Infrastructure Improvements & Traffic Citation Quotas

Kicking Off a Friday Morning Open Topic Thread

In hindsight, we'll admit that we were probably remiss in our failure to provide a reminder of yesterday's city council "Water Horizons Workshop," which was held last night in the council chambers, wherein Emerald City citizens were invited to offer their comments on the results of the council's recently completed water, sewer and storm sewer rate study.

According to this morning's Ace Reporter Schwebke story, however, it appears that some "30 or so" Emerald City citizens nevertheless did manage to attend this event; and yet only a handful of these registered any objections.

Perhaps significantly, Godfreyite insider and Friend of Matt (FOM) G-Train Wilkerson, owner of nine Ogden rental properties, was among the small minority of attendees who were not happy with the council's proposed water infrastructure upgrades. Exhibiting the very worst self-serving qualities of an urban landlord, Ms. Wilkerson reportedly lodged this comment about the impending encroachment on her rental business bottom line:

"'That’s a big chunk of money if the landlord has to pay the bill,' she said."

Better, we suppose, that the citizens of Ogden (including Ms. Wilkerson's tenants) should continue to limp along with a hopelessly dilapidated water system (and stinky water), in order to protect Ms. Wilkerson's profit margin.

We'll add that we've occasionally criticized our city council, for their slavish acquiescence to Boss Godfrey's agenda, and their failure to enact programs and ordinances on their own initiative. It's in this connection that we congratulate our city council for their forceful and focused effort to bring these long overdue infrastructure upgrades to a stage of near fruition. They did this all on their own, without so much as an iota of help from our Precious Boss Godfrey.

And in view of Representative Hansen's newly revived Traffic Citation Quota Bill, which would ban numeric ticket quotas all over Utah, the naysayers are already lining up their opposition; and this morning we find two editorial page items from folks who believe it's quite alright to use traffic citations as a major source of municipal revenue:

First we'll highlight this morning's Op-ed piece by Roy City police chief Greg Whinham whose main argument revolves around the strange proposition that without numeric quotas, his officers will refuse to enforce the traffic laws because -- get this --"traffic enforcement is not fun." The undercurrent to this, of course, is that Chief Whinham believes the officers under his command are unprofessional; which is a helluva strange theme to be hearing from the man in charge of an urban Utah police agency, we think.

Secondly we were astounded by this Doug Stephens letter, in which the author suggests, with an apparently straight face, that Representative Hansen's legislative effort, which will be brought before the Utah state legislature for the second straight year, is some kind of defeated mayoral candidate revenge.

We're going to assume, unless and until we're proven wrong, that this particular Doug Stephens is NOT the Doug Stephens who is a presently-sitting council member on our Ogden City Council, for we KNOW that nobody on our council could possibly be so ill-informed.

That's it for now gentle readers. The floor is open. Feel free to discuss any of the above stories, or treat this thread as open topic.