Ogden Streetcar Study Reaches the Next Milestone

With luck, all the preliminary spadework will be completed before the Federal Government goes broke

The Standard-Examiner reports that Ogden City has reached the next important milestone in its effort to initiate our city's street car study project, which has been creeping forward on the city agenda since May of this year. We incorporate Scott Schwebke's pertinent paragraphs to provide the gist:

OGDEN — The city council will consider tonight an agreement that defines the scope of a $750,000 study that may lead to a streetcar system along the downtown to Weber State University-McKay Dee Hospital corridor.
The agreement with the Utah Transit Authority calls for the city’s share of the study, which will include a transit-alternatives analysis and draft environmental impact review, to total $290,000.
Funding will come from $231,250 in Utah Transit Authority federal money pledged for local transportation studies and $58,750 is set aside in the city’s fiscal 2009 budget.
In addition, Weber State University will contribute $140,000.
Intermountain Health Care, which is the parent company of McKay-Dee Hospital, will provide $30,000.
The remaining $290,000 needed for the study will come from UTA.[...]
The UTA has hired Wilbur Smith Associates Inc., which has an office in Salt Lake City, to complete the transit-alternatives analysis and draft an environmental impact review.
Work should begin in the next few weeks and will be completed in June 2010, said Greg Scott, a transportation planner for the Wasatch Front Regional Council and co-project manager for the study.
“It (work) is always a little slower than you would hope, but it’s coming together well,” Scott said Monday

So let's see now. It's been a little over three years since the release of the 2005 Baker Study, which identified possible Intermodal Hub/McKay Dee transit corridors and recommended street cars as a best form of cross town public transit. And it's been almost a full four months since the city counsel passed a resolution joining with all the other aforementioned stakeholders to select a consultant and to fund the study, using that secret federal transportation grant money that our mendacious mayor had concealed from the council for over nine months. (We're assuming, by the way, that the council will vote to move forward tonight, now that we've reached this next milestone -- not an entirely safe assumption with Councilwoman Jeske out of action while she recuperates from her recent back surgery.)

"Slower than we hoped" is right. And then Ace Reporter Schwebke provides this encouraging information, leaving us to wonder just how many additional years all this preliminary spade-work will actually take:

A second, separate phase of the study will include the completion of a final environmental impact statement and preliminary engineering.
The cost and scope of work for that phase hasn’t been determined, said Bill Cook, the city council’s executive director.

Hoo boy! We suppose the best we can hope is that the U.S. government (Uncle Sugar - from whom we all hope to soak up substantial funding,) won't be broke by the time we get all our ducks lined up and enter the long queue, along with all the other cities looking for federal monies to fund their own street car systems.

And just as an aside... according to the most recent report, Boss Godfrey returns tomorrow from his European Street Car Study Junket. Anybody want to make a side bet on whether or not our Emerald City Mayor will return to town raving about street cars?

Don't let the cat get your tongues.