A Short Biography Our Readers Will Not Want to Miss

The lowdown on the Emerald City Ice-tower co-designer and promoter

As regular denizens of our Weber County Forum community blog are well aware, Mayor Matthew "Boss" Godfrey and his administration are moving full speed ahead to install yet another recreational novelty attraction in downtown Emerald City, namely "The World's first refrigerated, year-round, outdoor Ice Climbing Tower." And to WCF newcomers we'll say "No; we are not making this up. This fantastic structure depicted in the above link could very well be standing on the corner of 25th & Kiesel, possibly as early as this summer." For proof of that, we link our home-town newspaper's recent article on this topic, which spells out the whole exciting story in grand detail.

Yes, gentle readers; some folks are quite serious about this. This project is an integral part of Boss Godfrey's "vision" to transform Ogden City into a giant amusement park, of course. As Emerald City CEO John Patterson also assures us, it's certain to be a money maker. Godfrey has the Midas Touch, as we all know.

Regular readers who've followed discussions of this story are aware that we at WCF within the WCR editoral circle are NOT, shall we say, "overjoyed" about this project. It's not that we're NOT fans of refrigerated, year round ice climbing towers in general. It's just that we bristle when our elected officials build (and propose to operate) such knuckleheaded public projects on the public dime. Jurassic-period economic theorists that we are, we believe promoters of knuckleheaded plans and schemes ought to finance such projects on their own dime instead.

In this connection, we've observed cost estimates for this project escalate over the past couple of years, from $275 thousand to $1.6 million. These costs of course will be mainly borne by the taxpayers. And with Boss Godfrey ram-rodding the project, there's no doubt in our minds the costs will continue to skyrocket. Enormous refrigerated year-round neo-mesopotamian era architectural-style monuments to Mayor Godfrey's ego don't come cheap; and as we lumpencitizens of Emerald City know -- money is no object in MattGodfreyWorld -- when it comes to Magnificent Godfrey Monuments.

OK. Suffice it to say in summary that we continue to believe this is a dumb idea.

Having provided the above introduction, we realize that some of you may wonder who might have had the audacity even to design and promote such a project in the first place. One of the co-designers and promoters, Jeff Lowe, is of course mentioned in the above Std-Ex article. He's been more or less the mystery man behind this project for several years, although disconnected bits and pieces of information about Jeff have cropped up at various times in the media.

From here, we'll now launch into another patented neck-snapping WCF-style segue®. Jeff Lowe remains the mystery man no more. The Deseret Morning News published a candid and robust biographical piece on Jeff Lowe in yesterday's edition. Here's the lowdown on Jeff Lowe. We invite you all to read up.

At the very least, we think you'll all agree that Jeff Lowe is a quite remarkable man. Who can blame him for his desire to fulfill his dream? Really. And for Jeff's sake, we hope it works.

Comments, anyone?

And please be nice. Jeff Lowe and your blogmeister go way back.