The Eagle has belly flopped, again
Eagle Mountain, Utah's on-going experiment in bad government and conscience-free development, is in the news again—as usual for all the wrong reasons.The Provo Daily Herald reports that an Eagle Mountain development — complete with the usual lyin'-developer bucolic name—Silver Lake Village, has become a dangerous ghost town with most of the homes abandoned in mid-construction or foreclosed on and left to rot.
In what sounds like a travel guide to the slums of Manila, the Daily Herald reports:
Front doors that were never installed with knobs swing open day and night. Strangers doing drugs and having sex in abandoned houses have to be chased out, and raccoons have infested many. There is a sinkhole in one of the streets. Holes dug for basements are collapsing, posing a danger to the children who play there. The foundations of some of the homes are cracking and sinking. A pile of abandoned furniture sits in front of one home. There may be squatters living in another. Several of the abandoned homes have been vandalized, the perpetrators removing granite countertops, appliances, even pulling up the wood floors. Someone used a car to smash in the garage door of one home.Eagle Mountain's ten-year saga as a town has been a tale of revolving-door mayors, one involved in real estate fraud, another caught lying on his resume (he gets extra points for searching city council members' laptops for porn), another charged with taking gifts and yet another faked his own kidnapping.
Silver Lake resident Fabiola Muller offers what could be carved in granite as Eagle Mountain's city motto:
There is anger in my heart. I feel like I was lied to. I was deceived by people.
4 Comments:
You can blame all of this on the Bush tax cuts, the Iraq War and the Eagle Forum.
Also, blame the Mormons. It's in vogue...
I blame idiots who thought they could get away from the problems of society by building up their own little City On A Hill in some backwater corner of Utah County.
I also blame a near-religious devotion to free market capitalism, which lead to a few developers, lenders, and building cashing in on the housing boom and then walking away when the economy began to tank.
Utah County doesn't believe in government, or planning, and Eagle Mountain should be preserved in its current state for all time as an example of what happens when corruption, cronyism and a quick buck are seen as less evil than responsible government oversight.
Hey, the description of Silver Lake sounds EXACTLY like my ranch in southern Utah!! except for the pack rats sleeping in my bed.
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