News has been a mite slow concerning the "Powderville" town brouhaha during the last month, ever since the Weber County Commission took the town incorporation matter off-calender and began direct negotiations with the Powder Mountain developer.
Valley Citizens for Responsible Development's Larry Zini stirs the pot again this morning however, with a fine Standard-Examiner guest commentary, thereby bringing the Powderville town incorporation discussion back to the public forefront. Among other things, Mr. Zini reiterates these important points:
Decisions of the proposed town council and planning commission will be in control of the Powder Mountain ownership and large town landowners in and around the resort for at least the first two to four years.Regarding the identities of the property owners who filed the incorporation petition, Ogden Valley Forum has done some fancy footwork, obtained copies of the original petition, and posted it in this article on their blogsite. And having done that, the OVF blogmaster "Valley" makes some very interesting observations:
Most residents in the valley are aware of the identities of the main property owners who currently have considerable land holdings within the proposed town boundaries. The town incorporation will be a financial windfall for most of them. Despite the repeated denials of these property owners, it is apparent this was their goal (in concert with the Powder Mountain ownership) from the beginning when the initial rezone and subsequent incorporation petitions were filed.
Finally, the town incorporation will do nothing to resolve the single-road-access issue with its inherent safety and traffic-load problems from an eight- to tenfold increase in vehicle numbers calculated from Powder Mountain's own traffic study. In addition, incorporation will not address the numerous issues which were the subject of the other conditions attached to the grant of the rezone by the Ogden Valley Planning Commission. It will be as if those issues and the concerns surrounding them do not exist.
Pay particular attention to the status of several of the LLC's or corporations. Some are delinquent according to state records and should at least wave a small red flag with Mr. Bischoff and company at the County Commission offices.Although OVF has posted the original petition documents on its own storage site, OVF's host server is tediously slow, so we've taken the liberty of uploading them to our own storage site, which usually runs smooth as silk.
Also, we find the personal addresses of the Petitioners to be quite interesting - Hawaii, San Diego, Las Vegas, Colorado, Park City....
And we have mentioned fishy ties before with Western America Holding, LLC (Mark Arnold and Lee Daniels) being the "new" owners of Powder Mountain, while Western America Development Corporation, Inc. owns adjacent property and consists of Cobabe's daughters as principals.
According to State records, the former has a "status date" 5/14/04 while the later has a "status date" of 5/13/04. Is it just a coincidence that both companies were created within a day of each other? Cobabe's (and their Planning Commissioner granddaughter Jamie Lythgoe) have claimed to have sold the resort with no ties except a small adjacent property, but they are BIG players in the "Powderville" incorporation scheme. Why?
And according to our informal poll, only two petitioners actually:
1) Have an Ogden Valley residence
2) Are not related to the Cobabe's
That would be Rulon and Kathy Jones and Ricky and Theresa Stearman.
For those readers interested in taking a close look at the original Powderville town incorporation petition (actually a series of petitions) the 13MB PDF document can be viewed here. It's still a slow upload; but we do believe our site is faster. Nevertheless, we don't recommend that you click this link unless you're hooked up with a broadband connection.
That's it on the Powderville situation for now. We'll of course keep you posted on further developments, in future updates.
4 comments:
What a shame that the Dr. Cobabe and his family, prominent in the Ogden Valley community for many years, have chosen to turn their backs on their neighbors and their neighborhood, and opted for the "big score".
Prime example of the "me first" mentality.
What is worse than that, is that the Ogden Valley Planning Commission has not kicked Jamie Lythgoe off of their commission after her obvious and blatant conflict of interest actions. I wonder what those people would consider a conflict of interest? She was working with the OVPC and at the same time signed a petition to line her family pockets! It is time we replaced the commissioners at Weber County who appoint these crooks!
Start with Dearden this November! he is the first one up for re election.
As for the Johnson candidate I do not think he will be an improvement in that he also does not understand the concept of a COI it seems.
There needs to be Commissioner candidate who has unquestionable ethics and integrity.
COI? Please speak English!
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