Open Letter: "The Std-Ex RDA Fiction"

By Don Porter
The Standard-Examiner

In reading a response to your blog today, I was reminded of something Walcott Gibbs once wrote about someone else: "He wasn't exactly hostile to facts, but he was apathetic about them." I strive to be neither, but I do enjoy a good story.

I'm guessing that love of delicious irony has colored some of the discussion about the Standard-Examiner's editorial stance regarding Ogden's Wal-Mart RDA. The first I heard it was a month or so ago, in a letter from a reader who made the accusation that the newspaper favored the RDA because, she said, the S-E had benefited from an RDA when it relocated to Business Depot Ogden.

A fun story, but completely untrue.

While I was not involved in the negotiations, I do know a few things that might be of interest to those who love to believe the worst about my newspaper.

When then-Publisher Scott Trundle and our owners decided to buy a new printing press and expand our operations, they spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do it in place at the 23rd and Adams. We loved being downtown. But no matter how we tried to configure the necessary 100,000-square-foot-plus Top of Utah PrintWorks building, an office structure which needed to be two or three times our current footprint, expanded parking and the need for a rail spur to more efficiently deliver our newsprint, etc., it was obvious we needed to either start purchasing more property adjacent to our existing facility -- that option proved too expensive, since most who were willing to sell wanted more than their property was worth, and not everyone wanted to sell -- or move off-site. (I’m pretty fuzzy on this, but I think there was also some concern that the geology of the downtown site, involving water underground, precluded building the necessary foundation for our extremely heavy presses.)

That decision made, Scott looked at every piece of commercial land in Ogden and Weber County, I think, and we finally decided to exchange -- straight across -- our downtown location for the BDO parcel where we are now. The upshot: Ogden got a chunk of downtown real estate it's been redeveloping, and we got everything we needed. We have title to the land and structures at our BDO site, and Scott told me he never would have considered an RDA (in fact, I doubt one was ever offered); we knew we would be continually writing about various redevelopment projects all over the Top of Utah in the decades to come, and didn't want to taint our news coverage or our editorial positions by having benefited in an RDA ourselves.

I hope this finally puts to rest the rumor that the Standard-Examiner was involved in an RDA. But don't take my word for it; the public record will confirm what I've written here.

Sincerely,

Don Porter
editorial page editor
Standard-Examiner
dporter@standard.net