OGDEN — One of the centerpieces of Ogden Mayor Ben Nadolski’s second State of the City address was the announcement of a major gift to go toward aiding one of the city’s most prized historic assets.

During the address last Thursday, Nadolski announced that the city had been gifted $600,000 to go toward the hiring of an executive director for Ogden Union Station to ultimately help in restoring the station, the surrounding campus and even bringing transportation options such as FrontRunner and, potentially, Amtrak into Union Station.

Nadolski said the gift stemmed from a simple inquiry for help.

“Union Station is such an important piece of our history and our future,” he said. “I don’t have all of the tools, resources and expertise that I need to do it by myself. When I approached the Union Station Foundation for help, they recognized that I need and I’m asking for help — and there’s nothing wrong with asking for help and needing help; it’s just recognizing where our limitations are and where we need expertise that we don’t have.”

He said that Union Station already has talented people on staff, but there is something more needed.

“We have a phenomenal historian on our staff,” he said. “To ask her to continue to do the work she’s doing, plus to be able to develop a community capital campaign to preserve and protect and restore the biggest historical asset we’ve had in the history of our city is too much.”

According to Nadolski, the $600,000 will be utilized to help hire a museum executive director that can help bring about the city’s vision for the station and create a capital campaign to make that vision possible.

“We’re working with the foundation on a job announcement and we’ll be looking for somebody with national and international experience on fundraising and preservation at the scale of which we have,” he said. “We’ll be looking for somebody with vision, the ability to articulate that vision and to bring the community on board.”

He said that the work to implement that vision, no matter who steps into the role, is going to take a significant amount of time.

“It’s not cheap to do this work,” he said. “This will take my entire tenure and probably past me to keep doing the work. We need to start with our history, restore the building itself and then work on the surrounding properties around it and build out that neighborhood and area in a manner that not just respects the Union Station but highlights it and amplifies it. We’re not going to just build these big modern monoliths around it that don’t fit within the context of Union Station; they’re going to be complimentary of it.

“And we’re going to be telling the story of Ogden’s past and telling the story of our people in a world-class museum one day. Museums don’t pay for themselves — those are expensive — and we’re going to need donors and grants and appropriations from the city, the state, from our federal partners to help make all of that happen. And I need somebody with the kind of historical expertise and community capital campaign expertise to help lead that charge.”

Nadolski said the hope is to fill the position as soon as possible but only when the city finds the right person to fill it.

“If it takes longer than we’d like, so be it,” he said. “We’re not going to settle.”

In the meantime, he added that the conversation is shifting on Union Station, as it needs to.

“There was just so much time — I mentioned this at the end (of the State of the City) — where we were fighting over the Union Station, and we are at a point where we are going to be fighting for the Union Station together. You’re seeing that unity coming together now — Unity in my administration, unity in the Union Station Foundation, unity in the activists within our community that have stood up to protect that station. We’re all forming around the vision of not just saving it but restoring it. That has to be a thing we all work on together. We cannot afford, and we don’t have any time anymore, to fight over it. We have to all be fighting for it.”