Disquieting article in this morning's Standard-Examiner, regarding Ogden City's River Front Development Project. Scott Schwebke this morning reports that Evil Boss Godfrey has found almost $1 million languishing in the Emerald City RDA's bank accounts; and in true Godfrey fashion, the little shite wants to spend every dime of it. It's a short article, so what the hell, we'll incorporate Ace Reporter Schwebke's full text below:
OGDEN — The city’s Redevelopment Agency Board agreed Tuesday night to hold a public hearing next month to consider increasing its budget by $895,368 to acquire properties for the proposed Ogden River Project.Seems to us we have several problems here:
The hearing will be held Sept. 23. Following the hearing, the RDA board, made up of the city council, may consider allocating for the river project housing funds that have accumulated and weren’t transferred in fiscal 2003, 2004 and 2005.
The funds would be used for property acquisition within the project’s boundaries, said Dave Harmer, who is the city’s director of community and economic development.
“We are trying to move forward with remaining properties in negotiating options on behalf of the RDA or closing (the purchase) on some of them,” Harmer told the Standard-Examiner. The RDA still needs to obtain more than a dozen commercial properties within the river project area, Harmer said. However, the $895,368 isn’t adequate to finalize all of the purchases. “It’s nowhere near enough, but it’s all we’ve got,” he said. All told, the river project will encompass about 60 acres that straddle the Ogden River from 18th to 20th streets and Washington Boulevard west to Wall Avenue and will be a mix of residential, commercial and retail development, said Harmer.
Gadi Leshem, a developer from California, plans to construct a 200-unit development, dubbed Renaissance Village, along the Ogden River in connection with the project.
The development would include shops, lofts, townhomes, apartments and restaurants.
1) Boss Godfrey's Riverfront project is bogged down. The Ogden RDA lacks the money to acquire ALL of the necessary properties, so the Godfrey plan seems to be to drain all available RDA funds, and assemble these properties "piecemeal."
2) Godfrey has established with the Riverfront Project an ever-increasing money pit. Realistically, this grandiose project cannot move forward unless all targeted properties are acquired by the Ogden RDA. Yet Godfrey poposes that the RDA "zero out" the RDA bank account.
3) Godfrey's economic savior Gadi Leshem seems to have gone into hiding. We haven't read anything about Gadi since this story, which reported that Gadi was on the hook for $6.3 million in restitution to the California Insurance Commissioner.
4) Dozens of property owners within the Riverfront Development have been held in economic limbo since Boss Godfrey first designated their neighborhood as part of his right wing socialist River Front Development scam. For many of them it's been at least three years.
One of the factors that RDA board members should consider is whether at least some of these property-owning innocents should just be bought out, and finally let off the hook.
We'll add snarkily that this situation is one more reason that we all need to reconsider the business qualifications of our little-shite mayor, whose only experience in business (prior to being elected Ogden's Mayor) involved being a pizza delivery boy, before his father-in-law Ed Allen loaned him $30 thousand for his initial campaign run in 1999.
Its should be obvious to all of us that Godfrey bit off a little more than he could chew with the Ogden River Project, just as he's done with several other mindlessly ill-conceived other projects.
As we examine the languishing River Project, our memory turns to this:
This is how the now-floundering Junction Project looked for 44 months under Godfrey's command, almost FOUR FRIGGIN YEARS after he demolished the Downtown Mall:
The clock is ticking... and Boss Godfrey continues his efforts to acquire the whole Riverfont Development parcel, even though "moneyman" Gadi has obviously "flown the coop."
HA-HA!
We're going to assume that Godfrey's River project will move along at about the same relative pace.
So what say our gentle readers about all this?
