OGDEN — As interested parties perused several renderings of proposed projects at Wednesday’s Make Ogden open house at Ogden Union Station, officials say there’s a great amount of progress and enthusiasm on the slate of proposals.

The open house allowed visitors to leave feedback and ask about the current progress on projects such as the WonderBlock, the Ogden General Plan, paid downtown parking, the Union Station Neighborhood and 25th Street.

Rising up

Ogden City Planning Manager Barton Brierley told the Standard-Examiner one of those projects — WonderBlock — is well underway in the construction stage.

“It’s coming out of the ground,” he said. “The parking structure is what you see most dominant there. The second parking structure and commercial and residential buildings are following along. We expect the parking structure to be done by late next year.”

Work on the entire project is expected to conclude in 2027.

The planning stages

Other projects are still in the beginning or advanced planning stages.

This includes the effort to adopt a new general plan for Ogden, for which there was the first public vision meeting in June.

“That we are so very excited about because we got so many great public comments,” Brierley said. “We are still in the visioning part — that’s the first phase — and we’ve been out asking the community, ‘What’s your vision? What do you think the future should be?’ It’s planned out to 2050.”

He said that Plan Ogden is wrapping up the visioning process as part of formulating the long-term plan.

“We’re going to create scenarios based on the input we’ve got and find out what the main themes are, and then we’re going to present that at a workshop in two months and have the public say which part of scenarios they like,” he said.

Brierley said the next public session on the general plan will be Wednesday, Oct. 23.

The Union Station Neighborhood plan, which has involved several meetings over the past year, is entering the advanced stages of planning.

“They did their three concepts and have a more refined concept based on public input,” he said. “Now they’re refining the plans on that concept.”

Public input is still being sought on Union Station’s future.

Input from the public is still being taken for plans to revitalize Historic 25th Street and make it more pedestrian and event friendly, according to David Sawyer, deputy division manager for business development with Ogden City.

“We’ve just done some informal public engagement and came up with a summary of what people seem to be asking for,” he said. “We’ve put it down on paper here, but we haven’t gotten as far as any design studies or anything like that.”

He said this is one of the more incomplete proposals as it’s still very early in development.

“It’s mostly just public input,” he said. “This is possibly what it could look like, but we haven’t formalized that. There’s no funding for a project yet or anything like that. It’s just very preliminary just to kind of get peoples’ temperature for what they’d like to see on 25th Street.”

On the other end of the spectrum, a project that’s about to leave the planning stages for implementation is downtown paid parking, which Sawyer said will roll out late this year.

“We’re hoping by the end of this year to start converting to our paid parking management system on the busiest areas — 25th Street and Kiesel Avenue first,” he said. “It’ll be free initially if you use the kiosk or the mobile app, and it will be that way for a few months until it seems like everybody’s getting used to that. Then it will convert to paid parking, probably in the spring of next year.”

He said other streets downtown will be part of a second and third phase and will be implemented based on how the initial rollout goes.

Response

With several events throughout the year to gauge the public’s temperature and gather feedback throughout 2024, Sawyer said the city has received a lot of positive feedback on the various projects.

“They’ve also liked the opportunity to have some input into what (Ogden) might look like in the future,” he said. “Evidence of that is just how popular some of the public engagement sessions the planning group has conducted (have been) and how well-attended they’ve been. It’s been really cool to see that.”