Salt Lake Tribune: Ogden City's River Restoration Project Stalls at the Starting Gate

Another grand Godfrey scheme gets shuffled to the back burner

Discouraging Kristen Moulton story in this morning's Salt Lake Tribune, regarding Boss Godfrey's languishing Ogden River Restoration Project:

Ogden » One year after Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman of the international Waterkeeper Alliance, spoke at an Ogden River celebration -- also billed as a restoration kickoff -- there is still no grand plan for the river.
Nonetheless, the celebration did energize community cleanup efforts and a bid for federal funding for restoration of the river, which flows from Ogden Canyon through the city to the confluence with the Weber River west of downtown.
"It's a long process," said Jason Carey, a consultant from Glenwood Springs, Colo., who has been working with developer Gadi Leshem and an ad hoc committee of people interested in restoring the river. "These restoration projects, even the most fast-tracked of them, take at least two years."
Restoring the Ogden River likely will take much longer.

Ms. Moulton goes on to partially enumerate the laundry list of pesky problems which have landed the project on the VERY back burner, not the least of which is the generally dismal state of the economy, wherein funding for projects of this kind is a trifle "tight."

Compounding the problem of course, is the uncertain posture of U.S. Senator Bob Bennett's $6.5 million proposed federal appropriation earmark, which unceremoniously stalled in the Senate last year. In this connection Senator Bennett hints that the future of the appropriation is what we'll characterise as "iffy." We'll suggest however that it may be quite a bit worse than iffy, now that Mr. Bennett sits on the minority side of the Senate, in the absence of his former GOP majority clout.

And developer Gadi Leshem hasn't been much help either, according to Ms. Moulton's morning report. Notwithstanding all the grand hoopla last year, Mr. Leshem has evidently dropped out of sight, and remains missing in action. Specifically, Leshem draws criticism from Great Salt Lakekeeper Jeff Salt, who complains that Leshem has entirely failed to "keep him in the loop about the river's restoration, in spite of such a promise" during last December's Robert Kennedy, Jr. dog and pony show:

Salt said he believes Leshem used Kennedy to give his project a "greenwash."
"He used Bobby Kennedy to launch the project, and he hasn't kept his commitment to communicate with us or involve us," Salt said.

And this is interesting. Ms. Moulton reports that the city is trying to "find a deep-pocketed partner for Leshem who could finance massive demolition work" on the numerous derelict and abandoned residential fire traps he owns in the River Project area.

Hey waittaminute, gentle readers! We thought Gadi WAS SUPPOSED TO BE the deep pocket.

Sadly, like all the other grand plans and schemes of the "visionary" Godfrey administration, this one is panning out to be long on vision, but painfully inept in the execution. So what else is new in MattGodfreyWorld anyway, we ask?

And what say our gentle readers about all this?