I attended last night's community event at Ogden's Union Station, and would like to offer my obervations of what occurred.The event was broken into three segments: 1) a half-hour introduction and anti-Rec Center "pep-rally;" 2) a general presentation on "modern" urban planning by the featured speaker Mr. Howard Blackson III; and, 3) audience participation.
The first segment basically boiled down to a spirit-rally for the anti-Rec Center event sponsors. Mitch Moyes and Sharon Beech played a shrill tag-team for the first thirty-five minutes, blaming the Ogden City administration for their two most recent failures, the petition drive and the federal court case. It was the same old stuff rehashed; and I won't go into it "at length," except to say that it went on for far "too long." One significant highlight of this initial segment, however, was a short series of remarks by one Aaron Mueller, a local real estate developer, who somehow wound up with the microphone in his hand. Before the mike could be ultimately wrested away, amidst much spirited booing and cat-calling from the partisan crowd, he managed not only to upbraid Mr. Moyes and Ms. Beech for their late arrival to the planning process, but also to read from a recent Standard-Examiner article a short quote from Judge Stewart, explaining his actual rationale for dismissing the plaintiffs' lawsuit: "Plaintiffs' allegations against defendants themselves simply do not establish federal jurisdiction, but, rather, appear to be a thinly veiled attempt to make a last minute end-run around state statute to accomplish judicially what they could not accomplish through appropriate procedural means." To say that Mr. Mueller's comments took the wind out of the event promoters' sails would be something of an understatement. It also set the tone for the final segment of the evening.
The second segment was the feature presentation itself. Mr. Blackson is a young, energetic and knowledgeable speaker. He delivered a detailed "power-point" primer on the key elements of successful urban planning: preservation of significant historical structures, concentric development (high density uses forcused in the center and progressively lower density radiating to the periphery,) the creation if liveable neighborhoods, the creation of a local employment-base, etc., etc., etc. Unfortunately, his presentation did not live up to its billing. Not only did Mr. Blackson fail to explain why the present Ogden city development plan "would not succeed;" he actually affirmed most of the current plan's basic elements. If anything, it demonstrated that Mayor Godfrey's administration is probably on the right track. For example, Mr. Blackstone emphasized the need for Transit Oriented Development -- the creation of healthy residential development within walking distance of commuter rail. Commuter rail will be coming to Ogden as early as 2008; and Ogden city's current downtown plan is obviously well ahead of the curve on that. This segment was also a little too long for the audience in attendance, and possibly too detailed, as well. By the time Mr. Blackson had completed his 1-1/4 hour-long 154-slide presentation, he'd lost about half of his original audience. Most of the folks who'd been cheering and "high-fiving" during the introductory segment had either fallen asleep in their seats, or had departed the building entirely by then.
Things picked up considerably in the final "audience participation" segment though. First to the microphone was Descente N.A.'s corporate Vice president, Curt Geiger. Mr. Geiger spoke for about ten minutes, and offered an articulate and passionate explanation of why his company had chosen Ogden, Utah as its new North American headquarters, when other more seemingly prestigious cities might have been selected instead. "'Americana' and proximitely to the ski slopes" was his story in a nutshell. He also gave Mayor Godfrey profuse credit for his company's arrival in town. "More ski industry companies will follow," he predicted.
The comments session moved forward from there, with other pro-development citizens speaking in their turn, both at the microphone, and from the body of the audience. Notable among those was Gary Nielsen, of Gold's Gym. He grabbed the mike and also spoke articulately and passionately. He complained that nobody from the CCFOF group had ever contacted him or his venture co-partners (Fat Cats) about their financial capacity to proceed with the Rec Center project, or about the project's financial viability, either. He pointed out that the terms of the Ogden lease were similar to, and typical of, other leases he has for other facilities, and criticized the people who are getting in the way of the deal he's made with Ogden City
As the meeting drew to a close, Mr. Moyes was walking around in circles, throwing up his arms, and muttering to himself. Ms. Beech was seated a row or two back, screeching at Mr. Nielsen to give up the microphone, to a background tumult of half-hearted boos and catcalls. The event promoters never got the microphone back until the lights were turned off unceremoniously by building management around 9:30 p.m. As the audience filed out of the room in the dark, the hapless Mr. Moyes and Ms. Beech never got the chance to make their final sales pitch.
I'd score it Pro-development - 4, Antis - 0. You can chalk this up as another failure for our local knights-errant, I think. Democracy broke out passionately in Ogden last night -- even within a partisan echo chamber -- and the anti-Rec Center "forces" couldn't be very happy about that, I think.
