Shovel-ready... at the graveyard

The voters of Greeley, Colorado have spoken. By a vote of 54.4 percent to 45.6 percent, they have put a halt to the "entertainment district" and housing project that City Hall wants to build on the town's west side. The vote, on a grassroots ballot measure, revokes the recent upzoning of the property, so that now construction is impossible for at least a year. By then, the project may be dead.

Why does this matter to Portlanders? Because the development, known as Cascadia and Catalyst, was one of the big résumé items that former Greeley city manager Raymond Lee (left) was flashing around when he was interviewing for the Portland city manager job, which he eventually got, along with a first-year compensation package valued at well over a half million dollars. As our mayor, Keith Wilson, put it –

Lee's key achievements include:

• Leading the revitalization of Greeley's urban core through a partnership between the city, county, and school district to develop a public service hub, mixed-use housing, commercial space, a hotel, and office development. 

• Leading a 300-acre entertainment and housing district featuring a proposed 10,000-seat arena, resort hotel, water park, and multimodal transit hub representing $1.1 billion in investment....

In fact, Lee had left the Greeley job, under circumstances that nobody's talking about, a short while before he was named a finalist for the Portland gig. Now the project he was selling so hard back in Colorado, and touting here, is on the ropes.

To make matters a little scarier for Portland taxpayers, the main objection the opponents have to the project is that the underlying financial deal stinks. The election that concluded today was about whether the city was taking on too much downside risk while the developer character got too much of the upside potential. A clear majority of the voters question the wisdom of the deal – they're not buying the "public-private partnership" baloney.

I was rooting for the opponents of Cascadia. The developer guy who's ramming it down their throats, a moneybags named Martin Lind, is a Trumpy dude who sues anybody who looks at him funny. The first time the opponents tried to put the matter to a public vote, Lind managed to get their ballot measure tossed out. Later he sued them for defamation, which was meritless. Just yesterday he or his flunkies filed another lawsuit, claiming that today's vote was unconstitutional. The world has too many of these guys.

Regardless of whether the project ever does get built, the whole mess has caused tons of hard feelings in Greeley. The citizenry there has been divided into camps. There's a lot of mistrust, and in a city with only about 100,000 people, that can't be a good thing. This was one of Lee's big accomplishments? Portland, you'd better watch that dude like a hawk.