That will not stop Mayor Matthew Godfrey from pressing the group to approve a controversial high-adventure recreation center before the next council takes office beginning in 2006.

"There is no other option," Godfrey said Friday, three days after voters elected four candidates who oppose the center.

The vote means the mayor - for the first time since he took office six years ago - will have to deal with a council that is not inclined to support his initiatives.

The recreation center is dubbed "high adventure" because it would include an air tunnel, wave-riding pool and rock climbing. It is the hinge, the mayor says, on which the redevelopment of the Ogden City Mall depends.

Godfrey wants the City Council to vote Nov. 22 to approve a complicated $20 million financing plan to build and equip the center. Without it, the city will not attract the retail shops, offices and cinemas that he believes bring people back into the moribund downtown.

The urgency stems from this: The council must act before the end of the year because $8 million of that funding - property taxes from previous redevelopment projects - would revert to other government agencies or the city's general fund.

Until Tuesday's election, the mayor was virtually assured of council approval.

Now, two ousted council members - Donna Burdett and Kent Jorgenson - have signaled that in view of the public vote, they are reassessing their support. That's precisely what the two who were elected to replace them hope they'll do.

"They're going to tie our [Ogden's] hands for the next 25 years," said Dorrene Jeske, who will replace Burdett. Jeske objects to securing some of the bonds with revenue from a business park that is supposed to be used for improving the city's aged infrastructure.

Bill Glasmann, who replaces Jorgenson, says the lame-duck council members should read between the lines of the election.

"Let's not move too hastily, he said. "We're far into the process, but we're not too far."

Neither Jorgenson nor Burdett returned phone calls for comment on Friday.

Jesse Garcia, a re-elected incumbent, also urges caution. The council, he says, should make sure the administration satisfies myriad questions before approving the controversial funding.

Godfrey maintains he is not worried.

"These are reasonable people who have spent years on this. I don't see how they could all of a sudden come to the conclusion it's best to kill the mall project."

Likewise, Council President Rick Safsten says the council should not defer to the next council a decision on remaking the mall.

"All of us were elected just as the newly elected were," said Safsten. "We don't stop governing just because of an election."

Besides, he says, it's not clear that the voters made a wholesale change because they don't like the high-adventure recreation center.

Safsten says it might be that pockets of voters felt strongly about different issues: a proposed gondola, the mayor's resistance to selling mall land to the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, the mayor's management style.

Godfrey, for his part, scoffs at the notion that Tuesday's election was a referendum on him.

"That's all media drama," he said. "People vote for the person they think is going to do the best job."

Besides, he notes, the winners put on better campaigns than did the losers.

kmoulton@sltrib.com