We'll shine some daylight on two items in this morning's news, both from our home-town newspaper.
1) Today's Standard-Examiner breaks the news to the general public about something Weber County Forum readers have known about since Friday. There's been another gang-related murder in Ogden. We incorporate below the lead paragraphs from this morning's story:
OGDEN — A 22-year-old man is dead and a 15-year-old boy has been arrested and accused of killing him, while a community is left reeling over the latest gang-related violent incident as police continue their investigation.100 youths milling around a downtown parking lot late on a Friday night, (an accident waiting to happen), and not a single Ogden Police Department patrol unit in sight? What happened to proactive policing, we ask. And no, we're NOT putting the knock on our sorely understaffed men and women of Ogden's Finest. We know where the responsibility really lies:
The fatal shooting occurred at 11:30 p.m. Friday at the Phillips Kicks 66 gas station and convenience store at 30th Street and Washington Boulevard.
“I always get nervous around this part of town, just for that reason. You could just be an innocent bystander … and you could get shot,” said Joe Bauer, 52, of South Ogden, as he filled his car at the station Saturday.
This is Ogden’s third fatal gang shooting for 2007, according to police reports.
Friday night, when the shooting occurred, about 100 youths were milling around their cars and motorcycles in the parking lot, according to witnesses. The convenience store is a popular stop for people cruising the boulevard, police said.
We got the straight story from OPD Sgt. Troy Arrowsmith in midsummer of 2006, when he informed us, right there on the Std-Ex editorial pages, about Boss Godfrey's twisted, upside-down law enforcement priorities:
"...Mayor Godfrey has chosen to address the crime issue in Ogden by adding more officers to the Traffic Division (officers whose primary mission is to write citations). The mayor effectively doubled the size of the Traffic Division. No addition in personnel has been made to the Patrol Division (those officers who handle your calls and proactively prevent crime), to the Narcotic Unit, Gang Unit or the Detective Division. This is an obvious plan to use the police department as revenue generators and raise money from you, the citizens, to pay for who knows what project....
"Are your elected city officials representing your views on this? Is this fair to you? Why are they trying to raise funds in such an underhanded way? Your elected officials are using the police department as a revenue generating machine instead of the job we were sworn to do: public safety. "
Godfrey's obsession with feeding his Justice Court "Cash Cow," at the expense of real law enforcement, has left the citizens of Ogden in a terribly tight spot. We're now reaping the fruits of Boss Godfrey's revenue generation obsession, and it's costing human lives. And at the rate things are going in Emerald City, it's only a matter of time before an entirely innocent citizen catches a stray bullet.
And the next time Boss Godfrey tells you he's reduced crime 23% during his tenure as mayor, flash this morning's Std-Ex headline under his nose, or better yet, ask him to respond honestly to this.
2) In yesterday's article we linked to our city council's 9/21/07 press report, in which our city council tried to set the record straight, and to alert the general public that, contrary to some published reports, our city council had been cut out of the loop, and was NOT involved in the UTA/Godfrey administration's August 29 written agreement, intended to dispose of the $247 thousand in federal funds that's been sitting in a UTA account for over fourteen months.
Believing this story to be Scott Schwebke's "baby," we deferred to our favorite Ace Reporter, awaiting another blockbuster revelation in this morning's Standard-Examiner, laying out in detail how the city council got royally screwed over. And we got a tiny bit of that, at least at the start of this morning's article, which bore the headline, "Council denies involvement," and the even more accurate sub-headline, "Godfrey, they say, signed UTA-gondola agreement on his own."
And in all fairness to Mr. Schwebke, his article did adopt verbatim a few of the council's press-release paragraphs.
From there, however Mr. Schwebke's article spirals downward toward the mundane. And we just loved this couple of short (and carefully crafted) Schwebke paragraphs:
The urban leg of the gondola project remains in doubt because Godfrey has refused to sell city-owned Mount Ogden Golf Course to developer Chris Peterson, the driving force behind the proposal.We've seen Ace Reporter at his best; and he's certainly nowhere near that level this morning.
The city had initially planned to use proceeds from the golf course sale to help fund an urban leg of the gondola extending from downtown to Weber State University. It was estimated to cost about $20 million, [Emphasis added.]
As one of our readers has already commented in a lower thread:
What's with Scott Schwebke this morning?Take it away, gentle readers.
"Godfrey has refused to sell city-owned Mount Ogden Golf Course"
Makes it sound like Godrey's the man to protect us from those crazy gondolistas!
Let us all know what you think. Do it now, or after you get back from church.
