Important Council Work Session Set For Tuesday Night -UPDATED

The Ogden Transit Alternatives Analysis is on the agenda
Added Bonus: Read Dan S.'s live blogged remarks in the comments section below

For those readers closely following the Ogden Streetcar planning situation, we'd like to provide notice of tomorrow evening's council work session. Here's the full notice, straight from the Ogden City website:

Notice is hereby given that the Ogden City Council will meet for a Work Session on Tuesday, August 17, 2010 at 5:30 p.m., in the Council Work Room, located on the third floor of the Municipal Building in Ogden City, Weber County, Utah. The purpose of the work session is to discuss the Transit Alternatives Analysis, the property donation to St. Anne’s Center, Inc. and Council business.

Here's the link to the council packet:

• 08/17 City Council Work Session Packet

Within this lengthy lengthy (11.95 MB pdf) packet you'll find, among other things, two documents labeled "Ogden-WSU Transit Corridor AA-EIS Presentation" and "Economic Development Opportunities Analysis Presentation." In this connection we recommend that all WCF readers who are interested in this project carefully review these documents, as we have the uneasy feeling that these appear to be the sole working UTA documents upon which all interested parties will be forced to rely as the Streetcar Project moves forward.

Our initial impression upon first glance at these documents? Just as we've long suspected, the whole process has been carefully rigged to generate a finding that the 36th street east-west corridor is the "preferred alignment." Many of the so called assumptions and conclusions within these documents appear to be unsupported by reliable evidence.

Get out your magnifying glasses and green eye shades folks. Among other things revealed in the packet... A public hearing on this matter has been set at Union Station for September 28, 2010. Between now and then we'll urge all 25th Street cross-town corridor advocates to familiarize yourselves with these documents and carefully note the defects in the existing analysis, lest this project be shoved down the lumpencitizens' throats through flawed analysis.

And in the meantime we'll encourage all readers to chime in with your comments. And of course on Tuesday night we'll leave this thread open for anyone who plans to attend Tuesday's work session to provide your observations and post-meeting reports.

And in closing, we'll provide this helpful graphic, gleaned from the "Ogden-WSU Transit Corridor AA-EIS Presentation" document, just to allow our readers to see how far along we are in the Transit Corridor Alignment selection process:

(Click Image to Enlarge)

Scary ainnit?

And yes... we do confess... we photoshopped it just a little bit... just to clarify where we really are within this obviously rigged process.

Update 8/17/10 2:52 p.m.: Here's another reminder of tonight's Transit Analysis council work session, per Brandon Chase Bell, via Facebook:

• UTA/Ogden City Council Meeting Tonight 8/17 5:30 p.m.

We're glad to see the word is getting out; and once again we encourage all meeting attendees to get back to WCF, to post your post-meeting comments.

Update 8/17/10 5:46 p.m.: Surprise of surprises, Dan S. is now live blogging from the City Council Chamber! Open the below comments section and refresh your browsers to read Dan's continuing real-time remarks.

Update 8/18/10 7:15 a.m.: The Standard-Examiner's Roy Burton throws in his own 2¢ this morning with his brief post-meeting writeup below:

• Ogden streetcar far from happening

Special thanks to Dan S. for last evening's excellent real-time play-by-play reporting.