OGDEN — Ogden City Chief Administrative Officer Mara Brown and Ogden Mayor Ben Nadolski are discussing the role the city has taken in stemming homelessness while decrying the topic’s politicization.

“When we think about homelessness, it’s not an us-versus-them situation; it’s a ‘we,'” Brown said. “The homeless in our community are part of the Ogden community. They are constituents. They are citizens, constituents of the mayor and our customers as well in providing service. That’s important to note.”

However, Nadolski said the issue of homelessness has often been used as a means to make political talking points.

“I get really frustrated when people politicize issues to the point that people fall through the cracks,” he said. “Politics has a tendency — and this is clearly a political issue — to drive people and their opinions and their rhetoric to extremes.”

He said it’s especially frustrating to see the city accused of essentially sitting on its hands on the issue, saying there are very dedicated people within the city working on the situation.

“Anna Davidson is the one who leads our homeless service advocates team — it’s a team of people that work on this,” he said. “She was the original architect of this program and has won awards and been recognized by the state for her work in this space. … That’s the story — it’s not the political rhetoric, it’s the Anna Davidsons that are out there meeting people where they’re at and helping people find secure, safe and stable housing. It’s happening every day, and when people criticize me or us with political talking points, it pisses me off to no end because it’s taking away from the work that Anna and her team are doing, and that’s not right. They deserve the credit for the work they’re doing because it shapes their lives and they’re shaping lives too, so when people take away from that, it frustrates me a lot.”

Nadolski said that Davidson is currently a nominee for the Ogden-Weber Chamber of Commerce’s ATHENA Award. He also pointed out the Ogden City Fire Department, in the same year that it launched its homeless medical advocate program that has seen the department add two such advocates, is now adding a “mobile clinic” that will be able to travel to people as needed.

Brown said getting closer to solvency for homelessness in the city will depend on a collaborative approach.

“I think the county-wide approach in our area is going to be part of that solution,” she said. “I’d love to see that, in five years or 10 years, that we have much more of a collaborative approach in our county because we’re not going to be able to provide all of the housing that is needed to give individuals the opportunity to have a different living situation. It’s going to have to come in all areas of the county.

She added that, ideally, city services will also be meeting people where they are in the future as they’re intended to do now.

“We already see Ogden providing services for all people in the county to come here, so I don’t see why the underserved populations are any different from that, but sometimes they need more public transportation to come if you don’t have your own vehicle,” she said. “We’re still going to serve that role as being a centralized location for services, but the lack of transportation isn’t an excuse now. I would like to see more of our resources going out to different parts of the county to provide services on location in other areas. I think, in the future, I see more of a collaborative approach.”