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Publication:Ogden Standard-Examiner; Date:September 26, 2006; Section:Metro; Page Number:C3
Riverdale council wants to end PRUD dramaBY KELLY BINGHAM Standard-Examiner correspondentRIVERDALE – The City Council had an agenda recently as busy as Riverdale Road, with the main events of the 2 1/2-hour meeting including a police chief brief, a gas station that prematurely pumped and the latest sequel in the Riverdale Planned Residential Unit Development saga. Dave Hansen, the city’s new police chief, was given unanimous approval to renew an anti-graffiti stamped up all over the city,” he said. “They use juveniles who are working off community service hours, sometimes even graffiti artists themselves, to clean it up. The program is very effective – you drive around Riverdale, you don’t see graffiti.” Hansen, a 21-year Riverdale police veteran, also reported on two external audits conducted of h is department. Auditors looked or evidence procedures that wouldn’t withstand judicial scrutiny. They also reviewed whether money held as evidence had been compromised by a five-fingered withdrawal. “Ninety-nine percent of what we’re doing is right,” Hansen said. “It’s that 1 percent that they make recommendations on.” Although all money was accounted for, the police department has enacted new evidence procedures that include issuing receipts to owners for evidence seized and bar-coding all evidence for tracking purposes in the department’s Versadex computer database. “If we’ve seized a gun, I can do a search in Versadex and it tells me where that gun is in the evidence room,” Hansen said. “If that gun isn’t there, then I have a problem.” In other business, Dan Vaughn, owner of the new Stimson’s Express, 4090 Riverdale Road, won approval on a 3-1 vote for a six-week conditional occupation permit. Vaughn had been operating the gas station without an occupancy permit and without meeting criteria he and the council earlier agreed upon. Councilwoman Shelly Jenkins expressed her dissatisfaction with Vaughn’s delays in bringing that store up to code. “I’m getting frustrated because this is turning into a constant ‘Mother may I’ game of coming and asking for more conditional occupancy requests,” she said. The council granted the temporary occupancy permit so the store wouldn’t be buried financially, but only with Vaughn’s assurance that the stipulations agreed to would be met within that time frame. During the council meetings, officials continued their discussion of the PRUD ordinance. At the Sept. 12 Planning Commission meeting, some commissioners expressed frustration at being asked to draft a new PRUD ordinance just months after the City Council voted to repeal the previous ordinance. The commission voted to defer back to the council for clarification. Councilman Stacey Hawes explained the commissioner’s confusion about the PRUD ordinance. “Really what happened was that the Planning Commission was led to believe that the city wanted to fully remove and not replace the PRUD ordinance,” he said. “The city wanted to have an ordinance. We just didn’t think the one we had was accomplishing what we wanted to accomplish. That wasn’t clearly communicated to the Planning Commission, and that’s why they were lost.” Miscommunication between the two bodies was further exacerbated by too much information being relayed through staff members. The council agreed to a face-to-face meeting with the commissioners to try to put the PRUD issue behind them. Other considerations approved Tuesday included passing a new 14-day “fix-it ticket” ordinance to discourage unkempt, unseemly and unsanitary properties; a $50,000 allocation for preparing a stretch of Riverdale Road between the overpass and 300 West for an additional lane; and a land-swap deal between the city and Rocky Mountain Power. |