Ace Reporter Schwebke provides a story in this morning's Standard-Examiner, regarding Tuesday night's council work session, which was thoroughly reported yesterday in Curmudgeon's early morning report. The article headline pretty much sums up the tone of this morning's story: "Funds request not warmly welcomed." Indeed, it's our strong impression that the idea of dropping $200 thousand in taxpayer money on Boss Godfrey's Ice-tower Obsession has gotten zero traction with our sane and prudent Emerald City Council -- Councilman Stephenson excepted -- of course.
Mr. Schwebke's story did however have one element that left us scratching our head. This, from this morning's story:
The city has already received $200,000 in Weber County RAMP tax funds and a pledge for an equal amount of money that would be raised by Jeff Lowe, a renowned ice climber and executive director of Ogden Climbing Parks, which would manage, operate and maintain the tower, John Patterson, the city’s chief administrative officer, said during the work session. [Emphasis added].Up until now, we had been led to believe that the committees in charge of doling out RAMP funds had denied RAMP moneys for this patently goofball project; and we confess we are now experiencing some cognitive dissonance. We've even carefully examined the 2008 RAMP recommendations, and ice tower money seemed noticeably absent.
Did Mr. Patterson simply mis-speak; or does our Emerald City chief administrative officer have information to which we have not yet been made privy?
We heard privately that the RAMP selection committee had unceremoniously laughed the ice tower funding proposal out of the committee room, by the way.
So many questions... so few answers.
Perhaps our well connected Weber County Forum readership can help us out on this.
