The Standard-Examiner reports that the soon-to-be citizens of Weber County's newest town (affectionately dubbed "Powderville") have already gotten together to choose their own elected town officials. More from this morning's Marshall Thompson story:
EDEN — As the Powder Mountain developers’ petition to form a chunk of the Ogden Valley into a town moves forward, future residents are taking matters into their own hands.In essence, these fine folks of Ogden Valley have formed their own duly-elected "government in exile," so to speak, in conformity with the best traditions of American grass-roots democracy.
A group of 40 voting-age residents met Friday to elect their own ad hoc council. Darla Van Zeben, Deja Mitchell, Jim Halay, Ryan Bushell, Layne Sheridan and Norman Belnap are the six people who will unofficially represent “Powderville,” which is a nickname for the residential neighborhoods that were drawn into Powder Mountain Town without a vote.
“We agreed to work together on tactics and plans and report back to our residents,” Halay said. “We elected a group to speak for us.”
What we can distill from this morning's story seems to be that this latest citizen action carefully adheres to these citizens' earlier disclosed battle plan, with an object of forcing (or shaming) the Powder Mountain developer to refrain from the appointment of town officials as authorized under provisions of HB-466, but rather to voluntarily permit the selection of Powderville's new Mayor and Council by public vote.
Once again we'll express our great admiration for the determination and resourcefulness of the folks in Ogden Valley, as they march forward proactively to take and occupy the moral highground.
Update 2/25/08 1:44 p.m. MT: As promised yesterday, we earlier put up a live audio link for this morning's House Political Subdivisions Committee hearing. Unfortunately, the committee adjourned about halfway through today's agenda, because committee members were required to get back to the floor by 9:30 a.m. for floor debates. So we have now removed the link. We just spoke a moment ago with Rep. Froerer however, who advises that the bill will be back on tomorrow's committee agenda, and that he's working hard with committee members to see that an HB-466 curative bill, containing retroactive provisions, is ultimately sent out to the House floor for debate.
And to reiterate, although the probability of the the legislature's enactment of a bill containing a retroactivity provision is low, we haven't yet reached the point where such a possibility can be entirely ruled out.
