By Curmudgeon
The Salt Lake Tribune reports this morning that another high-end real estate development on steeply sloped land has bitten the dust, the Sun Crest Development in Draper.. Headline: "Ritzy Developer Bankrupt."
From the story:
The housing-market slump was one issue, but the development also was being built on steep slopes peppered with ancient landslides. That, plus it had been sued more than a dozen times. Many of the suits sought claims for allegedly unpaid bills, and one alleged city-developer collusion that damaged neighboring property. Some of those claims will disappear, but suits relating to the land - such as a suit that sought to prevent expansion of a detention pond - likely will remain.Last week, we had the high end resort in Park City going under. And of course, the [prospective] developer of Ogden's Gondola Station Towers Downtown Hotel and Parking Plaza withdrew when it became known the company could not pay its subcontractors on a similar project in Orem, was it?
Was Ogden lucky in that Mayor Godfrey's two year relentless campaign to sell Mt. Ogden Golf Course to his developer associate Chris Peterson for development as a high end gated community of vacation villas on mountainside lots... lots the Mayor announced were in the end too steep to build on anyway when he backed away from the project to save his re-election bid? Seems like a real chance that if Ogden citizens [often denounced by the Administration and its tub-thumping lackeys in Lift Ogden and the Ogden-Weber Chamber of Commerce as "naysayers"] had not organized against the scheme... and thank you Smart Growth Ogden and others who helped organize that opposition... and if the Mayor and his associates had thus succeeded in their scheme, Ogden might now be looking at a bankrupt half-built development on what had been the city's largest park. [Full disclosure: I was and am a strong and active supporter of Smart Growth Ogden and its thoughtful, evidence-based approach to city growth, development and improvement.]
Comments, anyone?
11 comments:
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
All of these projects were conceived and planned and initially financed in the good times before the credit market unraveled. Most of the economic activity you see around us and the jobs they provide are, again, funded by last years cash flow. The dissipation of the American economy will take a few more years before it is rendered to fly-ash. We have an immense amount of wealth to boil away that, in the meantime, masks the withering of our foundations. Our economy and wealth was built on cheap energy. It was built on the strength of all the world's energy traded in dollars(it is no longer). Best to rein in the disposable spending and pay off the mortgages and cards. Unfortunately, that will compound the national crisis. Our money supply is dependent on people using credit yet it is your best interest to not during a time of economic shrinkage.
Most people are filling the tank on the fumes of their charge cards. The working class can only subsist this way for a few more quarters. The war is not going to end under any circumstances or candidate. Unfortunately, despite my intense opposition to it, we are likely in the middle east for the rest of our days.
Big cheers to the repukelikans for voting in the destruction of America.
All persons should read Curm's headline article and Tec's comment above, slowly, and repeatedly. They are very profound and true.
As far as the war, I can only hope that the candidate with the racist minister and the almost all-black campaign staff will end the war when elected. He is a good speaker, but the only reason he is winning is he looks like something different, literally and figuratively. 81% of the public knows we are heading for the rocks and is looking for anybody else to steer the ship than the current crop of "leaders", even if it means getting somebody from below deck with no experience. The thinking is, he could do no worse. This is the situation in which we find ourselves.
It's interesting that for both bankrupt developments that Curm mentioned, the principals claim that it is a good development and the bankruptcy should not change that.
OH REALLY???
I guess I'm the only man left in America who, when something he does falls apart, takes some of the responsibility HIMSELF!
Thus the rise of the "Geigerettes," people who cannot see their own ineptitude.
So people vote for Obama, hoping like the biblical David, he will be a smart kid from the sticks who can wash out the systemic rot and set things right.
And thus the genius of America: Revolution by ballot box.
If that revolution doesn't work, we have another in four years.
A lot of our local problems (ie our Mayor and rule by developer) I think are due to the ineptitude of our local Standard Examiner. I think that if the past years' happenings had been reported in depth and without bias things would be different here in Ogden.
Here's a link to
Bill Moyers address on receiving the Ridenhour Award for courage in journalism for those who are interested.
OL:
Thanks for the link. Here's an excerpt from Moyers' talk, and it pretty much sums up what I, and you, and others have been saying about the SE's coverage of Ogden government matters for a long time now:
The job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is almost as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place. We journalists are of course obliged to cover the news, but our deeper mission is to uncover the news that powerful people would prefer to keep hidden.
Unless you are willing to fight and re-fight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every last detail to make certain you've got it right, and then take all of the slings and arrows directed at you by the powers that be -- corporate and political and sometimes journalistic -- there is no use even trying. You have to love it and I do. I.F. Stone once said, after years of catching the government's lies and contradictions, "I have so much fun, I ought to be arrested." Journalism 101.
A reporter's... an editor's... a newspaper's... "deeper mission is to uncover the news that powerful people would prefer to keep hidden."
Exactly.
Aw gee. You guys are so mean. I thought my job was to print whatever the mayor and that cool Dave Harmer guy tell me. They're such busy, important men, and I'm honored whenever they take time to tell me secrets and stuff.
Honestly, I think we should just trust Mayor Godfrey in every decision that he makes and we should just support that.
bout time someone said that
You guys are so tough on me. Sure, I'm the Standard-Examiner's crack political reporter, but I had the mumps and missed the part of the school term where they talked about "How a Bill Becomes a Law".
So it was easy for me to mix up the State Senate and the State House. How am I to know that State Sen. Allen M. Christensen actually represents a State Senate district, and not House District 19, like I reported?
And that State Sen. Scott Jenkins does not represent House District 20, like I reported?
The copy editor didn't catch it, so it must be right.
I'm thinking I should get another award from my editors for this insightful piece. After all, since the state legislature isn't really a deliberative body, with only one party and one point of view allowed to prevail, we might as well appoint one man to be the Legislative Branch. Then he can represent everyone -- we'll call him "King" -- and I won't be confused by all these House districts and Senate districts and how Senators represent Senate districts and Representatives represent House districts and all that confusing political stuff.
Maybe my pal Matt Godfrey can explain it to me next time he calls me. I'm sure looking forward to that.
Way back when, in the dim dark ages of the past, stories on dailies usually went to a news copy editor, and then perhaps a style copy editor who picked up typos, grammatical infelicities, unclear text, and general knowledge factual errors that might have crept in, and fixed them before sending the story on to the lynotype operater [I said the dim dark past].
I wonder, do stories still go through live copy editors on modern dailies? I don't know. I'm just curious about the mechanics of it all. If a reporter sends in a story via email, or posts it to the paper on line, or phones it in, or carries in, what happens then? Who does it go next and for what reason? How many people work it after the reporter before it gets to the people who lay out the page and send it to the presses? Anyone?
Anybody know?
Scotty:
Yes, the errors you caught [nice reading, by the way. I missed them.] shouldn't have happened. But errors like that do happen now and then. They shouldn't but when you write and print as much as a daily paper does, they do. They embarrass the staff for a bit and provide ammunition to critics. But they're not fatal to a paper's quality or credibility [so long as they are infrequent].
But in the end, the occasional error like this... putting a politico in the wrong office, etc.... matter much less than broader problems, like accepting unexamined the claims of elected officials, governments, and the powerful at all levels. My Home Town Paper fumbles a fact, mis-spells a name now and then, puts Christiansen in the wrong House... well, mistakes happen. So long as they are infrequent and corrected, not a big problem.
But doing press release journalism, not digging into public statements by public men and women, that's a much bigger problem. That cuts to the core of what political and civic journalism is... or should be... about. That cuts into the credibility of a paper far far deeper than the occasional error of fact, or fumbled name. Far more.
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