OGDEN — Ben Nadolski is approaching the end of just his first year as Ogden’s mayor, but there have already been several policy milestones.

After last speaking with him in June, the Standard-Examiner sat down with Nadolski to discuss the path the city has taken in the months since, where progress has been made and where the city will be focusing its efforts in the coming months.

Parking management in downtown

This fall, Nadolski made the decision to put a hold on the rollout of paid parking in downtown Ogden.

Thursday, he said the decision came down to better engaging with those businesses downtown.

“We’ve had employees going door-to-door with downtown businesses, we held 27 public engagement events and we got a ton of really good feedback and I’m really proud of the work that our team did,” he said. “But one reality for everybody downtown is there’s a lot of people that are so busy in the grind, making ends meet, making businesses work that they just didn’t have time or the ability to meet us where we were. I pressed pause so that we could reset, retool and meet them where they’re at. I think they’ve got some input that we need to know but there was engagement that was missing and they made that clear. It doesn’t hurt me to have to do that, I want to do that. It’s created a space where we can settle a lot of frustration and emotion and fear.”

Nadolski said the pause has been helpful in building bridges and that the consensus is that something will need to be done about parking in downtown.

“There was a disconnect between some businesses and the city that I want to fix — certainly not all,” he said. “I’ve learned that everybody feels that we have a parking issue. Everybody believes that we’ve got a problem. We all believe that we need to manage parking. How it is managed is what has to be decided and discussed.”

He said the city is looking at a committee process to help build a parking management system for downtown; however, there isn’t currently a rough timeline for a solution.

“The timeline needs to be met when we do it right and get the right decisions made,” he said. “Lengthening the runway is not necessarily a bad thing, but we can’t lengthen it forever because there’s a lot of businesses out there that … we have heard from very clearly that are saying, ‘Please don’t stop your planning. Please continue and do something about parking. It’s holding us back.'”

Ogden’s north side

While so much attention has been focused on downtown projects such as WonderBlock and the Union Station neighborhood, Nadolski said it’s important to keep Ogden’s north side near Five Points in mind.

“Because of where we’ve been with the past general plan and its outdatedness, we’ve had some ordinances that have made it easy for low-hanging fruit projects to take over prime commercial real estate,” he said. “Five Points is one of those areas that we need to be looking really hard at because we’re kind of bleeding our income and our wealth, as a community, to the north. We ought to be drawing income and wealth from the north to the city on that side.”

He said a recent meeting with the Black Student Union at Ben Lomond High School drove home the need to pay closer attention to this part of town.

“They talked about the lack of hope and the overwhelming sense of despair among the student body,” he said. “If that doesn’t break our hearts and cause us to take action, we have no business being in these positions. There is a cry for help and a need on the north end of town that we’ve got to answer. It’s deeper than just businesses at Five Points.”

On the 2024 election

While the mayor didn’t face an election this year, he noted that he and other mayors must inevitably face the aftermath of Tuesday’s election of President Donald Trump.

“Mayors across the country are in a difficult situation, regardless of the outcome,” he said. “I knew that going into it. … I have my personal views and my personal vote, but I knew that at the end of the day, we were going to have less than half of our community that felt a lot of despair and a loss of hope and more than half of our community that felt a resurgence of hope and optimism. That’s where we find ourselves.”

He said that he still represents all of Ogden, no matter who they voted for.

“It’s literally my job to try and restore hope and I want to do that by being the hope,” he said. “I want to bring as many people alongside me as possible … that wants to be the hope for Ogden. That’s what we do.”

Continuing to change the culture

Since June, Nadolski said the continuing shift in culture has been one of the city’s greatest accomplishments.

“We’ve done a lot of work to reach out to the community as a whole and to be really actively engaged and to reconnect with a number of partners on a bunch of projects,” he said. “While we’ve done that, what the 90,000 people of our community might not see every day that the 700 employees of the city see and feel every day is the cultural work. We’ve been working a lot on strategic alignment within the organization and I’m working on developing — and soon will be communicating — a vision for our city that’s rooted in a lot of the input we’re getting through the general plan process as well as input I’m getting from the team.”

He said that the biggest cultural paradigm city staff are working on is selfless service to others.

“When we make decisions, our first filter is the people that we serve, not the organization we serve,” he said.

What’s next?

Nadolski said that a State of the City event in January will help plot the course for the coming year.