This morning's Standard-Examiner reports that Boss Godfrey has vetoed a new ordinance which would have allowed a Montebello, California developer to move forward to develop the glaring central city eyesore at the old IGA shopping center at 24th Street and Monroe. From this morning's Ace Reporter Schwebke story:
OGDEN — In a rare move, Mayor Matthew Godfrey has vetoed a city council ordinance that allows construction of an office and education center adjacent to a proposed Hispanic-themed market.The Std-Ex has been following this story fairly vigorously, with previous writeups here and here.
The veto marks just the third time that Godfrey has challenged a city council vote since taking office in 2000. He issued line-item budget vetoes in 2000 and 2004.
It will take a super-majority of the city council — at least five of its seven members — to overturn Godfrey’s latest veto. The council is scheduled to vote on the veto Tuesday.[...]
The veto stems from a Sept. 16 unanimous city council decision to allow the development of professional office and education buildings despite an earlier ordinance placing a six-month moratorium on construction and alteration applications in some commercial zones.
The aim of the original moratorium, enacted by the city council on Sept. 2, is to give the city time to develop a neighborhood zoning ordinance that provides protection against incompatible commercial development in various locations.
Until the veto issue is settled, The Legaspi Co., of Montebello, Calif., technically can’t move ahead with construction of two buildings adjacent to a Hispanic-themed market it plans to develop within the former IGA grocery store at the corner of 24th Street and Monroe Boulevard.
As reported in this morning's story, residents of the central city neighborhood are in the midst of formulating a community plan, which would incude, among other things, the enactment of "standards allowing the city to require the size and architecture to be in line with historic, contextual or design characteristics of the neighborhood,” According to Godfrey.
We don't know about the rest of our readers, but it seems to us that any well-funded development in this area, regardless of architectural style or design characteristics, would be a vast improvement over the 50's style flat-tops that now stand in this dilapidated shopping center. The sticking point for some members of the community appears to be the developer's plan to follow a Spanish colonial architectural style - a style that's ubiquitous throughout the U.S. southwest, and not unrepresented in Ogden. We can't help but wonder whether the inclusion of this style in Emerald City standards wouldn't make a wonderful statement about the truly culturally eclectic community that we've grown to be.
This situation is also complicated by accusations by some members of the Utah Hispanic community, that objections to the developer's architectural and operational plans have a nasty racist element about them. With Boss Godfrey at the helm of city government, we're certainly not prepared to rule that out.
We're all for permitting citizens of Ogden neighborhoods to get together to chart the future course of development within their own neighborhoods. The recently completed Mt. Ogden Community plan is ample evidence of how well this concept can work. Neverthless, we wonder whether residents of the central city neighborhood might be going a wee bit overboard in overly-tightening architectural styles within the central city neighborhood, to exclude an architectural style which, it can be argued, is highly representative of the Hispanic population now dominating the neighborhood.
And what say our gentle readers about all this?
