Pursuant to our earlier promise, we now set up a new WCF thread, dedicated to the series of study sessions, work sessions and one formal council meeting which will be held tonight, in and around the Ogden City council chambers.
Among the most interesting issues which the council will deal with tonight is Boss Godfrey's heretofore super-secret Mount Ogden Golf Course poll, the results of which will be apparently unveiled in tonight's council work session meeting.
For those readers who missed the leadup to this, here are the two WCF articles we posted earlier on the Boss Godfrey's Secret Golf Course Poll topic:
- One Gentle Reader Tips Us Off to a Suspicious Ongoing Telephone "Poll" - 9/12/09
- Mysterious Golf Course "Pollster" Is Unmasked - 9/21/09
Have at it, O Gentle Ones; don't be shy.
Comments are invited of course on this thread from any conscientious readers, especially those who attend tonight's council meeting(s).
8 comments:
This is not quite a push poll, but it's damn close. The questions require those answering to accept the premises on which the questions are based --- that the MOGC really loses a quarter of a million a year and requires that much of a subsidy. That a tax increase is the most likely result unless voters approve an $8 million dollar upgrade --- that would, coincidentally of course, locate a new golf clubhouse and parking lot within spittin' distance of the proposed base station for Mr. Peterson's private up-mountain gondola to his as yet un-built vest pocket low-level mini-ski park in Malan's Basin. And that the only way to avoid either a tax rise or closing the course is to sell off city owned benchlands for real estate development.
The plain purposes of the poll are two: (a) to create an election issue for Godfrey-sock puppets in the Council election by seeding the idea that those who oppose selling the city's park land [note: not just golf course land, but much more] for development will in fact be favoring a tax increase to save the golf course and (b) to identify likely pro-Godfrey-ticket voters in the coming election, which information I have no doubt will be made available one way or another to Hizzonah's candidates.
One look at the questions makes it obvious that this is not a legitimate public opinion poll, but a poll designed to advance a particular agenda. Which makes it wholly inappropriate to have been done with public funds, if it was.
If Hizzonah piously claims his only motive was to sample public opinion about golf course options, then the poll would not have included the questions about registered voters and likely to vote in the coming election. But it did. Imagine that....
Since 100% of those polled appear to be registered voters, it suggests that the Ogden voter rolls were used as a source of names. Is that legal?
Also, the responses weren't all that favorable to selling the golf course land to a developer.
Considering that my water bill has doubled in the past year because BDO income is funding the Junction, I don't see an additional $6/$200,000 valuation to be so dreadfull.
Does this mean that the mayor is in favor of selling variances to various zoning and master plan requirements. if I wish to remodel my home in a manner that is not in compliance with building and zoning regulations will I be able to buy a exception to the rules?
Another disingenuous but typical Godfrey manuever. This guy and his sycophants are soooo predictable. Whenever one speculates on what Godfrey and his followers are up to, if you assume a large proportion of dishonesty will be in the mix you will be correct every time.
Surely the voters of Ogden are going to be smart enough to see through all of the BS that Godfrey and his candidate stooges will be putting out the next month and a half, aren't they?
Godfrey's poll in various places gives people phony options:
Would you rather be raped?
Or gang raped?
Or would you rather go along with the mayor?
Or do you have no answer?
The poll is bogus. The one question left unasked was,
Would you rather leave things as they are?
As usual, the mayor has tried to game the system, and it is transparent.
Thanks for publishing his fraudulent poll so ever more of us can learn how this creep works.
Also, dittos to the comments above.
Godfrey is an asshat.
Interested in the survey results, I obtained a copy of the survey questions with cumulative results/percentages. I also verified with the commissioned survey consultant how the sample of surveyed individuals was created. The survey included a sample of 200 active registered voters in Ogden with telephones.
I prepared a statement regarding verious concerns about the validity and completeness of the survey as provided by the consulting firm.
I will put it here, with the caveat that I didn't exactly follow every word, nor was I able to fit in everything I wanted to say in the 3 minute time allotment.
A random sample to be surveyed should closely match the population of the group of interest in selected demographics, such as Registered Voter, Homeowner/Renter, Race, Gender, Education Level, Income Level, Religion, Family Size, ...
*The demographics in this case seems to fit closely with the population. Except the Homeowner/Renter question was not asked.
Any combination of these demographics, included with golfing information may affect the person’s answer to the question about raising taxes to support the deficit at MOGC, which is why the 200 individual surveys need to be included in the packet, to analyze any correlations between demographics (especially where golf interest is concerned) and responses to survey questions.
Descriptive statistics need to be provided, in order to show if any of the survey responses prove Statistically Significant – or simply show what the initiator of the survey wanted to show. (This is called investigator bias or data snooping bias wherein researchers narrow the data used in order to reduce the probability of the sample refuting a specific hypothesis.)
Any single survey with refusal(s) of pertinent questions should be thrown out.
Given the time frame, and if the report given the council doesn’t contain each individual survey sheet for validation – then the report should be summarily rejected as irrefutably invalid and a waste of time for further examination by the council. It should be done right the first time.
Hundreds of thousands of $$$ or even millions of our money is good enough reason to NOT play around with Ogden City Administration’s version of Family Feud.
J Neil
There's an article on the golf course up on the S-E web site, and I tried to leave a comment there but kept getting error messages. Here's the comment:
It was a push-poll, not a survey.
Why doesn't this article tell us how biased the survey questions were?
The survey opens by stating, as fact, that the shortfall in use of the course is due to its "playability" and that $8 million in "improvements" would "encourage increased play to the point where the City would not need to subsidize the course". These are the mayor's opinions, not facts. How do we know that the shortfall isn't due to mismanagement by the Godfrey Administration? (After all, the course did make a profit years ago, when it wasn't any more playable.) How do we know that after the "improvements", revenue would increase at all? We don't.
The survey goes on to state, as fact, that the proposed condo project would "avoid the need for a municipal property tax increase and would end $250,000 annual taxpayer subsidy for the golf course". Is there any evidence of this? There's no concrete proposal on the table for such a project, and I'm not aware of any major Godfrey Administration development projects that have been carried out as promised without unexpected costs to taxpayers. Just look at the Junction: We were promised that its property taxes would revert to the taxing entities (schools, library, public safety, etc.) starting in 2015, but now that's been extended 12 more years. Meanwhile, we're subsidizing the Junction by $1 million a year with money that could have been used for other important public projects or services.
Finally, the survey never mentions the totally obvious option of just leaving things the way they are. If we've been "subsidizing" the golf course for the last seven years without a tax increase, why can't we continue to do so?
The best solution would be to get a mayor who actually wants to solve the problem, rather than one who highlights and exacerbates the problem in order to serve his prior agenda of building condos in Ogden's foothills.
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