OGDEN — Luis Lopez is no stranger to Ogden City government.

For eight years, Lopez served on the Ogden City Council.

However, Lopez returned to Ogden City government six months ago, trading in the title “Council member” for the position of community engagement director.

Lopez — who first came to the United States from his native Mexico when he was 19 — said the experience of moving to a new country helped shape him.

“I’ve been here in Ogden almost 30 years,” he said. “I’ve lived the immigrant experience. I didn’t speak English when I came here. My kids were born here. I went to school here — graduated from Weber State in Education/Teaching and got my masters from the U. I worked in education for 20 years — 10 years for the Ogden School District doing community programs and community outreach and 10 years at Weber State University in administration, but also community outreach.”

Lopez also served on the Ogden City Council for two terms, opting not to run for a third term.

“I’m a community leader and I do community advocacy,” he said. “I got to a point that I felt I could be more effective outside of the council than inside the council. I also feel that it was just the right time.”

He said that he considered getting more involved with the three businesses his family owns, but talking with Ogden Mayor Ben Nadolski steered him elsewhere.

“In talking with the mayor, he asked me if I was interested in applying for a position that he needed to fill doing community engagement,” he said. “We became good friends when we were on the council so I was very excited to do that.”

Nadolski said that having people like Lopez in such a position is key.

“In this job, it’s really important that the people that are closest to you are people that you can trust and you can count on,” Nadolski said. “Because they’re people that you lean on for advice and counsel.”

He said that community engagement could be difficult at times when they were colleagues on the Ogden City Council.

“We had a lot of time that we spent together on the council,” Nadolski said. “It was really hard back then not to have an administration willing to help in the ways that we were wanting to help. We were directly involved and engaged in talking to people who had real needs from our city, and it was really hard to get that kind of support in the past.”

Nadolski said his administration wants to do community engagement differently and having people like Lopez on board make that a reality.

“We are an administration that is putting a lot of change into place, and it has everything to do with how we do things,” Nadolski said. “We’re not doing community engagement for performance or for talking points. We want to do it in a way that leads to real change that helps people.”