The Powder Mountain town incorporation story is once again on the Standard-Examiner front page this morning, with a well-crafted article by Marshall Thompson, providing updated information on the heroic effort of our Weber County neighbors in Ogden Valley to prevent a fair sized portion portion of the area's unincorporated neighborhood from being gobbled up by Utah's newest developer-controlled company town.
Today's article emphasises the tight timeline now bearing down upon these valiant folks. While the Powder Mountain developer still remains optomistic that town incorporation could be achieved within two weeks' time, the two remedial bills which would thwart the develeloper's backhanded efforts have more or less stalled in the legislature. The Ogden Valley citizen activists grow suspicious:
“I think it’s being held up, and it’s moving slower than it should,” said Richard Sorensen, a Huntsville Town Council member who helped pass a resolution opposing the massive development last year.And those suspicions are certainly NOT unfounded:
One unforeseen problem was that Senate President John L. Valentine, R-Orem, and Speaker of the House Greg Curtis, R-Sandy, both described the proposed amendments as unfair to developers and pledged to delay their passage. [Emphasis ours].While "freshman" House District 8 state representative Froerer attributes the legislative delays to to the tight scrutiny being given to the text of the two bills by the legislature's legislative attorney staff, we're not quite sure we're ready to swallow that entirely.
Speaker Curtis "declared in January that he has a conflict of interest when it comes to land issues because his law firm represents several developers." So why, we ask, does he seem to be dragging his feet? Why hasn't he handed it off to somebody else in House leadership who doesn't have a conflict? Our BS-O-Meter is jumping off-scale even as we feverishly post his blog entry on our keybord. Somebody needs to build a fire under his and President Valentine's feet.
One possible way to do that, we think, is to sign the petition, folks.
In the event you haven't done that already... you can find it here. As mentioned in today's Std-Ex article, over 300 Utah residents have already jumped aboard (339, to be exact, as of the time of this posting). And for the most up-to-date news on this topic, we remind you to check out Ogden Valley Forum. Lots of good information on this subject there.
On the other hand... if you'd like to see Ogden Valley become the next Park City... ignore this article (and the petition) entirely.
Comments, anyone?
Update 2/14/08 9:55 a.m. MT: Whilst reading through some of the excellent material on Ogden Valley Forum this morning we stumbled upon this wonderful article, reporting on one of the developer's "sales meetings" which are being held to beat down small groups of Ogden Valley residents one by one. The article provides some good analysis and also provides at least a glimpse of the aggressive evil corporate foe that Ogden Valley residents are up against. We're pretty sure the author won't mind our taking this liberty. (The article was "broken at the fold," and difficult to link, so we just unceremoniously copied it to our own storage site.) Read up, gentle readers. You won't believe your own eyes at the audacity of these Powder Mountain development folks.
We'll also note that we've now added a direct graphic link to the Powder Mountain petition in our right sidebar.
