By Curmudgeon
The Standard-Examiner has a lead editorial up this morning, calling upon the Council and the Mayor to reach some negotiated settlement regarding the "Marshall White and golf course" matters to avoid having the two sides face off in court.
It makes some good points along the way. Particularly this one:
The mayor says that the original ordinance that he vetoed is illegal. If that's so, we wonder why he took the administrative action of using his veto.... By issuing a veto, Godfrey seemed to adhere to a policy that most observers would cite as being susceptible to an override.But overall, it is sadly wrong in both its analysis of the problem and its proposed solution.
1. The time for negotiation and discussion between the Council and the Mayor was before the Mayor suddenly announced the terms of the contract for private management of the Marshall White Center, which did not include funding for operating the pool for the full fiscal year --- an announcement the SE editorial board rightly criticized as yet another example of the Mayor's preference for playing "Gotcha!" with the Council.
2. Once that happened, and the Council passed its budget ordinance included full funding for the pool and the Mayor vetoed that funding and the Council over rode the veto and the Mayor said he'd ignore the law, two non-negotiable positions had been staked out. As the editorial notes, when the Mayor cast his veto, he recognized the Council's authority to have passed that ordinance in the first place. Only after the vote didn't go as he expected did he decide the rules didn't apply to him.
3. The editorial calls for a negotiated settlement for the good of the city. That can work only when parties negotiate in good faith --- i.e. when they can be counted on to keep their agreements. The editorial forgets that the Mayor and Council negotiated another disagreement recently. The Mayor agreed that Ogden's paid lobbyist at the legislature would work on legislation that both the Council and Mayor decided he should work on. The Mayor promptly broke that agreement by secretly tasking the city's lobbyist to work on a bill stripping city councils of the power to remove a mayor as head of an RDA. In short, the Mayor demonstrated that his word, given in a negotiated agreement, is no good.
4. At this point it probably is best that the matter be settled in court. It's going to come up again. If the Mayor can, as he contends, veto the language in a budget appropriation specifying what the money is to be used for without vetoing the appropriation itself, he will have the power to use such funds for whatever purpose he wishes. The legality of this breathtaking power grab of the public's money needs to be settled once and for all. Only a court or the legislature can do that.
5. Similarly the Mayor's claim that his power to manage the city, which includes the power to let contracts and to sell city property, trumps all other city authorities also needs to be tested. Can he let contracts and sell property, for example, that violates city policy as established by the Council? That violates the Ogden City General plan ? Are there no limits to his power? So he seems to be claiming. That claim needs to be tested, and it can be settled now only by judicial or legislative action.
The Mayor and Council could negotiate the specific issues involved regarding the MWC pool, perhaps. But the core of the dispute --- the Mayor's claim that his administrative authority trumps all possible limits on it, and that he can vote in appropriations bills the purpose for which the money is granted by the Council while still getting the money to spend, wholly unencumbered --- go to the fundamental nature of city government and cannot be settled now by negotiations. Particularly since the Mayor has demonstrated that he does not consider himself bound by what he's agreed to in previous negotiations with the Council.
