Narrowly elected to a 3rd term, mayor hopes to continue the city's renaissance

Godfrey escorts his guests from his office into a parking lot, looking for his car. "This is it," he says, but it can't be. The car he is opening has faded paint — gold fading to gray and silver — and the hood is blotched by years of sun and weather. Where is the official city car, the Benz, the SUV, something else?

"Climb in," he says, moving a child's seat to clear the back seat. "If you find any Cheerios back there, you can have them."

The mayor's car is a 1992 Nissan Maxima with 167,000 miles. His wife Monica has the family's newer car — a 1996 Dodge Caravan with 140,000 miles on it.

"I'm too cheap," he says, slipping into the front seat of the Maxima. "I have a hard time spending money."

He could probably convince the city to spring for a car for his use, but he won't do it.

"This one works fine," he says.

That's Godfrey. This man is so frugal that Stuart Reid, his former community and economic developer, complains, "He wore this one jacket all the time that looked like it came out of the '70s. I was tempted to throw it away."

The irony of this is difficult to miss, because one of the things Godfrey has been criticized for is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to revitalize Ogden's dying downtown area.

Which is exactly what he set out to do in his only-in-America first run for office eight years ago. He was the unlikeliest of candidates — 29 years old, no political experience, a late campaign start, an unbeaten opponent — and won anyway with an old-fashioned, door-to-door campaign. At the time he was the youngest mayor in the country. With a very narrow re-election victory this month (490 votes over Councilwoman Susan van Hooser), he will soon start his third term.

Godfrey steers the old Maxima onto the road and drives a couple of blocks through Ogden before pulling to the side of the road next to an empty lot. "See this area," he says, pointing.

"There were vagrants there. There were needles in the sand and grass. No one would come there. We spent $2 million on an amphitheater. We were told over and over no one will come; they were too scared. It's been a tremendous success. We offered free movies on Monday nights. By the third week it was packed."

He continues driving but soon stops again.

"This block was a mess," he says. "There was a dump and a salvage yard and barbed wire fence."

Then the mayor convinced the IRS to move into a historical building; now the IRS, in an ironic twist, is paying taxes to Ogden to work there.

And so it goes. The Ogden City Mall was leveled and replaced with a new, updated mall called The Junction, with retail stores on the bottom floor that are adjacent to Wave Rider — an indoor surfing pool — and "I Fly," a wind tunnel that holds patrons aloft, as if they were skydiving.

The plans call for a hotel to be built upstairs, where a gondola could take skiers from the heart of the downtown area directly to a ski resort they hope will be built on the city-side of Ogden Peak.

The Ogden River and the adjacent land were cleaned up, some 60 acres so far, with dumps and other rundown areas being replaced by kayak parks, cafes, stores, trails, parks, housing, fly-fishing parks, and more is on the way, including a one-of-a-kind man-made ice-climbing tower of real ice. Godfrey plans to complete another 120 acres of redevelopment before he is finished.

This is all in keeping with the mayor's vision of turning Ogden into the outdoor adventure capital of the West, and so far it seems to be working. Eleven ski-related companies have moved to Ogden — among them, Salomon, Atomic, Descente, Goode, Scott, Rossignol, Nidecker (all but two of them have established headquarters here).

Godfrey is trying to capitalize on Ogden's natural assets — two rivers and hundreds of miles of trails and world-class ski resorts and popular rock-climbing sites. Ogden's rise in the outdoor recreation market has been written up by the New York Times and by several national outdoor and ski magazines. Godfrey was invited to speak to a group of resort owners last month in Switzerland to discuss the rise of Ogden as a resort community (he declined because of the election campaign).

According to Godfrey, the overhaul that Ogden has undergone will cost taxpayers nothing in the end. Revenue streams from property and sales taxes far outstrip the debt payments, he says, and after 10 years the debt will be paid and all that money will go to city coffers.

Meanwhile, he likes to note that he has reduced property taxes three times.

"We're tight; I'm a miser," says Godfrey. "These are great investments."

Ogden wasn't always an urban train wreck. In its glory days, it was a booming railroad town and, by anyone's standards, but especially Utah's, it was wild. There were two towns, really — the one above ground and the one under it. You could go to an ice cream parlor on the street level and then go to the basement and visit opium dens and prostitutes, bars and speakeasies, all connected by tunnels underneath the sidewalk.

Al Capone is reputed to have said the town was too wild for him.

"It was the Bourbon Street of its day," says Godfrey.

It was all fueled by the millions of railroad passengers who came through the 25th Street railroad station. The economy thrived. Stores, banks and businesses prospered.

But in the late 1950s the diesel locomotive arrived on the scene, and that was the beginning of the end of Ogden's heyday. Because the locomotive engine allowed trains to travel longer distances, they no longer needed to stop in Ogden to reload coal and water for their steam engines.

A decade later, the interstate highway system opened and railroads lost much of their business to trucking. Thus began an exodus of businesses, manufacturers and banks.

"There were decades of decay all the way through the '90s," says Godfrey.

After the tour of the city and his pet projects, Godfrey drives to his home, a brick rambler on a tree-lined street in an old, middle-class neighborhood a few minutes from his office. It's the middle of the afternoon, and his wife, Monica, is in the kitchen making jam, with the help of a couple of their five children, whose ages range from 4 to 12.

Several years ago, her husband walked into the house at the end of another day of work and announced that he wanted to run for mayor.

"I was shocked," she says. "It was nothing we had talked about, ever. After I picked myself up off the floor, we talked about it and he explained why. I knew he'd be great. I've seen his passion for things, and he has a lot of business sense. I knew he'd maximize every dollar because he's frugal."

Monica met and married Godfrey when she was a freshman at Weber State and he was a junior just returned from a church mission in Venezuela.

Godfrey, a 5-foot-6, 118-pound distance runner, graduated from Weber High School and accepted a track scholarship at Weber State, where he became an All-American in the 3,000-meter steeplechase and the Big Sky Conference indoor mile champion.

He proved to be nothing if not enterprising and industrious. At one time, he was running track, completing classwork simultaneously for bachelor's and master's degrees, delivering pizzas in the evenings, serving as an adjunct professor in the business department and operating a budding real estate business in which he borrowed money and bought apartments and small houses to rent.

"We were leveraged heavily for a while," recalls Monica. "We adhered to a budget. We didn't go out to eat or go to movies much."

Their house is paid off and they are debt free.

Godfrey graduated from Weber State with degrees in finance (a bachelor's) and accounting (a master's) in just five years and took a position with Iomega in Ogden, turning down three out-of-state job offers in order to remain in his hometown. A short time later, he was asked to serve as a bishop in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, at the age of 25.

"He's always been able to manage a lot of things," says Monica.

Eventually, the Iomega job (he was a project manager) evolved into what was essentially an out-of-state position, requiring him to commute to San Diego several days a week.

After several months, he tired of this routine and quit.

He devoted himself instead to his real estate business, managing his apartments and homes, and eventually took a low-level job in the city's community development office. Genuinely bothered by the decay of his hometown, which he observed daily on his drive to work, and weary of seeing so many friends leave the area for better opportunities, he began to attend City Council meetings to see what was being done to improve Ogden.

"That opened his eyes," says Monica. "He saw how things were run. As a finance major and businessman, he thought it should be run like a business, not a bureaucracy."

He began to make suggestions at work on ways to improve the city and, according to Godfrey, after his ideas made their way back to Rocky Fluhart, the city manager, a meeting was arranged between the two.

As Godfrey recalls, "I gave him my thoughts on what needed to happen. He took notes. Then I told him I had never heard anyone talk about crime and that we could do a lot about it and put resources there. He stopped (taking notes) after a couple of minutes and folded his arms. He told me, 'You can't do anything about crime; it happens.'

"I was shocked. I politely ended the meeting. It was obvious nothing was going to come of it. But that got my wheels turning. I started to pay attention to what was going on."

By then, it was the middle of the campaign season, and Godfrey was convinced none of the candidates was going to make a difference. He began to mull the idea of his own candidacy.

The Godfreys were not complete strangers to politics. Monica's father, Ed Allen, was a state senator, and her grandfather, Merle Allen, was a former Ogden mayor. Godfrey's father was mayor of Harrisville.

As Godfrey explored the possibility of running for office, word made its way through City Hall back to Mayor Glenn Mecham, who then ordered his attorney to meet with Godfrey.

"The attorney told me I'd be fired if I continued to explore running for mayor," says Godfrey. "I told him that it doesn't seem right that I could lose my job over this. The attorney knew I was right, but said he was asked to meet with me. I told him, 'Don't worry; I'm going to quit."'

Looking back, Reid marvels at Godfrey's temerity. "He was working in the bowels of Ogden City, the lowest level you could be, three or four levels below me, in neighborhood development," he says. "He had been there less than a year. He took his ideas to the boss and they basically told him he was a worker bee, not a thinker, and go back to work and don't worry about it. So he quit."

In early June 1999, Godfrey decided to run for mayor — "We felt good about it; we just thought he was going to lose," says Monica — and he began to campaign in earnest. The campaign committee consisted of Godfrey, Monica and a few friends.

It was a late start, especially for a political novice whose only political office was eighth-grade class president. He simply knocked on doors and told people what he was going to do to revive Ogden. "He probably knocked on every door in Ogden," says Monica.

His opponent was Robert Hunter, a three-time Weber County commissioner and Ogden city manager who had never lost an election.

"Nicest guy in the world, and a formidable opponent," says Godfrey.

Hunter papered the town with campaign signs and billboards and had endorsements from all the politically connected.

On election night, the Hunter crowd gathered in the Ben Lomond Hotel to accommodate everyone. Godfrey, with his family and a few friends, convened in the basement of his home to watch the election results on TV.

"We did not think we were going to win," recalls Godfrey.

Godfrey won every precinct.

"Everyone was absolutely shocked that this kid got elected," says Reid. "His message was change. That's how he won."

The now 37-year-old Godfrey has stepped on a few toes to encourage Ogden's renaissance, as Godfrey calls it.

He cut the mayor's office staff from five to three and the city's executive staff from nine to six. He started a good-landlord program in which business license fees were reduced for landlords who don't rent to felons and keep their property crime-free and clean.

Failure to comply meant fees would be quadrupled.

He also supported a police fitness test, which didn't sit well with some police.

He kept a checklist of his campaign promises in his desk, and periodically he would study the list to see if he was living up to his promises. But his promises involved significant changes to the status quo, and that meant they all came with controversy — construction of a Wal-Mart downtown, the downtown river and mall projects, the privatization of Union Station (an old railroad depot that now houses several museums), zoning changes, the issue of some 1,200 citations a year for enforcement of zoning laws (read: trash in yards).

His changes and proposals came with considerable criticism, and early on the local newspaper lampooned him with cartoons and editorials, some of them poking fun of his small stature.

"The way to get re-elected is to do nothing," says Godfrey. "All the easy decisions had been made. We were only left with hard ones. All have been controversial."

He has been criticized for his management style, which is characterized as hard-charging, blunt, aggressive and autocratic. He is not, by nature, a politician. He is a businessman in a politician's chair. As a result, sometimes his style — rather than his programs — has been the target of criticism.

"Anytime you implement change, there will be people who buck it," he says. "A lot of the hatred has been geared toward me. Those groups have discovered each other. But I didn't come into this too naive. I knew change would be hard.

"There's a price for progress, and I'm OK with it. I didn't take this job to be popular. I took it to get things done."

Godfrey believes all of the above account for the narrowness of his recent election victory, which was close on election night and wasn't verified until absentee and provisional votes were canvassed and the results announced on Tuesday.

But crime is down to levels from the early 1970s — or 23 percent in the past seven years — since he increased funding for police and started other anti-crime programs (as if to put an exclamation on a Neighborhood Watch program, the 135-pound mayor tackled a burglar in his yard one night last month). And no one can argue that he has not worked to renew downtown Ogden.

Says Reid, "When (Godfrey) was elected, he was really inexperienced in government, but his value was he didn't know what he didn't know, so everything was possible to him. They were boarding up the mall, and he said, let's buy it and rebuild it. (Godfrey) didn't worry about political ramifications, and he didn't have any preconceived notions or cynicism about what could or couldn't be done. In the beginning, the local paper went after him, and a good portion of the community and half the City Council resisted the change. Most are thrilled now with results. Now he's as expert as anyone in the country in how to build a city."

Godfrey has grown into the job over the years, learning to work with people to solve problems and relax around crowds. During his first months in office, Godfrey's shyness and stiffness around people was interpreted as aloofness, especially in a political crowd where schmoozing is the norm.

"He was a track guy," says Reid. "He had done things alone. And he was only 29 years old. Six months before that he would have been working for me four levels down."

"I did not enjoy going around working the crowd," Godfrey confesses. "I had a hard time with that. Stuart used to tell me, 'You gotta go out and talk to people. They want to see you.' But it felt presumptuous to me — why would they want to talk to me? I really struggled with that.

"I do it now, and sometimes I even enjoy it."

He takes a measure of satisfaction now as he pulls his car out onto the road again and drives past areas of Ogden that have been rejuvenated under his watch.

"We're over the hump," he says. "It's not just a hope anymore. By no means are we done. But you should have seen this place 10 years ago."

Does he have any other political ambitions after this? Probably not.

"I have no idea what I will do next, probably get back into the private sector," he says.

"He has not expressed any desire to do anything political beyond this point," says Monica Godfrey. "This is not a stepping stone. He just wanted to help Ogden."

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