Who Do I Actually Call? Greeley, Weld County and the Towns

In a lot of Colorado, “who do I call about this?” is a genuinely hard question with a disappointing answer. Greeley is the opposite, and it is worth understanding why, because it makes almost every job here easier.

Greeley is a home rule city, incorporated on 15 November 1885, running about 49 square miles and roughly 115,073 people. It writes its own municipal code, adopts its own building and fire codes, runs its own fire department, licenses the businesses that move refuse within the city, and answers on one phone number. And because Greeley is also the seat of Weld County, the county’s permit counters for nearly four thousand square miles of Colorado sit inside the city limits too.

So there is an answer. Here it is, desk by desk.

Start here: Greeley 311, (970) 351-5311

If you only remember one number, remember this one. Greeley 311 — (970) 351-5311 is the City’s single front door for service requests, code questions, licensing questions and anything you cannot place. City Hall is at 1200 11th Avenue. If 311 is not the right desk, 311 knows which desk is, and that is worth more than a list.

The thing most people get wrong: Greeley does not run the trash trucks

This surprises people who have moved here from a city with municipal collection, and it explains a lot about how waste works in Greeley.

The City’s code declares, at Greeley Municipal Code § 8-371:

“The city, by and through its duly authorized agents, employees, contractors or city-licensed operators, shall be the sole agency for the collection and disposal of refuse.”

Read that phrase “city-licensed operators,” because it is how the sentence is satisfied in practice. The City has declared itself the sole agency and then discharges that role through licensed private companies. The City’s own recycling page directs residents to arrange service with private businesses rather than with a municipal department.

Greeley does not run the trucks. It licenses the people who do.

And the license is not vague. It has its own chapter of the code, Title 8, Chapter 11 — “Refuse Haulers” — and notice where it sits: inside Business Taxes, Licenses and Regulations, between the chapter on free cigarette distribution and the chapter on tree trimmers. Refuse hauling is regulated in Greeley as a licensed trade. The chapter runs from § 8-367 to § 8-371, and three sections carry the substance:

• § 8-368, “License required”: “All refuse haulers who collect, transport or remove refuse, garbage or ashes within the city shall be required to have a license” — as provided for in Chapter 2 of the same title, the business license chapter at § 8-58, whose fee is “set annually by the city manager.”
• § 8-369, “Vehicles; requirements”: a hauler “shall use a packer-type truck or vehicle or a truck or vehicle equipped with a tight metal lining or side frames and with a flame-proof tarpaulin” so that the contents cannot spill.
• § 8-370, “Identification; filing descriptions”: a description of every vehicle used, with its registration details, must be filed with the finance director.

There is one loose end and we are going to name it rather than paper over it. The chapter opens at § 8-367 with a requirement for state-level authority, and the state’s own current published list of the carrier categories it regulates does not line up with the way that section reads. We could not reconcile the two from the public record, so we are not going to tell you which way it falls in either direction. If you are setting up to haul refuse in Greeley, call the City’s licensing office through Greeley 311, (970) 351-5311, and ask what is required today. That is the only body that can answer it definitively.

One more thing the code does say plainly, at § 8-367: nothing prohibits “any resident of the city who, with his own conveyance removes his own refuse or ashes from his own premises.” Hauling your own material in your own truck is expressly contemplated.

The City desks, by what you actually need

• A container in the street, a lane closure, anything in the public right-of-way — Public Works Permits, 970-350-9881, 2835 W. 10th Street, Monday to Friday 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. This is the desk that issues the Public Space traffic permit the City requires for placing a dumpster in the roadway. See our permit guide.
• Where a container may stand relative to a building — Greeley Fire Prevention Bureau, (970) 350-9510. The Greeley Fire Department is a City department with seven stations; its administration line is (970) 350-9500.
• The annual Spring Clean-Up — 970-350-9336, Monday to Friday 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.
• Green waste and clean, untreated wood — the Greeley Organic Waste (GROW) Center, 970-673-3718.
• Water and sewer — 970-350-9811, 1001 11th Avenue.
• Parks — (970) 350-9390. Long Range Planning — (970) 350-9780.
• Everything else, including code enforcement and licensing — Greeley 311, (970) 351-5311.

A note on burning, because people ask every spring. Greeley amends the open burning section of the fire code in its own Chapter 12, and the City does issue an outdoor burning permit. We could not retrieve the terms of Greeley’s amendment, so we will not publish burning rules. Call Fire Prevention on (970) 350-9510 before you light anything.

And the county is here too — all of it, on O Street

This is the part that people who have not lived in a county seat underestimate. Weld County is 3,984.94 square miles, the third largest county in Colorado, with about 378,426 people. It produced more than 80 percent of Colorado’s oil and gas in 2024 and sold $2.38 billion of agricultural products in the 2022 Census of Agriculture, first in the state. It has recorded more tornadoes than any other county in the United States.

And every county counter that touches a construction job in those 3,985 square miles is at 1150 O Street, in Greeley:

• Weld County administration — 1150 O Street, (970) 400-4000
• Weld County Building Department — 1150 O Street — the building codes for every unincorporated acre in the county
• Weld County Public Works, right-of-way permits — 1150 O Street
• Weld County Planning and Development Services — (970) 400-6100
• Weld County Household Hazardous Waste — 1311 North 17th Avenue, Greeley, (970) 400-2217, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., free to every Weld County resident

A contractor working in Briggsdale or Keenesburg sorts the paperwork here. So does a homeowner in Gill, and so does a farmer off a county road forty miles east. That concentration is what “county seat” means on the ground, and it is a real advantage of working in Greeley: the answers are local even when the job is not.

The Weld County Courthouse, at 9th Street and 9th Avenue, was built in 1917 to a design by William N. Bowman and has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 9 January 1978. It sits inside the City of Greeley’s own Downtown Historic District — county government physically embedded in the city’s oldest protected blocks. We are not going to tell you where to go for court business, because the judicial branch lists more than one county location and we did not establish which functions sit where. weld.gov is the county’s own site.

Three kinds of address, three different answers

1. Inside the Greeley city limits. The City is the government in every sense that touches a container. City permits, City fire code, City code enforcement, City license regime. One number: 311.

2. In one of the separate Weld County municipalities. Evans is its own home rule city. Eaton, La Salle, Kersey, Ault, Platteville and Garden City are statutory towns. Each has its own government and its own answers. We did not establish their hauler, container, right-of-way or fire code rules and we will not assume Greeley’s apply. Tell us the address and we will point you at the town rather than guess.

3. In unincorporated Weld County. Lucerne, Galeton and Gill are on Weld County’s own published list of its unincorporated communities. They have no municipal government at all. County rules apply, from O Street. And note this, because it is the sharpest contrast in the whole service area: Weld County adopts no fire code — its own ordinance provides that the International Fire Code applies only when adopted by a local fire district. So out there the container-against-a-wall question goes to a fire protection district, not to the county. Lucerne sits a short run north of a home rule city with seven fire stations, and it is territory with no municipal government whatsoever.

Garden City: two governments, one street

Greeley completely surrounds another town. Garden City is a statutory town of 0.113 square miles — 72 acres — and 254 people at the 2020 census, incorporated on 2 August 1938 and hemmed in by Greeley and Evans on every side. It exists because Greeley voters approved a local option in June 1935 that made the city dry, and a small town incorporated next door to sell what Greeley would not.

Nathan Meeker founded Greeley in 1870 as a temperance colony. Sixty-five years later the city voted itself dry, and a seventy-two-acre town incorporated beside it. The founding principle and its loophole, a lifetime apart and one street apart.

The practical point is genuine. Cross one street and Greeley’s license regime, Greeley’s Public Space permit, Greeley’s adopted fire code and Greeley’s fire department all stop applying. We established nothing about Garden City’s own rules — not its codes, not its permits, not its fire district, not a phone number. So the honest advice is exactly this: if your address is in Garden City rather than Greeley, tell us, because the answers are different, and we are not going to invent them.

The state and federal numbers you may actually need

• Colorado 811 — 811 or 800-922-1987. Utility locates before you dig. Two business days by statute under C.R.S. § 9-1.5-103, not counting the day of notice; white-line the area first. colorado811.org
• CDPHE solid waste program — 303-692-3320. The electronics landfill ban and the waste tire rules. cdphe.colorado.gov
• CDPHE asbestos, Air Pollution Control Division — 720-507-5136. Regulation 8, Part B, and the 32 square foot / 50 linear foot / 55-gallon drum triggers for a single-family home.
• US EPA — lead renovation, repair and painting. Colorado is not an EPA-authorized state for this program, so firms certify with the EPA directly. epa.gov
• Energy and Carbon Management Commission — (303) 894-2100. Oil and gas, which in Weld County is never far away. ecmc.colorado.gov
• National Weather Service, Denver/Boulder — 303-494-3210. The forecast office that covers Weld County. weather.gov/bou

What we will not do

Three things, stated plainly, because knowing what a company will not tell you is as useful as knowing what it will.

We will not publish a City fee. Greeley’s permit and license fees are set annually by the city manager under § 8-58 and § 18-66 and live in a fee schedule, not in the code. Any figure we printed could be stale within months.

We will not guess at another town’s rules. Eaton is not Greeley, Garden City is not Greeley, and unincorporated Weld is not Greeley. Where we could not establish something, we say “we could not find one” — which is not the same as “there is none.”

We will not publish rules we could not read. Greeley’s open burning amendment is the clearest example: we know the section exists and we know the City issues an outdoor burning permit, and that is exactly where our knowledge stops.

The one-page version

• Anything city — Greeley 311, (970) 351-5311
• Container in the street — Public Works Permits, 970-350-9881
• Container against a wall — Fire Prevention, (970) 350-9510
• Spring Clean-Up — 970-350-9336 · Green waste — 970-673-3718
• Anything county — Weld County, (970) 400-4000, 1150 O Street
• Paint, chemicals, automotive fluids — (970) 400-2217, 1311 N 17th Avenue
• Before you dig — 811
• A container — (970) 888-6911

Call us and describe the job and the address, in that order. We will tell you which of those numbers you actually need, including the times the answer is that you do not need us at all. More on the permit side in the Greeley permit guide, on materials in the Colorado disposal guide, and on where we run on the service areas page. The rest is on our FAQ page.