Monday, May 17, 2010

Powder Mountain Update: Big County Commission Meeting Set For June 1

Possibly the most important planning meeting to ever be scheduled affecting Ogden Valley

Thanks to this 5/14/10 blog alert from our friends at Ogden Valley Forum, we'll inform our readers of an important new development in the Powder Mountain Legal Stalemate. The Weber County Commission has set a public hearing "on June 1, 2010 at 6 p.m. to consider and/or take action on Zoning Petition #18-2006 involving a request to rezone property located at Powder Mountain Resort. The hearing will include consideration of a proposed Memorandum of Understanding as a precursor to a more comprehensive development agreement."

You can review the Commission's full Public Hearing Notice here.

We also encourage our readers to peruse an auxilliary article from Ogden Valley Forum's archival storage site, wherein Ogden Valley resident Kirk Langford speculates on the true purpose of the June 1 Commission session, and strongly urges citizens who are interested in protecting Ogden Valley from a possible Commission sellout to show up at the meeting en masse. For starters, here's the lede from Mr. Langford's most magnificent rant, which provides the gist:
Regarding the hearing scheduled for June 1, 2010 at 6:00 pm in the commission chambers -- this may be the most important planning meeting to ever be scheduled affecting Ogden Valley.
It is likely that the commissioners will be handing out and approving additional free entitlements for Powder Mountain over and above what the entitlements were when the developers purchased the land. It is likely that this will be presented as a compromise, as compared to what the developers ask for, and therefore justified. It is further likely, that these entitlements, along with other development agreement proposals, will result in, a quid pro quo, the de-facto release of the hostage homeowners from the proposed petitioned town, as the developers will withdraw their petition.
Nothing will be more important than showing the commissioners how powerful our community involvement is in local government decision making.
Read the rest of Mr. Langford's article here:
Kirk Langford Citizen Call to Action
Be sure to mark your calenders folks. This is most certainly one Weber County Commission hearing that pitchfork and torch-totin' steely-eyed lumpencitzens are DEFINITELY NOT going to want to miss.

Power to the people, right on!

Reader comments are invited, as always.

Have at it, O Gentle Ones.

7 comments:

Ernest T. said...

Seems pretty strange that Rudi would put up this article about nothing and at the same time completely ignore the budding scandal surrounding the Mayor and the Donkey under the grandstands over at the rodeo grounds.

blackrulon said...

Will Gage Froerer or any of our local legislators speak at the meeting? Do legislators have any plans to introduce legislation to make certain this problem does not occur again? Will Gage Froerer reintroduce his failed remendy bill? If he does will he get enough co-sponsors to insure passage. Will he be able to gather any support in the state senate?

Bob Becker said...

The public announcement summarizes the rezoning requested as follows:

The proposed rezone covers approximately 4,234 acres within Weber County and would change the existing resort zoning from Forest Residential-3 (FR-3), Forest Valley-3 (FV-3), Commercial Valley Resort Recreation-1 (CVR-1), and Forest-40 (F-40) to Forest Valley-3 (FV-3), Commercial Valley Resort Recreation-1 (CVR-1) and Forest-40 (F40)

It would be helpful, I think, if someone familiar with what those various zoning categories mean [I am not] could give a brief summary here of what the changes might mean in a practical way. The only category being eliminated,it seems, is Forest Residential [FR-3]. I have no idea what the proposed changes might mean in a practical way.

Help?

RudiZink said...

Don't get blown out by the zoning language gibberish Curm!

What's obvious is that the County Commission is worn down by all the stress... and that they're now apparently ready to "cave in."

Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve said...

Blackrulon...... We have already been down that road twice with Gage Froerer. His bill never came up for a vote either time because of opposition in the State Senate from legislators.

The replacement bill the following year (2008) corrected the flaws in the original HB466. So anyone that incorporates now cannot force the affected residents into the town boundaries without their vote.

What makes all this so bad is in correcting the original bill, the legislature would not make the new bill retroactive to free the Powder Mountain hostages in the original bill. This was deliberate malfeasance on the part of the legislature. Even though it was recognized that HB466 was a flawed bill, certain members of the legislature in effect said " We are not going to let a developer lose a battle to a citizens group like this."

Danny said...

Too bad the County doesn't post info packets the way Ogden City does.

This gibberish is useful only to those on the inside, rendering a public hearing pointless.

They need to post a plain English description of what is going on, or post the packet.

Or, somebody needs to go down to the county and scan it for the rest of us.

Grizelda said...

The performance of the Powder Mountain developers could be a precursor of things to come in Ogden Valley.

They did a sloppy job of research on the road issues and zoning issues before buying the land and now they want to shoehorn a large resort at the end of a road that goes to nowhere. It is a very dangerous road and these dangers will be amplified if this resort or town go in.

I hope that if the Valley area residents don't stand up on this issue, that they enjoy the mega traffic, pollution, water usage and loss of wildlife that will result.

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