On Wednesday, MAKE Ogden held an open house at Union Station to update the public on where the planning process is and is going in the coming months.

“Over the last couple of years, we’ve had several iterations of the master plan for the Union Station Neighborhood,” David Sawyer, deputy director for community and economic development for Ogden City, told the Standard-Examiner on Wednesday evening. “Tonight we’re unveiling the latest and greatest. It’s been a little over a year since we’ve done that at this level of detail. What we’re showing tonight a lot of work that’s gone into defining what we call, ‘the public realm’ meaning where will the pedestrian walkways be, where will the interior roads be that serve the commercial and residential areas on the north side of the neighborhood? How do we connect to the trail on the northwest side that leads to the existing trail? How do we support that? Where will the parking structures be? All of those different elements.”

Wednesday’s open house comes only weeks after Ogden Mayor Ben Nadolski announced that the city had received $600,000 from the Union Station Foundation to seek out an executive director for Ogden Union Station.

“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,” Nadolski told the Standard-Examiner earlier this month. “We’ll be looking for somebody with vision, the ability to articulate that vision and to bring the community on board.”

Sawyer said Wednesday that, in the meantime, there’s still a little bit of fluidity in the proposed design of the neighborhood.

“Depending on the kind of feedback we get from the public, we will refine or modify,” he said. “Every time we come to one of these, we get ideas we’re like, ‘Huh, that’s interesting. Let us work on that.’ We’ll see how tonight goes, but our plan is in the next few months to have this locked in a little better.”

He added that the city, in the coming months, will also be deliberating the financial projects of elements of the proposal, such as retail spaces and the residential spaces on the north side of the Union Station Neighborhood.

Sawyer said the coming year will also be spent identifying potential sources of funding for major goals of the Union Station Neighborhood including the return of passenger rail services and museum expansion and presentation.

“One of the first things we want to do is bring the FrontRunner train back to the station, but it’s super expensive,” he said. “Where’s the funding coming from for that? We’ll be talking to our state transportation partners on that. Then, in order to make this building primarily a train station, we need to move the museum exhibits out of here and so we need to build a new museum approximately where the Laundry Building is on the south side. Those projects don’t generate tax revenue, they’re public spaces so we’ve got to have the private support and development in order to generate the income to pay for all of that.”

He said that city officials have been speaking with state legislators, most recently on Tuesday, about support and potential funding resources to make these items happen.

Sawyer said that public feedback opportunities on the Union Station Neighborhood aren’t going away, but they will be becoming more focused in the coming year.

“(Wednesday) will probably be the most high-level one,” he said. “In the future we’ll be talking more specifically about some of the individual pieces … and talking about the capital campaign and how we’re going to do that.”

He said the city hopes to have a major milestone checked off in a year’s time.

“By next year, we’ll have submitted our master plan to the state of Utah to get approval to make this an HTR Zone — that stands for, ‘Housing, Transit, Redevelopment Zone,'” he said. “That allows us to utilize a funding mechanism to capture all of the increment from the private development. By this time next year, I hope we’ll be submitting that, which will show the phased plan and when we will do what.”

Sawyer said, ultimately, the Union Station Neighborhood is going to go on to be a major driver of Ogden and the region in the future.

“Downtown Ogden really is the downtown for Northern Utah,” he said. “The Union Station Neighborhood only enhances that attractiveness. It will also be a multi-modal hub for transportation. It’ll be, once again, the center of attention and energy for Ogden City.”

For more information, visit https://unionstation-ogden.com/.