By Dan Schroeder
The Ogden City Council agenda packet for this Tuesday, September 7, contains some items that are sure to interest Weber County Forum readers:
1. Allocation of the $175,400 that WACOG granted the city last month to operate a rubber-tire trolley system circulating around downtown Ogden.
Officially this project is a “study”, to assess the feasibility of someday building a genuine streetcar along the same circulating route. The cost of such a system would be in the tens of millions of dollars, so it would compete for funding with the far more important transit line between downtown and WSU. The $175,400 grant comes from the 1/4-cent sales tax fund that we approved three years ago for “regionally significant” transportation projects. Because the downtown circulator is not a regionally significant project, it was actually illegal for the Weber Area Council of Governments to grant the funds for this purpose. It did so, in part, because the Wasatch Front Regional Council wrote a letter last April blessing the circulator project, and even calling it a “portion” of the WSU line. Anyone who doubts that Mayor Godfrey has political clout should consider how he coerced WFRC into telling this outrageous lie and thus got the money he wanted out of WACOG.
Now that the money has been handed to Ogden City, of course, it would be foolish for the council not to approve spending it. But it would be equally foolish for the council to hand it to the mayor with no strings attached, as they’re apparently about to do. At this time neither the city nor WFRC has any written protocol for how this “study” is to be conducted, or even a list of specific questions that the study is supposed to answer. We can be sure that under these circumstances, the mayor will declare the study a “success” no matter what the outcome. To make matters worse, the administration intends to outsource the vehicles’ operation to Downtown Ogden Inc., a nonprofit organization that is wholly controlled by the mayor but immune from public records requests.
2. Creation of a new Tenant Improvement Loan Program for downtown retail businesses, and allocation of $315,000 of BDO revenue to this program.
The high vacancy rates for retail space at The Junction and along Washington Blvd. are a continuing embarrassment for the city in general and for Mayor Godfrey in particular. This latest attempted remedy would provide incentives in the form of loans to tenants for finishing or improving the interior of retail spaces. Such a program sounds reasonable, though I question whether the administration can be trusted to award the loans fairly.
I also have a more immediate concern: Why is the loan program being created through a resolution, rather than by ordinance? Whereas an ordinance carries the weight of law, a city council resolution is merely an expression of opinion, with no teeth. Thus, if the loan program is created as currently planned, the administration would apparently be free to change the terms and conditions of the program at any time.
Of course, the houses need to be torn down. But I seriously doubt that Mr. Leshem or his associates will ever reimburse the city for this expense, so we should chalk this up as yet another subsidy for this black hole of a project (over $7 million spent so far, and counting).
The good news is that the city council has put a restriction into the proposed ordinance, allowing no more than $25,000 of the funds to be used to clean up sites where the homes were intentionally burned. But it’s not at all clear that this restriction is sufficient. The administration could still use additional money to prepare houses for incineration, by removing the asbestos and so on. If the council wishes to stop the city from burning more of the houses, it should stipulate that no funds be used on sites of intentional burns, other than the two that have been burned already.
In summary, this city council meeting will be an important one—and there are plenty of reasons to lobby the council to improve these proposed measures before passing them.
To see the full city council agenda packet (10.7 MB), click here.
For an abridged version of the agenda packet, including all the items discussed in this article (2.4 MB), click here.
Update 9/8/10 8:00 a.m.: Both the Standard-Examiner and the Salt Lake Tribune report that the Council has allocated $545,000 in Business Depot Ogden lease revenues to demolish the derelict Leshemville residential structures, and that further "burns" are off the table:
• Ogden won't burn other vacant homesUnfortunately, there's no word on the Council's treatment of either the $175,400 WACOG grant or the proposed $315,000 Tenant Improvement Loan Program. Perhaps one of our readers who attended last night's meeting can help us out with these latter two issues.
• Ogden mayor: Halt plan to torch vacant homes
