Ogden Sierra Club Press Release

For Immediate Release -- 3 June 2011

Contact: Dan Schroeder, Sierra Club volunteer, 801-393-4603

SIERRA CLUB AND OGDEN SETTLE GONDOLA RECORDS LAWSUIT

The Sierra Club and Ogden City have settled a legal dispute over access to government records dating from 2007.

The disputed records pertain to the gondola and resort development that was proposed in 2005 by Mayor Matthew Godfrey and Chris Peterson, owner of the Malan’s Basin property in the mountains above Ogden.

The Sierra Club requested access to a variety of records in mid-2007, and the city released many of the requested records at that time. However, the city also withheld a few dozen records--mostly emails--citing several statutory exemptions under Utah’s Government Records Access Management Act (GRAMA). After the city’s Records Review Board upheld the decision to withhold these records, the Sierra Club filed suit in Utah’s Second District Court.

Under the terms of the recent settlement, Ogden has now released 43 of the 46 withheld records, even while continuing to maintain that these records were legally withheld. The Sierra Club disagrees with Ogden’s opinion on these 43 records, but has agreed that the remaining three records were legally withheld under GRAMA. To complete the settlement, Ogden has reimbursed the Sierra Club for $10,000 in attorneys’ fees.

The Sierra Club considers this settlement a full victory, aside from the investment of volunteer time and the long delay before the vast majority of the records were publicly released. The Sierra Club’s attorneys, Joel Ban and Patrick Shea, were allowed to examine the three remaining records under a confidentiality agreement, and determined that those three records were legitimate attorney-client communications that could be withheld under GRAMA.

As the lawsuit progressed over the last three years, the Sierra Club and Ogden became engaged in several procedural disputes. Chief among these was whether Ogden was required to provide a detailed list of the records being withheld.

Initially, the city refused to list the withheld records or even to disclose the number of records being withheld. When this question came before the court, however, Second District Judge W. Brent West ruled that the city had to provide an index of the withheld records that was sufficiently detailed to allow the opposing party to assess the applicability of each GRAMA exemption that was being claimed. The Sierra Club hopes that this ruling will help set a state-wide precedent, encouraging other government agencies to adequately describe the records they are withholding.

Although the gondola and resort proposal has been dormant for the last three years, the content of the released records is still interesting for two reasons.

First, the records document the depth of involvement of Ogden City officials and others in promoting the gondola-resort proposal. For example:

* The city administration assembled a detailed $600,000 budget for gondola-related studies and attempted to fund nearly half of this amount through an exchange of federal grant funds with the Utah Transit Authority, bypassing the Ogden City Council.

* Peterson and Godfrey managed the public relations campaign through a “steering team” consisting of Michael Joseph, Edgar Allen, Dave Hardman, Dan Musgrave, Larry Hansen, Bob Geiger, Kent Petersen, and Jennifer Jones.

* The Ogden-Weber Chamber of Commerce paid at least $15,000 to Pinnacle Marketing for the public relations effort, and was reimbursed for at least $10,000 by Peterson.

Second, the newly released records document the city’s overly broad interpretations of several GRAMA exemptions. For example:

* A contract and invoice for an already-completed consultants’ study were withheld under the GRAMA exemption for “drafts”.

* A price quote from an engineering firm was withheld under the GRAMA exemption for records whose disclosure would impair government procurement, even though no competitive bids were ever sought.

* An email suggesting that Peterson close off the hiking trails on his property was withheld under the GRAMA exemption for records of negotiations over business incentives.

* An email consisting solely of the sentence “Thanks for following up on this” was withheld under the GRAMA exemption for attorney-client communications.

These classifications highlight the city administration’s troubling preoccupation with secrecy, even in instances when the withheld records contained no information worth protecting. Equally troubling is the fact that the city’s Records Review Board, a supposedly independent body, upheld every one of these classifications during its administrative appeal hearings.

Copies of all of the released records are posted on the Sierra Club’s web site, http://utah.sierraclub.org/ogden/.