The text below is the response by Smart Growth Ogden to the "map" article in Standard-Examiner, 8 June 2006. We hope this response will shed a bit more light on the Mayor Godfrey's accusation that Smart Growth Ogden is inaccurate in its portrayal of the proposed Peterson Development. We hope this information will be made available to the public.
Thanks,
Mike Vause
For Smart Growth Ogden
mvause@weber.edu
Response to Article in Standard-Examiner, 8 June 2006
Smart Growth Ogden welcomes the coverage in the June 8 Standard-Examiner of the important issue of how the Peterson development proposal would affect our foothill trail system. This trail system, built and maintained over many years by hundreds of volunteers, is one of our city's greatest assets and a source of pride that has justifiably earned Ogden national recognition.
The June 8 article focuses on accusations from Mayor Godfrey that a map highlighting trails impacts, distributed by Smart Growth Ogden, "is not an accurate portrayal" of the Peterson proposal.
Smart Growth Ogden stands by its map and the accompanying text, which in all material aspects accurately represent the data and descriptions provided by the city itself. The map was produced from vector data provided by the Ogden City GIS Department on April 21. An image created from the same vector data is still posted on the city's web site (http://www.ogdencity.com/img/mayor/presentationpanels.pdf, page 12). The locations of the features depicted--trails, roads, building sites, and golf course fairways--were not altered by Smart Growth Ogden in any way. All of the conclusions drawn in the text that accompanies our map follow from the data itself; for example, the city's data shows trails in the completed project crossing roads in more than 10 locations, golf holes in 8 locations, and the driving range. If the data is inaccurate then the city, not Smart Growth Ogden, is at fault.
We are disturbed that the Standard-Examiner has chosen to present this issue entirely in a "he said, she said" fashion. The Standard-Examiner has copies of all the maps in question, and the reporter even told us over the phone that as far as Standard-Examiner staff could determine, our version of the map agrees with the city's version. Why was this crucial fact not included in the article?
The real story here is that Mayor Godfrey is using immaterial alterations in the map (described below) to attack the credibility of Smart Growth Ogden--even while using city resources to mislead the public about such aspects of the proposal as the alleged Snowbasin connection. Perhaps it is inevitable that misunderstandings will arise when describing such a complicated project, especially when so little information about the project has been made available in writing. Still, Smart Growth Ogden has made every effort to learn what facts are available and to accurately convey them to the public in all our communications. The record shows that we have succeeded in this endeavor in every material aspect--better than the city itself.
Smart Growth Ogden wishes to underscore Mayor Godfrey's statement that the city's map of the proposed foothill development is only a draft. Whoever ultimately designs the development will face the daunting task of finding room for 400 homes, several miles of new roads, an 18-hole golf course, a network of golf cart paths, a commercial area with retail shops, two gondola systems and associated service facilities, plus the promised "enhanced" trail system, while avoiding overly steep slopes, several active fault traces, two deep canyons, the Pineview canal, and a high-voltage power line. We urge everyone not to assume that all this is possible until there exists a realistic plan that incorporates all these elements.
The version of the city's map distributed by Smart Growth Ogden did incorporate a number of cosmetic alterations to shadings and line weights, to facilitate printing the map at a much smaller scale, in black and white. For the same reason, our map omitted the underlying aerial photo that was provided with the city's data. These cosmetic alterations would hardly justify labeling the map as Smart Growth Ogden's "own work."
The only specific alteration mentioned in the June 8 article is that "the Smart Growth map doesn't show the same amount of green space around the periphery of the golf course as the city's map." (It is unclear whether this statement comes from Mayor Godfrey or from the Standard-Examiner.) This remark apparently refers to the fact that the city's map uses a specific color (green) to represent what its legend calls "fairways and open space." Confusingly, the city's map includes in this category the developed park area along Taylor Avenue and a sizable parcel of National Forest land near the top of 29th Street, neither of which (in our understanding) would be acquired by Chris Peterson for this project. Our own version of the map omits this shading primarily because we did not want to mislead the public about the extent of the project area. We also thought it would already be clear to readers that any land not within the building sites would be open space.
In contrast, the version of the map accompanying the June 8 article in the Standard-Examiner (and an almost identical version printed on May 7) could easily mislead readers. Besides incorrectly outlining the "project area" as described above, this map fails to identify which of the "existing" trails would be removed to make way for the development. In this respect the Standard-Examiner's map is more confusing than the city's version, which identified such trails as "displaced." There is also a spurious trail on the Standard-Examiner's map that does not exist on the ground or appear in the city's data. Ordinarily we would not quibble with these details because maps are inherently complicated documents in which it is extremely difficult to get every detail right. Our point is simply that our version of the map is more accurate than the one printed in the Standard-Examiner.
(The accompanying image shows the two versions of the map in question--one prepared by the city and one prepared by Smart Growth Ogden from the city's data--side by side. The "displaced" trails mentioned above are shown on a separate map prepared by the city, and are overlaid on the golf course map in the Standard-Examiner's version as well as in a separate version prepared by Smart Growth Ogden, available from our web site.)
