That candidate, as the article later reveals, is a local political operative by the name of Dustin Chapman. Regular Weber County Forum readers will of course recognize Mr. Chapman by his self-disclosed blogger "handle," UTmorMAN. Mr. Chapman is also prominently known to be the publisher of the now-defunct the good in ogden blog; and has also been an active contributor to WCF comments threads from time to time.OGDEN - Opponents are accusing Mayor Matthew Godfrey of trying to stack the city's Planning Commission with members inclined to support the biggest project to hit Ogden in a generation.
Godfrey this summer nominated - and the City Council approved - a businesswoman who openly supports transforming the city's east bench with luxury homes as well as crosstown and mountain gondolas.
Now the City Council is poised to vote on another Planning Commission candidate who has been involved in the Lift Ogden citizens group, which is advocating the project proposed by developer Chris Peterson.
The problem here, as revealed by the article, is that Mr. Chapman seems to be soft-pedaling his partisan political credentials, prior to consideration by the council of an appointment to the open planning commission seat:
Godfrey is nominating Dustin Chapman, who began the pro-gondola Web site TheGoodinOgden.com and has had what he calls "limited participation" in Lift Ogden, a pro-gondola citizens group.Mr. Chapman, of course, has become well-known in the local blogosphere as a rabid gondolist, a very active and high-profile Lift Ogden member, and slavish proponent of anything and everything Godfreyesque -- particularly the Peterson/Godfrey Gondola Plan.
In updates to a previous article, we noted that Mr. Chapman has now "sterilized" the material on his blogsite. Whereas the good in ogden blog had formerly been the "go-to" site for pro-gondola propaganda, ten months of highly partisan political postings have now "mysteriously" disappeared. In our view, this facially-deceptive act of removing this previously-published material amounts to the internet equivalent of "document shredding," as we noted in the below-linked 8/12/06 WCF article update.
In that connection, we have begun a little "deep research" to try to unearth some of the "cached material" that Mr. Chapman saw fit to hide or delete. In this connection we now provide a link to an archive page which consists of the excised data that we have managed to compile so far: UTmorMAN Fails to Cover His Tracks. (This is "missing" text from some of UTMO's deleted blog posts, people. If you're going to click any link at all on this page, this one is a "must see.")
One of our gentle readers suggested that we set up a separate article on this subject; and we are doing that now (although perhaps belatedly.) Readers who would like to have more background on this story, should read the updates and comments here.
We propose that our readers regard this article as one dedicated solely to the Dustin Chapman nomination.
We'll also be moving one or two of the more recent relevant comments from the former article comments section here, in order to provide focused discussion on this topic.
If all goes well, we hope to stimulate a discussion sufficiently robust to warrant emailing this article (and comments) to all council members prior to Tuesday night's meeting.
Who will be the first to comment?
Update 8/14/06 7:23 a.m. MT: A full three days after publication of Kristen Moulton's detailed and probative article, the Standard-Examiner finally gets around to at least mentioning the brewing Dustin Chapman nomination controversy, in this classic example of tepid Std-Ex-style "he said-she said" reporting. The web version headline nicely encapsulates the text of the article, we believe -- pure mumbo-jumbo.
The Std-Ex once again lives up to its unofficial banner motto: "Keeping the Top of Utah in the political dark since 1993."
