Brace yourselves, Emerald City lumpencitzens. The Skipper's "Citizens' Golf Course Committee" is reportedly on the verge of making its final recommendations. Well.. maybe not quite "on the verge," we suppose... final recommendations won' t come out until March, according to this morning's Ace Reporter Schwebke story. Nevertheless, we'll apparently at least get a glimpse of the work product of Boss Godfrey's hand-picked committee, somewhere around the end of this month. From this morning's story:
A preliminary proposal from a citizen committee working to solve financial problems at Mount Ogden Golf Course includes a recommendation to build a new clubhouse on Weber State University property that could cost more than $2 million.Declining to discuss financial details at this point is a pretty good tactic on the Skipper's part, we think. It's really an expansive pre-ordained Godfrey-style boondoggle. If we add up the costs of all the elements leaked in this morning's story, we're looking at a project with a projected bill running upward of $10 million bucks. No wonder The Skipper doesn't want to talk about it. Quite a chunk of change for a city that's already feeling the current recession's financial pinch. We'll therefore just ask at this point: Even assuming for the sake of argument the committee comes up with an acceptable plan... where will the money come from?
Kent Petersen, chairman of the Mount Ogden Golf Committee, said Wednesday he may give the city council a glimpse of the proposal later this month.
The committee may also present final recommendations to the council in March, he said. [...]
The Mount Ogden Golf Committee, established at the request of Mayor Matthew Godfrey, has been working since May on the proposal aimed at making the golf course more playable and, ultimately, more profitable.
Peterson said he has met with several financial experts to determine how the construction of the clubhouse and other improvements at the course can be funded.
“The committee is trying to fix the fiscal side of things,” said Peterson.
He declined to discuss specific funding options until the committee shares that information with the city council.
It's pretty obvious that Ogden City doesn't have that kind of dough laying around.
How about the bond market? Now that Boss Godfrey's financial guru, Scott Brown is back in harness, surely he'll be able to engineer the necessary bonding, like he did for the Junction Project back in 2005, right?.
For our part, we're not going to hold our breath waiting for funding from muni bond investors. That bond market has effectively dried up. As a matter of fact, The Port Authority of New York-New Jersey, a genuinely well-connected Big Player operating in the very geographic heart of U.S. financial markets, got completely skunked on its own bond offering just yesterday:
On Wednesday, the New York-New Jersey Port Authority joined the list of public borrowers locked out of the market. The agency, which helps oversee the World Trade Center redevelopment, was forced to postpone a $300 million note sale because no one bid on the debt.The foregoing is an sign of the current economic times. We remain in an economic environment where U.S. financial institutions, of course, won't even lend to each other.
Well.. there are always those mysterious foreign investors, we guess.
We're posting this on the fly, and we've therefor ignored most of the issues that pop out of this morning's Scott Schwebke story. We'll thus rely upon our readers to supply the rest.
Have at it.
