OGDEN — A report card issued Monday by the Ogden Sierra Club gives Mayor Matthew Godfrey a D+ based on his overall environmental record during nearly two terms in office.Demonstrating remarkable pre-holiday journalistic initiative, Ace Reporter Schwebke interviewed Boss Godfrey on each of the ratings categories point-by-point, and furnishes an article filled with delightful Godfreyesque quotes like this:
Sierra Club leaders reached a consensus regarding the grade after evaluating Godfrey’s performance over the last 7-1/2 years in nine categories, said Dan Schroeder, the club’s conservation chairman.
The categories are sprawl and Legacy Highway, mass transit, bike routes, pedestrian-friendly development, trails, open space, wilderness protection, city utility services and municipal energy use.
"My goal isn’t to please Dan Schroeder — it’s to do what’s right for Ogden," he said. Seldom, we suggest, has Boss Godfrey snarkiness ever been better captured in the public press.
And we find within Mr. Schwebke's article this noteworthy example of the Boss Godfrey alternate reality, wherein the same fellow who tormented our community for two years over a proposal to commit hundreds of acres of Emerald City foothill open space to residential development, now poses as the most open space-friendly mayor in sixty years:
The Sierra Club gave Godfrey an F in the open-space category because of his “high-profile campaign” to advocate the sale and development of 175 acres of city-owned park land, including Mount Ogden Golf Course, and 60 acres of adjoining undeveloped property to developer Chris Peterson....Hoo-boy! Never let it be said that our little mayor is lacking in the chutzpah category.
Godfrey said the city has acquired more than 60 acres of open space during his time in office. That is more than any administration in six decades, he said.
In the interest of providing our readers some additional background on the factors contributing to the Sierra Club's scorecard revision, we also link yesterday's short press release here.
And while we're on the subject of Boss Godfrey, we're going to throw in an added bonus item, which has been sitting on the Weber County Forum back-burner for the last few days. Most of you will remember the classic Scott Schwebke article series, in which our favorite Std-Ex reporter exposed Boss Godfrey's "Secret Gondola Study Scheme," whereby Boss Godfrey obtained and then attempted to conceal from the city council $247 thousand in federal transportation money, which would have been secretly applied to Godfrey's apparently incurable Gondola Obsession.
In a nutshell, Boss Godfrey's Washington lobbyist had secured a federal grant for study of gondolas as a transportation alternative. Boss Godfrey hid the information on this cash grant from the city council for almost six months, then told the council one of his typical "tall tales" when confronted on the subject.
For a true life audio expose on how Boss Godfrey actually operates in real life, be sure to check out this reader-submitted text/audio combo link.
Helpful Housekeeping Tip. Several months ago, we completely converted our software to the new and "improved" xhtml Blogger II version.
Like all new and improved software everywhere, it's buggy, unpredictable and, well, difficult.
For almost the whole history of this blog we've "set" our comments section to appear in a pop-up window, which before our conversion to the new software allowed reader comments to be opened in "full screen view." Inasmuch as many of our readers are often "long-winded," this was a very good thing, indeed.
Lately we've received comments and reader emails complaining that our reader comments cannot be displayed "full screen," and are "scrunched up" to the left side of the screen, making reading lengthy posts "difficult" at best.
For the convenience of our readers we offer this browser-based workaround (This works in both IE and Firefox):
1) To read or post on this blog, right-click your mouse on "comments." This will bring up a menu;
then,
2) Select and click on "open in new window."
This will open up a full page comments screen.
The problem relates to an internal bug in the new blogger software; and we do hope it'll be fixed within our lifetime.
In the meantime, this will make our reader comments much more readable.
That's it folks. The floor is open for comments.
