OGDEN — Mara Brown serves as the Ogden City Chief Administrative Officer — a title she compares to one of the most important positions in live music.

“I always think of it as being like an orchestral conductor,” she told the Standard-Examiner. “You’re really that high-level view of everything that’s going on administratively in the city and have all of your departments. I’m really the main employee of the mayor to carry out the mayor’s vision and really coordinate — or orchestrate — all of the activities of the departments and the executive team and make sure that they’re achieving the mayor’s vision.”

She described her workdays as “sun up to sun down” and “full of meetings.”

“We have a weekly meeting with the executive team, which is all of the executive directors for the departments, the mayor, all of the Ninth Floor staff,” she said. We meet weekly … and we try to focus on information that is important to share amongst the departments, really focusing on that inter-departmental communication and collaboration.”

Brown said the team discusses anything from major projects to what’s coming up on the City Council’s agenda and brainstorming on policy and strategy.

She noted that she’s hardly new to Ogden, having worked for the city for nearly 19 years in various roles.

“I started in the city attorney’s office, was deputy city attorney for about 14 years and then I moved into management and had the opportunity to do that when our former senator, Gregg Buxton, was retiring and he managed the department that I most closely advised as a city attorney, which was our Internal Services/Management Services,” she said. “For about two-and-a-half or three years, I was the executive director over that department. That led to, when Mark Johnson retired, I applied for the job as Chief Administrative Officer after that.”

Ogden Mayor Ben Nadolski said Brown fills a critical role in this form of city government.

“In this form of government, the mayor of the city is the CEO of the city,” he said. “I’m elected by the people to lead the city. When you look at the budget, assets and resources — all of the water lines under your feet, the infrastructure we manage and own — we’re a multibillion dollar corporation. The mayor is the CEO of the city and I have a CAO in Mara that helps me administer the city.”

He said their roles differ but serve the same goal — enacting the will of the Ogden voters.

“It’s my responsibility to run and direct and to prioritize resourcing consistent with what the people are wanting, asking for and needing,” he said. “(Mara) is kind of my hand-off for how we, at an executive leadership level, help manage the entire organization in alignment with what the people of our city need.”