Brett Payton is running for the at-large city council seat. Here’s where he stands on the issues.

By Kelly Ragan

Brett Payton is running for the at-large city council seat. The at-large councilmember is tasked with representing all of Greeley, rather than a single ward. 

At a forum hosted by the League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan organization, Greeley mayor and city council candidates answered questions from the league and from audience members regarding where they stood on various issues, what their plans would be if elected, and more. 

Some of the major topics included housing, transportation, water, diversity, and communication. Candidates were also asked about three ballot measures, 2F (also known as Keep Greeley Moving), and 2G and 2H (also known as the water ballot measures). 

The NoCo Optimist included candidates’ opening and closing statements, answers (with edits for clarity and brevity) as well as the questions asked for context. The NoCo Optimist’s goal here is to give you an idea of who a candidate is and where they stand on issues that matter to you. 

Opening statement

I’m Brett Payton, I’m the current Ward II city council member in Greeley running for the at-large seat. My desire is to serve the entire community in which I live and work. We moved here in 2007. I graduated from CSU, but I’ve spent most of the rest of my college dollars at UNC since then. I’m an attorney. I hire attorneys here in the city. My firm is on the west end of town.  

My approach to city council was strictly service. Since we moved here, my goal has been to serve this city. I’ve served on the planning commission, I’ve served on the Global Refugee Center, got elected to city council, been a part of the Metropolitan Planning Organization representing our city on regional transportation matters. I just want to continue to serve this city and serve everybody in this city. 

Being an attorney, I’m absolutely used to varying points of view, varying arguments, taking all those and consolidating those ideas and coming out with the best resolution for any given situation. 

Question: As the city of Greeley continues to experience increasing population growth and diversity, moving from a town to a big city, this growth has impacted a number of areas such as housing, transportation and water to name a few. What ideas or strategies do you have to address future issues impacted by this growth? 

Water is going to be key to our future. It addresses the housing issue, it addresses cost of living. Water is a scarce resource in Colorado. As a city council, we have been looking at innovative ideas. Where are we going to find our water? What projects are we going to participate in regionally for storage of water? We continue to participate in water storage opportunities in the region.

But that will both be a limiting factor on growth and a limiting factor on budgets. It has to be. Relative to housing, the cost of housing is a direct correlation to what it costs to develop the cost to acquire water, the cost of regulations, the cost to comply with city ordinances, the cost of raw land – so again, the more we can continue to come up with any innovative ideas and give developers opportunities in their toolboxes to reduce those costs, the better off we’re going to be across the board on all of those topics.

Question: Do you think the city is effectively communicating with the community about its activities and needs? If so, how are they doing that? If not, what needs to be improved?

Yeah, there’s always room for improvement in everything. If you stop improving, you’re missing out on opportunities.

City council has been doing a better job of communicating. The website is available. I think the unique opportunity that COVID-19 gave us was moving things to the Zoom platform. We are here nearly every Tuesday night. We have time for public comment. All the city council members make themselves available through our email systems and our phone systems. 

I think we communicate out fairly well. Like I said, there’s always room for improvement in everything we do. 

Question: Offer some specific ideas on addressing growth and housing challenges. 

One of the tools in our toolbox that we rolled out years ago then kind of went away, if you will, and we re-rolled out are metro districts. Metro districts are not a solution for all developments, nor should they be used in all developments, but it's an opportunity for a developer to come to the city, find opportunities to amortize the financing of their infrastructure. 

Some of the other things that we've been doing is changing our development code to speed up our development process. Time is money in development, quite literally. 

The planning department also rolled out a software system where developers could interact with the planning department quicker, they get more real-time updates on the on their process. The idea is to move that application through faster and give more reliability to outcomes. 

Question: About 40% of Greeley’s population identifies as Latino or Hispanic. But there aren’t many language services to reflect that. How will you support the Latino population and other minorities in Greeley, including undocumented people?

To address what I heard was the first part of the question, with regards to communication, communicating to 40% of our population in the city, to the degree that the city is failing to, as an example, translate the website, providing translation services when calling into city services. 

That's something that we absolutely should address on behalf of 40% of our population. To that end, when I did serve on the Global Refugee Center, I'm very much aware that there are a number of efforts within this city to provide access to government, schools, and businesses to help people journey through their experiences in the city. 

This is something that we need to continue to address. The population is just going to keep growing. As the population grows, the 40% is likely to stay the same, which means the number of people speaking second languages will also continue to grow. 

Question: What is your position on Keep Greeley Moving? Why? What is your position regarding the changes to the home rule charter on water decisions? Please explain. 

Keep Greeley Moving, everybody needs to vote for that. We have been working hard to bring our PQI up. We’ve done a great job of doing so. That effort was started under Mayor Norton and we to be able to finish the job. I think city council would love to be able to look at the community and say job really well done on that. We’ll then need to make sure that we’re maintaining them. Hopefully that doesn’t mean continued or new taxes. 

With regards to the two water bills, our water board has the longest and deepest depth of knowledge, no pun intended. Those guys are super knowledgeable. The water board meetings are open to the public. Feel free to come down and bring some donuts. They last really long. But those two bills will absolutely stifle development in this city.

Closing statement

Running a city that is growing at the rate that we are, it’s important that city council will not be a single-issue council. It’s important that council not be divisive in its politics. It’s about the business of the city. It’s about making sure that we’re moving in the right direction as people come to this city, that we do understand that diverse families, economically, socially, are coming and what they need.  are coming, that we understand what they need economically and socially. Listening to all of those concerns, that’s what I’ve done throughout these last four years, through COVID-19. We’ve come through fantastically, and I’m looking forward to continuing to make Greeley the city of choice.