This morning's Standard-Examiner has a truly odd Scott Schwebke story, showcasing a couple of trivial complaints, evidently eminating from the Boss Godfrey 2007 re-election campaign machine. We incorporate the lead paragraphs below:
OGDEN — City Councilwoman Susan Van Hooser has been asked to stop using the city’s internal e-mail system to solicit support from municipal employees for her mayoral campaign.And here is mayoral candidate Van Hooser's quoted response:
City Attorney Gary Williams wrote in an e-mail to Van Hooser, obtained by the Standard-Examiner, that the city’s e-mail server has received numerous e-mails from her campaign addressed to municipal employees.
“I encourage you to update your campaign e-mail address list to avoid use of the city e-mail system for political purposes,” Williams wrote to Van Hooser.
Van Hooser said her campaign did not intentionally send e-mails to city workers while they were on the job. “They are between a rock and a hard place (in supporting candidates for mayor),” she said.Bulk emailing can be tricky at best; and according to the Ace Reporter Schwebke narrative, some 55 city employees apparently did receive Van Hooser campaign-related emailings on two occasions, in the course of the organizing of a fund-raiser, and in the announcement of last week's mayoral debate. Yet the Van Hooser campaign's error in this regard (if any) would seem to be entirely innocent and inadvertant, inasmuch as her campaign staff actually sent these emails to Dave Hardman's Ogden/Weber Chamber of Commerce email list, and not to city employees as a distinctly "targeted" group.
The e-mails were sent out en masse to Ogden/Weber Chamber of Commerce members, some of whom also happen to be city employees, Van Hooser said.
Van Hooser said she has since deleted the workers’ e-mail addresses to prevent them from receiving future materials from her campaign.
The about to be out of a plush job Mr. Williams announced that he's ordered preventative action, to "avoid" violation of the ordinance which prohibits the direction politically-oriented emails to city employees:
City code prohibits elected officials from engaging in political activity aimed at municipal employees in the workplace, Williams wrote to Van Hooser. The city council’s staff has adopted a policy to reject and refuse to disseminate all political campaign e-mails it receives to avoid violation of the ordinance, Williams said in the e-mail.And the question we ask is this: Does this preventative measure apply to all politically-oriented emails, including those transmitted by the Chamber of Commerce itself, and the Bobby Geiger operated Lift Ogden Gondola Cult organization? Both of these organizations are heavily into political email lobbying, as many of us are well aware. And for all intents and purposes, each of these political activist organizations is an agent for Boss Godfrey.
And what about the city employees themselves, who have apparently voluntarily placed their workplace emails on the Chamber of Commerce (and perhaps other) non work-related lists? Shouldn't Mr. Williams also issue these employees an admonishment, demanding that they remove their email addys from non work related lists? It would seem to us that each of these employees has the affirmative obligation to remove their city email addy's from any and all political lists.
And moving onto the lower section of the Schwebke article, we find this:
In a related matter, Williams told Van Hooser he has received a complaint that she has used Art Stop Ogden’s facilities and staff to disseminate campaign literature.We'll be danged if we know what this complaint is all about. Perhaps some of our city hall insider readers can help us out with the "real" argument.
“The allegation is that this is wrongful because Art Stop is a city-funded facility, staffed by the city’s contractor,” Williams wrote in the e-mail to Van Hooser.
Van Hooser said campaign flyers were distributed to some art galleries on 25th Street and somehow ended up at Art Stop.
Take it away, gentle readers.
28 comments:
In repsonse to Susie being highlighted in the paper (re: emails to city employees), does anybody know if there are rules at the City for city staff regarding their involvement in political campaigns? Just curious, as I noticed nobody other than Mr. John Patterson hobnobbing w/ Bobby Geiger and ilk and cheerleading Godfrey through the entire debate last Friday. I heard him clapping and cheering from the other side of the room. I understand he might be looking for a new job after next month's election, but standing on the sideline being the Mayor's number 1 cheerleader at a public debate seemed inappropriate to me.
I don't disagree w/ an article being written on Susie's emails, per se. She does need to be more careful as it is clear the Mayor (and the Standard) will be there to make sure she pays for her mistakes if she does indeed make them. I don't mean to rag on the Standard, but its too bad we have to go to the Tribune and Kristen Moulton to get objective reporting and the real scoop on Ogden matters. How does the Standard decide what misdeeds to report?
Email doesn't belong to the employee, but the employer and can be control how ever the employer deems necessary no matter what list an employee signs up for. And it is not a matter of removing the email addy's form lists as I'm pretty sure they have no power to do that, but to prevent the emails form entering there email server. Happens all the time.
"And it is not a matter of removing the email addy's form lists as I'm pretty sure they have no power to do that..."
Legitimate mass emailers will allow recipients to "opt out" on request.
The key word here, of course is "legitimate."
Perhaps Mr. Williams will soon be contacting the Chamber of Commerce, and the Lift Ogden group, with a demand that they clean up their email lists too.
After that, Scott Schwebke can tell us all about it in the Standard Examiner.
Here's thorough discussion of bulk email best practices:
"Best Practices" and Guidelines for Bulk Email Senders:
"Unsubscribe:
If a customer doesn’t want to receive e-mail from you any more, you will do more harm than good to your reputation by continuing to send them. Any good e-mail list software will have easy unsubscribe options built right in. This enables the recipient to automatically control what they are subscribed to.
List managers should provide an unsubscribe process which requires the fewest number of "clicks" possible. A "1-click" unsubscribe process is the ideal, as long as it is clearly stated that clicking on that link will immediately unsubscribe. A 2-click process may be necessary in some cases for security reasons, or if you find that many people are accidentally unsubscribing.
Subscribers should not have to go through the process of having to provide a password or to surmount other obstacles to removing themselves from mailings they no longer wish to receive. An unsubscribe request should result in the subscriber being immediately and completely removed from the mailing list. There should be a way for people to contact you if there is an unsubscribe problem (a list administrator contact address), and a way for you to manually unsubscribe addresses.
Must reading for anyone conducting a bulk mail campaign.
Rudi:
Here's another point raised by the SE story [though of course it does not raise the question directly].
1. Ms. Van Hooser was informed of a problem with a mass emailing, some of which reached city employees who are on the Chamber of Commerce email list. How did she react: the admitted the error had been made by her campaign, and immediately corrected the problem.
2. Some time ago, it became known that the Ogden City Foundation Board held a meeting in the Mayor's Office. Present were the Foundation Board, which consisted largely of Godfrey Administration personnel, appointed by the Mayor, and I believe Councilman Safsten. The Foundation had then listed as its mailing address the Mayor's office. The minutes of the meeting --- again, conducted in the Mayor's office --- were kept by a city employee. Yet when he was asked to make public the minutes of the meeting, the Mayor refused, insisting the Foundation Board [ meeting in his office, listing his office as its legal address, and consisting largely of city employees, with its records kept by a public employee] was a "private" organization. To this day, he has not made the minutes of that meeting public.
So: Van Hooser is informed of a problem involving her emails reaching city employees, and she promptly agrees it was a mistake, and fixes it. Godfrey is informed of a problem and his reaction is to stonewall, deny and cover up. And to continue stonewalling, denying and covering up to this very day.
I think that's a telling comparison of how the two candidates deal with mistakes they have made. The question is, then, which management style do you want running your city for the next four years? Van Hooser's or Godfrey's? I know how I'll answer that question on election day.
Just got a piece of Godfrey propaganda in the mail.
It states that Ogden used to be the 2nd highest taxed city in the state-not any more. I've cut taxes 5%, blah blah blah. He then goes on to say that it would have been more if the City Council had not cut in half one of his proposed tax cuts.
The truth is that Ogden is 3rd highest in Property tax in the state, 2nd highest of the 30 largest cities in the state, according to the Utah taxpayer’s assoc. website.
He can spin the hell out of numbers, and place blame on everyone.
Vote Van Hooser, Wicks, Gochnour, and Aardema.
Rudi
The problem with your unsubscribe receipt is that it just lets the unscrupulous spammers know that in fact your's is a valid email address.
Some of these gangsters send out emails by the millions to any conceivable email combination that their computer can cook up. Then they wait for responses, including unsubscribe ones. Now they have a list they know is good and they proceed to use it and sell it to their fellow travelers in the pain in the ass department.
My advice is to either add the guilty emailers to your black list that almost all email programs have, or just delete the unwanted along with all the zillions of other junkers you receive.
This current email complaint from the Godfrey camp is just more proof of how disingenuous the whole lyin camp is. There little star Bobby G routinely emails every one he can in the city to tattle tale on one council member or another. His favorite target is the greatest patriot there is in Ogden government - Dorrene Jeske. So why doesn't Williams get his panties in a knot over the young Geiger's mean spirited attacks using city email addresses? They are all very political in nature after all.
I wonder how the policy relates to city employees jobs being threatened over the phone by Admin staff unless their VanHooser support signs are removed from their lawns.
It happened before the primary to a good friend of mine who happens to have the misfortune of working for the city under Napoleon's reign.
And before anyone suggests his bringing the incident to light, would you risk your family's livelihood knowing the vindictive nature of Mayor Geig..errrr... Godfrey?
One who works for Stalin is in a very precarious position.
But, if only we had two or three dozen of the disenchanted who would come forth in an organized group, would Stalin chop off all their heads?
I think not. My neighbor had her Neilson sign removed...and the biggest Godfrey sign went in. My poor neighbor fixes the hair of the mayor's mother-in-law.
Had this same flap, with the salon's business being threatened when my neighbor had our (are you for or against bonding of the rec center?) petitions in the hair salon that Mrs. Allen partonizes. Patty let her stylist know that she and her friends would stop coming to the salon...."But I still want Cami to do my hair!"...she told me.
Really? Where? On the curb?
Two sets of rules...no, only one: My rules...you're out.
Here we have one candidate who has caused Ogden to be $93,000,000 in debt, who has done who-knows-how-much damage to our future tax revenues with tax incentives and poorly-decided RDI debt, and he complains because 55 city employees received an email! An email which was sent as an honest mistake.
Throw the bum out.
The essence of the article is that city employees should not do politicking on the job using city property, i.e. computers.
And how does the article get written? It's essentially a re-write of an email from city attorney Gary Williams, who was using his city computer and city time to campaign for Godfrey by sending an email that was obviously written as an article push for Scott Schwebke, in an attempt to discredit VanHooser.
It's called "Irony." Around these parts, we call it "Godfrey."
How about City Department heads having the city employees putting up Godfrey signs using City vehicles just before the Primary election? I dont hear the Little Rat complaining about that.
Oh Sharon it works both ways, I have already stopped frequenting the businesses that support Godfrey, It's my money and I will not support any business that shares the views and ways that Godfrey has DIVIDED this community.
Yeah, there ain't no iron in Godfrey. Sawdust man...so apt for H'ween.
That sounds reasonable to me, TAT. I bet you haven't gone in and THREATENED to tell all your friends not to patronize that establishment.
Understand Ligouri had a prominent city employee tell him re: petitions, that "you can just forget the mayor's award next yr!"
LOL...wouldn't that break your heart?
No Mayor's award? AAAAARGH!
Say, Tat,
List some of those businesses here, will you? Hardman has the Subway.
I wonder how Mayor Godfrey's motion to dismiss went today.
The article in this morning's paper shocked me for its simplicity and lack of news peg.
There's simply no "there" there.
Back when I worked in the newspaper biz, if I had tried to pitch a story like that to my editor, I would have been thrown out of his office.
Yes, I worked for small-town newspapers and I'm sensitive to the pressures they're under.
Still, we did our puff pieces as feature articles and tried to make the subjects as interesting as possible ("John Smith says he's dreamt of being a burger flipper ever since he was a wee lad, and now he's realized his dream as the owner of Smallville's newest McDonald's.")
We would never, ever, EVER run something so insipid in the above-the-fold position on the first Metro section page.
Poor and sick children are big government.....
It must be stopped at all cost...
New post on Ms. Van Hooser's campaign website, calling the Mayor out on his inflated claims about declining violent crime in Ogden during his administration. Here's a part of what Ms. Van Hooser has posted:
According to FBI and Utah BCI statistics, Ogden's violent crime rate has increased sharply over the last two years. But the rate declined during the previous two years, and there is no clear trend over the last decade. Our violent crime rate is twice the state average, and this hasn't changed over the long term either.
I would encourage Mayor Godfrey to similarly clarify his remarkable claim of a 43% drop in Ogden's violent crime rate since he took office. This statistic appears on his campaign web site and in recent city-sponsored advertisements. After carefully reviewing the FBI and BCI data I see no support for such a claim. [The full post can be found here.]
So, it seems, what it boils down to is this: who's statistics are likely to be more accurate? Those of the FBI and the State of Utah, who find no significant decline in violent crime in Ogden over Godrey's tenure, or those cooked up by a desperate incumbent who 60% of the voters in the primary want removed from office, frantically seeking an issue that will work for him and imaginary numbers that make him look better than his record?
When the time comes to write the history of the Godfrey administration --- its descent into cronyism; its endless stonewalling of the press and the people; its pathological commitment to secrecy and abhorrence of open government; its piling up of public debt; its overlooking growing city problems in the neighborhoods while spending endless hours closeted with out of town developers, seeking ways to sell them public park land to finance a flatland gondola the people did not want or need; its loose grasp of what ethical conduct requires of public men; and now, its thuggish desperation-driven campaign tactics --- whoever writes it will, I suspect, be reminded of the comment of Robber Baron Jim Fisk when his questionable activities were exposed: "Nothing is lost," Fisk reportedly said, "save honor."
I'm still wondering why Greiner's 2004 report (p. 17) has a violent crime rate of 5.6 per 1000 population for the year 1999, while Godfrey's taxpayer-funded advertisement in the Aug 30 S-E claims the violent crime rate for that year was 6.7.
This number is used to support his spurious claim of a "43% drop" in violent crime (6.7 in 1999 vs 3.8 in 2006).
Of course, as we all now know, that 3.8 per 1000 number is made up also.
The Utah BCI (p. 6) has a rate of 6.0 per 1000 for that year, while the FBI has a rate of 5.2 per 1000.
I'll contact the FBI to report the discrepancy. I'm sure it's just a clerical error. Yet, when I did an analysis, Ogden's numbers were the only numbers in the seven largest Utah cities for which there is a significant difference (i.e., more than 1%) between the Utah BCI figures and the FBI figures.
For example, Ogden (pop. 80,861)reported 474 violent crimes to the Utah BCI and 415 to the FBI.
(474/80.9 gives you 5.9 violent crimes per 1000, 415/80.9 gives you 5.1 violent crimes per 1000. To get the Mayor's stated rate of 3.8, there would be only 307 violent crimes in Ogden last year. It seems that between 167 and 108 violent crimes -- the type of crime police should be most carefully tracking, I would suppose -- have gone missing between these three reports. Either that, or a CPA can't do simple math. You decide which is best supported by Occam's razor.)
Sandy (pop. 92,586) reported 152 violent crimes to the Utah BCI and 151 violent crimes to the FBI.
West Valley City (pop. 116,992) reported 475 violent crimes to the Utah BCI and 473 violent crimes to the FBI.
It seems Ogden City is the only major Utah city where violent crimes go mysteriously unreported to the Federal Government.
New WCF readers: you can click on the links in this posting to see for yourself whether I've quoted the numbers accurately.
This is in sharp contrast to Mayor Godfrey's campaign webpage, where there is no source for his numbers. As with so many "accomplishments" of his administration, we are asked to take this statistic on faith.
I would also ask the S-E: if it's newsworthy that Ms. Van Hooser has inadvertantly emailed city employees using a city-owned email server, isn't it really REALLY newsworthy that the Mayor uses my taxpayer dollars to buy $4000 advertising space to tout demonstrably false and unsupported campaign claims in your very own newspaper?
Can't be a potential conflict of interest there, can there?
Are you putting this into 250 words and sending it to the SE? Or, sending this as a commentary...which I hope will be printed.
Masterful. Thank you
This just in, thanks to the intrepid Mrs. Monotreme:
http://www.votematthew.com/crime.pdf
Same lies, new webpage.
Yes, Sharon, I'm writing it up. I want my numbers and analysis to be ironclad before I submit it, because even the smallest discrepancy will be seized upon by the Mayor's supporters.
WCF readers, please go to the websites I've posted and check my statistics. If you find any errors (or even if you confirm what I'm saying), please post that here (if okay with Rudi).
Curm,
Your last comment weighed in at well under 250 words. Sadly, it summed up the past 4-8 years pretty succinctly. How about sending _that_ to the SE?
Do these crimes that are on the Mayor's web site also reflect the ones he and his henchmen have committed themselves?
It seems like Bob Geiger is a crime wave all by himself, do his capers make it into these numbers? And Scot Brown's porno on city computers, just where does that figure in these Godfrey crime statistics?
It was also a pretty nasty crime that Godfrey and Greiner perpetrated on Matt Jones, was that figured in to these statistics as well?
And last but certainly not least, what about the $45,000 ripp off of the taxpayers by Godfrey and Reid, was that reported as the grand larceny that it was?
Or the 38,000 dollars of the campaign funds that Godfrey pocketed and will not open his books to the voter who wants the real truth and has to go to court to find out.
Rudi:
How about offering a WCForum prize to the gentle reader who correctly predicts the date on which the S-E will endorse Godfrey?
I'm with you
Just look at the Godfrey Campaign disclosure in the upper right hand of the WCF home page, it is a list of businesses and individuals who have contributed to his campaign.
I also pay attention to signs located at businesses, if they have a sign, no more business from me. We have plenty of other business owners in town that do not share the same blurred vision as our crooked little mayor.
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