This Will Be On the Test

Just for fun, I thought I'd present our gentle readers with a set of locally-operative facts, just to test the reasoning skills of our Weber County Forum readership:

• Earl Holding's Sinclair Oil is the owner of Snow Basin, on the eastern slope of Mt. Ogden;
  
• Chris Peterson (Earl Holding's son-in-law) has purchased the entire historic Malan Family property on the west side of Mt. Ogden, running from the top of Mt. Ogden, to the eastern border of Ogden city's Mt. Ogden Golf course;
  
• Mr. Peterson has announced he'll build a four-season resort (including a modest ski hill,) and a gondola to link from the vicinity of the Weber State University campus to upper Malan's basin;
  
• A local community activist group, "Lift Ogden," supports the Peterson venture, and touts a second gondola system, linking the Ogden Intermodal transit hub to the vicinity of the lower Malan's Basin gondola terminal; They've spent thousands of dollars hyping the project and trying to generate general public support;
  
• There's gossip circulated about a mysterious giant hotelier who'll build a $200 million luxury hotel in Ogden, conditionally, upon construction of the Downtown-WSU lower gondola leg;
  
• Earl Holding's Sinclair Oil happens to be deeply involved in the luxury hotel business;
  
• Lift Ogden and other gondola promoters campaign briefly to sell the lower leg as a legitimate public-funding-eligible public transit alternative, then suddenly back down, and admit the lower leg is intended mainly to transport tourists from the soon-to-be-constructed downtown hotel to the bottom of the Malan's Basin Gondola. In a complete turnabout, gondola promoters then confidently announce last week that all the subject projects - both gondolas, and the hotel -- will be entirely privately-funded.
  
• There's an election coming up in two weeks, and the local newspaper of record, the slavishly pro-city administration Standard-Examiner is starkly silent on election issues about which Ogden's citizenry is all abuzz. While Ogden citizens are talking about throwing out a couple of city council incumbents, the best the Standard-Examiner can do is publish a few puff pieces about various downtown projects which, although floundering, "aren't as bad as they were a couple of months ago."

Those are the facts, gentle readers, as have been reported in the local media. Having examined these facts, can we draw any reasonable inferences from the so-far reported facts? Taking this set of assumed facts into consideration, are there any reasonable inferences about whom this mysterious "hotelier" may be? And what about these private funds which will be expended to build-out these projects? Do the facts provide sufficient information to reasonably infer the true identity of this mysterious financier?

And if this secretive character is indeed the multi-billionaire Earl Holding, (which is my tentative conclusion at this point,) why the cat-and-mouse game? Has Mr. Holding kept his cards under the table so far, just to test the public's tolerance for contributing public money?

And if indeed a "private deal" has now been struck, why aren't the City Administration and the "Lift Ogden" folks already crowing about it? This is much bigger than the Scott USA deal, and the Ogden city administration didn't skip a beat in taking immediate credit when that old-guard recreation manufacturer announced its relocation to its new Ogden city site. Mr. Holding would be deserving of a ticker-tape parade, as far as I'm concerned, if he's willing to carry out these grand plans on his own dime. Mayor Godfrey could even ride along with him, smiling and waving from the back seat of Mr. Holding's open Mercedes-Benz stretch convertible.

Could the delay in the announcement be have some other purpose perhaps? Remember there's an election coming up, and many of the Ogden city townsfolk are salivating to roll some council incumbent heads. Could it be that the Ogden city administration has borrowed a page from the national political play-book and crafted a means to suddenly rehabilitate the current city council's sagging credibility?

Is there an October surprise in store?

Am I the only one who's connected the dots?