People who wanted to collect petition signatures in the parking lot at Aims Welcome Center on Wednesday evening were told to leave or face trespassing charges, their attorney said Thursday.

Lisa Denke and Carol Gustafson from the group Greeley Deserves Better were among the people who were standing in the parking lot of Aims Community College’s Welcome Center around 6 p.m. with their petition clipboards. Inside, a crowd of people gathered to listen to Jeff Speck, a nationally known planner, and give their opinions about future growth in west Greeley.

The Greeley Deserves Better group is gathering signatures to put an item on the November ballot to ask voters to repeal Ordinance 2025-15, approved May 6 by the Greeley City Council, which authorizes the financing plan for an entertainment district on city-owned land near Weld County Road 17 and U.S. 34 that would include an ice arena, hotel and water park and anchor Windsor-based developer Martin Lind’s proposed Cascadia mixed-use development. The project includes a new arena for the Colorado Eagles, which would move the hockey team out of Larimer County’s Blue Arena in Loveland.

The people with the petitions did not get approval from officials at Aims before being on campus, said Weld County Sheriff’s Deputy Thomas Agnew, a school resource officer at Aims Community College.

The college has procedures for outside entities that want to come on campus and solicit, and people need to go through those steps to get approved, Agnew said in a phone call Thursday.

Attorney Suzanne Taheri disagrees. Her clients were protected by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, which allows people freedom to assemble, Taheri said in a phone call. They were not solicitors, she said, because they weren’t selling anything.

“Those petition gatherers had a letter from our firm, and they gave it to the sheriff (deputy) and he ignored it,” said Taheri, an attorney at West Group in Denver.

The Aims campus in Greeley is considered a limited public forum, which means officials may limit the time, place and manner of political speech, but can’t ban the speech, Taheri said.

“Our position is, we clearly had a right to petition there,” Taheri said.

Taheri said she would call the Weld County attorney’s office to discuss the matter.

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