"His (Mayor Godfrey's) kind of recreation is paid recreation," she said, noting that many central Ogden youths can't afford such things.
"He's telling a significant number of people to go do something else. And that something else is, 'Go hang out on the street.'"
Betty Sawyer
President, Ogden NAACP
Mayor wants to drop rec facility from budget
May 28, 2009
This morning's Salt Lake Tribune picks up on the Marshall White Center brouhaha, with this Chris Smart story, which focuses on the sharp contradiction between between Boss Godfrey's obsessive compulsion "to bill Emerald City as the future recreation capital of America..." and his recent actions to cut Marshall White Center funding from the city budget, and to farm out management responsibilities to the non-profit Ogden-Weber Community Action Partnership (OWCAP) .
Mr. Smart provides an accurate and tight fact summary, and foreshadows a possible "showdown with the City Council." (We think that's nearly a sure bet, inasmuch as the council still remains entirely out of the loop; and the proposed OWCAP management contract, which Godfrey had promised to produce early this week, still hasn't found its way to the city council.)
We applaud Mr. Smart's initiative in obtaining a few choice quotes from Ms. Sawyer too. We believe the NAACP's take on this story represents a very important story angle.
Strangely, Ogden CAO John Patterson was unavailable to deliver the administration's ("he said") side of the story. Could it be that he was too busy, working out at the Salomon Center, with the free employee pass which he receives as a city employee perk?
Hopefully this morning's Chris Smart story signals a renewed resolve on the part of the Salt Lake Tribune to take a closer look into the ongoing political shenanigans in Ogden. We're all waiting for someone in the print news media to do some sleuthing on the Envision Ogden/FNURE money laundering scandal, which our home town newspaper, the Standard, still mysteriously treats as a non-story. And many of us also sit back in absolute astonishment, as no one in the print media has yet demonstrated enough curiosity to examine the probable illegalities surrounding the 2007 Salomon Center "Sneak Preview/Godfrey Campaign Fundraiser." Seems to us a blockbuster story like this would be a reportorial magnet for a young, enterprising and up-and-coming reporter like Chris Smart. The pending question? What (if anything) is holding him back?
Reader comments are invited, as always.
