On Thursday, the public got its first chance to start giving feedback on what they’d like to see done with the station and properties to the north and south.

On Saturday, it was the turn of Ogden mayoral candidates to lay out their vision of the future of Union Station and associated properties. This opportunity came in the shape of a forum sponsored by Save/Visit Union Station at the Two-Bit Street Cafe.

While all mayoral candidates were invited, Angel Castillo, Taylor Knuth, Jon Greiner and Ben Nadolski ultimately were on hand and given five minutes to talk about their visions for Union Station as well as a short question-and-answer session.

Mayoral candidates Oscar Mata, Bart Blair and Chris Barragan did not attend.

Saturday’s forum came on the heels of another event — held Thursday at Union Station — that gave the public the chance to interact with developers and give feedback and input on what they would like to see done with Union Station and the adjacent properties.

‘It deserves to be protected’

Castillo said Union Station truly belongs and that any vision for its future should be much bigger.

“It should be a satellite campus with Weber State University bringing special collections here,” she said. “It should have its own special museum and it deserves to be protected. It deserves to make sure that the community is a part of that restoration and actively involved.”

She said she’s also concerned for the businesses along 25th Street.

“As mayor, I would enact a special zone for this area that would put together a coalition of businesses who have been here for three years or more and allow them to set what businesses can be here because we have to protect local,” she said.

When asked about how preservation and changes would be funded, Castillo said getting the state of Utah involved would be key.

“There’s going to be a multilayered strategy,” she said. “Part of it will be bonding, but I think what’s more important as mayor, you are supposed to leave things better than how you found them. That means I want to make the museum a state-run museum just like I want to make the airport and airport authority. These are objects that don’t belong to us that need to be protected by administration and they should be engaged with something that is going to be going in perpetuity. If it is a state-run museum like the Utah Museum of Natural History, it’s never going to go off the rails.”

‘A world-class transportation hub’

Knuth said he believes that Union Station ought to return to a role that it was well-suited for in the past — being a rail station.

“I am committed to restoring the Union Station into a world-class transportation hub for Ogden City,” he said. “This is a return to what the station was and it is a commentary on how quickly our city is growing and how much we need community spaces like the Union Station. I want to work with UTA (Utah Transit Authority) first and foremost to bring that FrontRunner station right down to the Union Station. How cool would it be to have people come through the station — once again, getting off the rails — and coming into the gateway of our city, which is 25th Street.”

On the subject of 25th Street, he said he would like to work with small business owners along the street to create a special assessment area. Knuth also suggested running some of the rails west of Union Station underground and opening the area up as a park.

Knuth also said he’s dedicated to preserving the on-site museums and seeing to it that they expand as well.

“You have my commitment, those museums will be saved,” he said. “I have a master’s degree in arts administration — I know how to get the job done because I’ve worked in the industry. I don’t think any single candidate is going to close the museums. I think the museums tell a part of our history. They need to be expanded to tell all of our history. Where is the story of the Black entrepreneurs that set up 25th Street, or the Chinese-American railroad workers who impacted the West or the Shoshone Indians? We need to expand the museums to include all of our history.”

‘There’s no set of plans’

Greiner said that an important part of preserving Union Station long into the future is already being accomplished.

“Because I worked for the city, I know that a big part of the problem with Union Station was we don’t own the ground underneath it,” he said. “For us to invest in more than just maintenance of a building and look into the future, we had to work out some kind of an arrangement with Union Pacific. Union Pacific is very hard to deal with, but to the credit — and I’m going to give credit where credit is due — we have City Council members that have helped put together and craft a budget modification to the 2024 budget which is going to allow the purchase of that 8.5 acres for about $5.5 million.”

He said that this would be a boon for the station’s preservation.

“Now we’re going to own the ground,” he said. “We’re going to go to the developers and say, ‘We own this ground. We’re going to help you. We’re going to do what we can to make this place work for the best interests of everybody involved.'”

Greiner also cited Thursday’s meeting with developers as the start of building a vision.

“What that’s going to look like, I think, is anybody’s guess at this point,” he said. “If you went (Thursday) night, you’d see they’re looking for your input. There’s no set of plans, there’s no drawings, there’s no nothing — we were just barely acquiring the ground, and that was the most important piece because the lease was going to run out in three or four years.”

‘My vision is what your vision is’

Nadolski also cited the Thursday public input meeting when speaking about what he envisioned for the campus.

“When I think about what my vision is for Union Station, I agree a lot with what Jon said,” Nadolski said. “My vision is what your vision is. My vision is us coming together, putting it on paper, taking our time and getting it right. The best thing that I saw at that open house was the timeline they’re proposing. When I talked to those consultants, they said, ‘We want to start over. Rather than taking what the administration’s telling us … we want to start over from scratch. We wanted to hear it for ourselves because we wanted to make sure we get it right.'”

He said he would not favor any project that compromises the station.

“If there is anything in that plan that doesn’t absolutely highlight that building, it’s a no-go for me,” he said.

Nadolski added that the station is an important part of everyone’s lives in Ogden and that his vision is to ensure that this is acknowledged.

“That’s my vision for Unions Station — we own the artifacts, we own the ground, we do the work on its historic restoration, we do it in a way that brings people back inside that building, activates the space and the way it was,” he said. “The way that put us on the map.”