The people's golf course

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Frankly, the front-page headlines in Sunday's paper were a bit of a jaw-dropper: "Mt. Ogden off the hook" and "Mayor: Course won't be sold for gondola, subdivision."

Junction City Mayor Matthew Godfrey recently announced he's seeking a third term. Looking ahead to Nov. 6, he must have decided his avid support of selling off the Mount Ogden Golf Course to developer Chris Peterson would continue to alienate necessary constituencies for his re-election: golfers, east bench residents who enjoy the park lands surrounding the course, people from all over the city who enjoy hiking the trails adjacent to the city's land, and non-hikers and non-golfers who just didn't approve of selling the land.

Godfrey's a smart guy; those numbers add up.

Then on Tuesday, Godfrey took things a step further, saying related plans by the city to build an urban gondola with proceeds from the golf course sale were kaput, too. Now, Godfrey says, the urban gondola could be built between the Intermodal Transportation Hub on Wall Avenue and somewhere near Weber State University, but not with taxpayer funds.

Given these startling developments, it will be interesting to see whether or not Peterson - who had proposed reconfiguring the golf course and lining its fairways with luxury homes - will continue his planning to build a four-season resort in Malan's Basin on the side of the Wasatch Range east of the golf course and Weber State University.

Originally, Peterson told the Standard-Examiner's editorial board that he needed the golf course land and 120 acres of WSU-owned land on which to build hundreds of homes in order to pay for construction of his resort and a gondola on the side of the mountain.

Without all the homes, he said, the economics of the project simply wouldn't work.

Since then, the university's Board of Trustees said it won't be selling WSU's 120 acres to anyone. And now that Godfrey has closed the door on the sale of the golf course, it appears to drop Peterson's original proposal in a coffin and seals the lid tight. As Peterson told our reporter Scott Schwebke over the weekend: "If there is no possibility of owning the Mount Ogden Golf Course," Peterson wrote via e-mail, "... my project is left in a precarious state. I'll have to think long and hard about whether or not I want to start the process over from scratch."

But if Peterson ultimately decides not to pursue his resort, he can't blame Godfrey. The mayor promoted the golf course sale relentlessly for nearly two years - that's why it's such a stunner that he has reversed position. Godfrey backed Peterson - at least in part, we presume - because the developer kept promising to submit his formal proposal to the city, setting deadlines and then blowing them time and time again. As far as we know, there still has never been a full-blown, formal plan submitted to anyone in an official capacity.

Absent the details in such a document, speculation by both supporters and detractors has filled the void, and the Ogden community has been polarized on the topic.

Now, we hope, Godfrey's removal of the most contentious portions of the Peterson plan may allow for a more reasoned discussion of mass transit in the city.

And we will continue to wait with great anticipation to see where Peterson plans to go from here with his 1,440 acres east of Ogden.

The resort idea sounds interesting to us, but absent the details, it's impossible to know whether it deserves support.

And so the saga continues.

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