By Dan Schroeder
For archival completeness I'll note that the Standard-Examiner finally reported on the council's water tank decision on the eighth day after the meeting, Thursday, February 11. The article is on the front page but isn't available through free portion of the S-E web site. Here's a link to the Digital Edition version:
• 36th Street tank closer to realityHere are some excerpts from the article:
By SCOTT SCHWEBKEReader comments are invited, as always, even at this late date.
Standard-Examiner staff sschwebke@standard.net
OGDEN — Construction of a controversial 5 million-gallon water tank at the top of 36th Street is scheduled to begin in April.
After several months of study, the city council last week amended its Capital Improvement Plan to allow the installation of the tank, which will cost about $3.5 million....
The tank will replace two existing steel tanks, also on 36th Street, that are about 80 years old and can store 2.2 million gallons.
The old tanks will be removed and the site will be landscaped, said [City Engineer Justin] Anderson.
The Capital Improvement Plan amendment also allocates $100,000 for a design and engineering study for the installation of a 1.2 million-gallon tank that could be built at a location yet to be determined on the East Bench.
In addition, the amendment also earmarks $300,000 for a study involving transmission lines and potential property easement purchases to connect the new 36th Street tank to another tank on 46th Street.
4 comments:
Thanks for the archival update, Dan. Gotta admit I'm still miffed that the council sat on its thumbs, and refused to get a "second opinion" on this.
Seems to me there was too much conflicting evidence for the council to rationally adopt the city engineer's (The Administrations's) recommendation alone. The council could have (and should have) obtained an independent engineering opinion on the subject, but instead took the Llazy way out," it seems to me.
Seems to me the new council still has a lot to learn about fiscal prudence.
The SE has been pretty regular about putting local news stories by its own reporters up on the free site. I did a search on the free site water tank stories, and all but the latest one came up.
Curious, I queried one of the editors about why this latest one didn't appear on the free site. Reply: it should have. Omitting it was an oversight, not intentional. Just FYI.
The city council, according to its staff, Alan Franke, cannot do any studies of its own in under six months, because they don't have a budget allocated for it, along with other reasons he stated.
The city council needs to fix that. If the only information they get is from Godfrey's henchmen, how can they make objective decisions?
Ogden Res,
A new budgeting authority process does not need to be created.
City Council already has the ability to spend money without going through a vigorous bidding process as their staff so informed them. I think their limit is $10,000. They just need to read their Council Member Handbooks that they are given when they take office to realize that. Instead they rely on their staff to tell them what to do.
As I have said, nothing will change until the City Council starts assuming the responsibility of their positions rather than delegating that responsibility off to their staff.
The Council’s decision to spend this money as they have was a waste of taxpayer money to the tune of 5 million dollars. This money could have actually been spent on pipeline systems from the current storage tanks down into the neighborhoods that would have actually made our system better and safer. But this wasn’t worth their fight.
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