The Corporate Welfare State Remains Alive and Well In Ogden

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This morning's Standard-Examiner delivers a brief summary of last night's Council/RDA sessions, in which he reports that our city council voted 4-3 to squander another $100 thousand on yet another ill-conceived Godfrey pipedream. Unfortunately, the story is a mite thin, we think. Although several projects and initiatives were on last night's agendas, Ace Reporter Schwebke, for reasons unknown, limits his reporting to the council's treatment of the Ice Tower Project. Notwithstanding this deficiency, we nevertheless incorporate a few of Mr. Schwebke's key paragraphs below:

OGDEN — By a 4-3 vote, the city council amended the municipality’s budget Tuesday night enabling the allocation of $100,000 for construction of a controversial ice climbing tower.
The allocation is part of an overall budget amendment that earmarks $2.7 million in fiscal 2007 carryover money and BDO lease proceeds to finance a variety of city projects and initiatives.
City council members who voted against the budget amendment included Dorrene Jeske, Amy Wicks and Doug Stephens. [...].
The budget amendment requires the $100,000 onetime allocation be used only for construction of the tower and prohibits the money from being spent until funds are raised to complete the project.

By process of elimination,we suppose it's fair to deduce that these are the publicly elected fiduciaries, YOUR city council members, who thought it was quite alright to dole out $100 thousand of YOUR hard-earned taxpayer dollars, to roll the dice on this nit-witted project, and put Jeff Lowe's private company on the public dole:

• Jesse Garcia
• Caitlin Gochnour
• Blaine Johnson
• Brandon Stephensen

The corporate welfare state remains alive and well in Ogden, while financial prudence and discipline fly out the council chamber window. We believe these four should be ashamed of themselves.

Mr. Schwebke notes one dissenting council member's objection to the commitment of public funds toward this project:

[Councilwoman] Jeske said she opposed the amendment because taxpayer funds shouldn’t be used to help construct the $1.6 million ice tower planned for the corner of 25th Street and Kiesel Avenue. “It’s supposed to be a private enterprise,” she said.

According to other sources however, we believe Ms. Jeske's objection may have been more complicated than that, in which connection we incorporate this information received in a lower article comment section last night from gentle reader Steve A.:

Councilwoman Jeske tried to persuade the other Council members for more than 15 minutes saying that a summary document that they had received Friday had areas of concern that stated the City would be responsible for the construction, the refrigeration and everything else to make it operational.

Is there a document floating out there which would bind Ogden City to contribute to this boneheaded project beyond the limitations set forth in last night's conditional budget allocation? Has Boss Godfrey entered into any separate agreements with Jeff Lowe which might require further contributions from the city, in the event that the project fails to meet rosy expectations? If so we'd love to get our hands on them.

And what about the other items which were set for last night's agenda? Ace Reporter Schwebke provides nothing about the other projects and initiatives which we discussed yesterday:

• The 2008 Junction Bailout ($1.5 million)
• High Adventure Business Recruitment Scheme ($200 thousand)
• Debt Reduction Plan

Perhaps a few of our readers can offer their own comments and observations, to fill in the blanks left by Mr. Schwebke's short article, which (now that we think about it) may have suffered from the constraints of a tight publication deadline.