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Former Ogden Mayor Matthew Godfrey is carving out a fairly lucrative career as an economic-development-guru-for-hire, and is about to add another Utah local government to his growing client list.

The West Jordan City Council is scheduled to vote Wednesday on hiring Godfrey's Better City consulting firm to bring some business-recruiting firepower to its push to redevelop its city center.

Better City would receive $15,000 on signing the 24-month contract and the company has the potential to earn up to $145,000 more based on its ability to cut deals with targeted businesses.

If it delivers a signed development agreement for a hotel of at least 90 rooms, it will be paid $30,000. A conference center of 10,000 square feet would trigger a $25,000 payment, or more for a larger facility.

Additionally, if Better City delivers a public-private partnership deal with a company to develop corporate office space of at least 30,000 square feet, it would get $15,000 — $5,000 for each 10,000 square feet.

West Jordan leaders are planning an ambitious transit-oriented development at the city center site, including a conference center, hotel, corporate offices, big-box stores, restaurants and, eventually, residential housing.

They also hope Godfrey can help in other economic-development projects, including developing an auto mall elsewhere in the city. Better City's proposed contract guarantees payment of $40,000 for a signed development agreement for a new dealership or $20,000 for a used-auto dealer.

Pointing to the massive redevelopment of downtown Ogden, with more than $1 billion invested during his 12 years in office, Godfrey's firm has lined up a long list of Utah clients: Logan, North Ogden, Brigham City and Morgan County and city in the north; Eagle Mountain in Utah County; and Garfield, Beaver and San Juan counties in the south. He's also gotten contracts in Wyoming, Wisconsin and Ohio.

Among the selling points of the company is Godfrey's claim that he recruited more than 8,000 jobs to Ogden, and "when we left that community, they were leading the country in job growth."

That doesn't seem to fit with state statistics that show mostly negative or flat job growth during his tenure. Ogden's nonfarm employment of 61,096 in 2001 was the highest reported during the period, and that had declined to 56,650 by 2012, according to the Utah Department of Workforce Services.

"I don't know how they're crafting their data," Godfrey said in an interview Tuesday. "The way we derive [the 8,000 jobs] are by the companies we actually recruited into town and they would give us their employment that they intended to hire into the area and we just added them up."

The claimed job growth doesn't take into account jobs lost in Ogden during the same period from layoffs or closures.

Still, Godfrey is widely praised for his aggressive revitalization efforts, including rebranding Ogden as an outdoor recreation mecca.

The former mayor says the results speak for themselves.

"Rather than tooting my own horn and saying whether or not I think we were successful," he says, "people can go make their own assessment and I would encourage them to do it by assessing what Ogden was like beforehand and what it is like today."