As Ogden City Council District 3 candidate Heath Satow looks ahead to the election next month, one word is prominently on his mind: communication.

Satow said he’d like to see how the budget is pieced together on a yearly basis better conveyed to residents.

“Looking at my own projects in other cities, I end up often looking at their whole budget layout that they put out,” he said. “Ours is at the lower end of understandable. It’s really hard to dig through and see what we’re really spending money on.”

He said that it’s about bringing the public into the fold on a matter that will impact them and making it more approachable.

“I’ve seen budget reports that are much more easy to understand and the public can come in and say, ‘Why are we spending so much on this? This isn’t important to us,'” he said. “We shouldn’t view the government as just the people paid to be there; it’s the entire community, which has to be involved in some way. We have to find better ways to communicate with them and really get what’s important from them.”

As a near constant staple in the audience of Ogden City Council meetings, Satow said he and others have tried to make it a little easier to keep the public involved.

“We have a Facebook page a small group of us put together to sort of get information out to people,” he said. “Every single City Council meeting — I think I’ve missed one I didn’t do it for — in the last year or so, I’ve been doing a summary. The city links a packet and headlines, but there’s not really much more about what that’s about and you really have to dig into it. I looked up the packet one day and there was more pages than the Bible — nobody wants to look through this stuff. The density of information and the complexity of issues is something that turns people off.”

He said that he is encouraged to see some changes in communication with the public and that he would like to enhance that.

“I’m happy Ben (Nadolski) is focusing more on communications,” he said. “I’ve been trying to do my small part and I want to expand that as a council person to each issue, who it might matter to, the key points and that sort of thing — sort of break things down a little more easily and encourage people to come and speak up.”

Satow said he’ll continue to encourage others to speak up on issues.

“I tell people, ‘If you’ve got something important, get a few people together,'” he said. “There is rarely any times there are more than two or more people speaking to an issue. If you get 15 people to show up, you’ve got their ear. That’s the sort of thing I’ve been pushing out in trying to get people involved and saying, ‘You can make a difference, but you do have to make some effort.'”

On housing, Satow said that it’s one of the biggest battles the city is facing right now, noting that one calculation has been a huge hinderance to bringing in more affordable housing.

“One thing that bothered me a number of years ago when (Mike) Caldwell was running again was he kept saying we have 4,000 too many affordable units in Ogden,” he said. “One thing I found out was they kept basing it on the Ogden-Clearfield metro area median incomes, which are way higher than Ogden’s. So Ogden didn’t have nearly what it said it did. … All of the data we get is lumped in as the Ogden-Clearfield metro area and that’s from North Ogden to North Salt Lake. That’s a huge area and most of it has nothing to do with Ogden.”

He said he would like to see appropriate spaces found for higher density housing — and one such opportunity is beginning to take shape.

“I feel like we could focus better on where we place high-density housing, and it needs to be along transit lines,” he said. “I’m hoping with the development of the Union Station Campus … will put a lot more people closer to the FrontRunner. I think that will be good for us.”