getting us the information we need to make the best decision possible, not only for the taxpayers of Weld County but also for our operations for decades to come.”

The commissioners in March hired two firms, PCL Construction and RJA Engineering, to research and verify the costs of building the judicial center at either location. They also hired Darnell to represent the county in negotiations.

In a related measure, the Greeley City Council has been discussing various methods of funding a $126 million civic center project while also tackling the complicated and risky $1.1 billion financing plan it approved in early May for a sports, entertainment, hotel and water park on city-owned land on the city’s western edge, the keystone of Windsor-based developer Martin Lind’s massive Cascadia project.

One option Greeley city officials studied was forming a public/private partnership with Richmark Cos. LLC, which would lease the new city hall to the city until the debt it incurs for construction of the campus is repaid. That would allow the city to hold off on major expenditures on the civic center until Cascadia’s entertainment complex — dubbed “Catalyst” — begins generating revenue that the city could use to pay off the lease.

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