The Boundary That Left Them Out

When Ogden Valley City incorporated, its founders drew a boundary that left out two of the valley's largest commercial properties: Snowbasin Resort and Powder Mountain. Snowbasin sits entirely within Weber County, and Powder Mountain's Weber County side could have been drawn in — part of Powder Mountain, including its main lodge area, lies in Cache County, but the Weber side's exclusion was not a county-line issue. It was a choice, made by the incorporation's own sponsors, about where to put the line. The state's own hired financial consultants flagged the risk of that choice in writing before a single vote was cast. Less than three years after incorporation, the city passed a 512.6% emergency property tax increase.

1. A boundary drawn by the people who benefit from it

Three of the six named Ogden Valley City incorporation sponsors — Brandi Hammon, Shanna Francis, and Jeanie Wendell — sat on the committee that drew the city's boundary. That boundary excluded both Snowbasin and Powder Mountain from the new city's tax rolls. Nordic Valley, whose land sits inside the boundary, was included.

No public record supports any version of events where the resorts asked to be left out. The boundary was the committee's own decision — and it dates back to the original incorporation petition itself, not a later adjustment.

2. The people who drew the line also ran the coverage

Shanna Francis wasn't just a boundary-committee member. At the time of incorporation, she was also the founder and co-owner of Ogden Valley News, the local paper covering the incorporation drive she was helping lead — a fact news outlets covering her later mayoral run flagged directly. KSL's own election coverage noted that "critics of Francis point to her leadership of the Ogden Valley News... and maintain that she's used it to promote her candidacy." Francis ran for the new city's first mayor in the Nov. 2025 general election after leading the August primary, then lost the general to Janet Wampler by a wide margin, 73.45% to 26.23%.

Utah's own corporate filings show what happened to the paper afterward. Ogden Valley News operates as a DBA of S R Communications, Corp. As of the company's most current officer filing, Francis does not appear anywhere on the list. The paper is now run by fellow incorporation sponsor and boundary-committee member Jeanie Wendell — President, Director, and Treasurer — alongside Christopher Wendell as Director and Secretary.

3. Brandi Hammon: a closer look

Of the three boundary-committee members, Hammon's footprint touches the most parts of this story — a boundary-committee sponsor, an adjacent property owner, a resort executive, and, through her own company's reporting, a documented observer of Snowbasin's internal development plans.

Timeline

4. A $300 million authorization, created for a project that died five months later

Snowbasin's exclusion from the city isn't the only unresolved question hanging over its finances. In November 2022, Weber County created three Public Infrastructure Districts covering Snowbasin's land — authority to bond for up to $300 million over 40 years, according to Christopher Crockett, a deputy Weber County attorney, at the time. The stated purpose was to fund infrastructure for Snowbasin's planned base village.

That village had a named anchor tenant: Club Med. The all-inclusive hotel brand had partnered with Snowbasin in 2021 to build its first U.S. Exclusive Collection resort — 300 rooms, ski-in/ski-out, the centerpiece of a multi-phase plan that also called for residential and employee housing, more hotels, and an entirely new beginner-terrain base area. In August 2022, Weber County's Planning Commission approved a development-agreement amendment specifically to let Snowbasin subdivide and build infrastructure for the project simultaneously. Grand America's own VP of Development told the Commission that night he was "working very closely with Club Med" on subdividing the land to sell to them. The resort's Old Day Lodge and nine surrounding acres were demolished to make way for it.

The PID authorizing up to $300 million in bonds was created that November — one county meeting after the subdivision amendment, and while demolition was already underway.

The district didn't stay entirely dormant, though. In August 2025, Weber County appointed a new trustee to the Mount Ogden PID board: Davy Ratchford, Snowbasin's own General Manager and, since a December 2024 promotion, Chief Operating Officer of Grand America Hotels & Resorts, the company that owns Snowbasin. He also holds trustee seats on two other special districts tied to the resort's water and road access — all three appointments moved through the Commission as routine consent-agenda items, with no conflict-of-interest disclosure entered into any of the three appointment records.

Nothing about this is illegal. Boards routinely draw on industry expertise, and a $300 million authorization with no debt against it isn't the same as $300 million spent. But the underlying question is straightforward: what is this authorization actually for now, three years after the specific project it was created to fund collapsed — and why is the resort's own top executive the one sitting on the board that would decide?

5. What the exclusion actually cost, in the state's own numbers

LRB Public Finance Advisors — the Salt Lake City firm the Office of the Lieutenant Governor hired to determine whether Ogden Valley City could support itself — completed its feasibility study in December 2023. Its own methodology shows exactly how much revenue the boundary choice took off the table.

The study's overall commercial tax base was thin to begin with: just 36 commercial parcels, about 1% of the Study Area's market value. Total projected city property tax revenue for the first year was $474,347 — against a total taxable value of nearly $2.6 billion, almost all of it residential.

6. The bill comes due

The feasibility study's headline finding — a projected 5% budget surplus — was calculated on that thin, almost entirely residential tax base. It was enough to clear the legal bar for incorporation to proceed. It was not enough to absorb the ordinary cost growth of running a new city.

On Aug. 18, 2026, the Ogden Valley City Council voted 3-2 to conditionally adopt a budget with a 512.6% property tax increase, contingent on the city winning its own separate truth-in-taxation legal fight. Residents — not Snowbasin, not Powder Mountain — are the ones being asked to close the gap.