Richard Hyer said he’s seeing a disconnect between Weber County and its cities, and he hopes taking a seat on the County Commission can help bridge that gap.

Hyer, a goldsmith by trade and presently the Chairperson of the Ogden City Council, is one of four primary candidates vying for Seat A on the Weber County Commission. The seat is currently occupied by Gage Froerer, who opted not to run for reelection in 2026. Hyer is facing Katrina Gibson, Duane Kearsley and James Ebert in June’s primary election.

Recently, Hyer sat down with the Standard-Examiner editorial board to discuss his campaign, why he’s running for Weber County Commission and his goals if elected.

Disconnect with cities

Grace Watters, Standard-Examiner

Hyer said one of the main reasons he’s running is because he’s noticed a disconnect between Weber Counties and the cities within.

“The county is a pretty big organization and has, I think, lost touch a lot with the customers — the cities that they serve,” he said. “They sometimes do things that almost seem like they’re bullying the cities. I don’t use that word lightly — and I don’t think it applies to the general staff of the county — but sometimes the leadership tends to think they know best and don’t collaborate to the extent that they should to make sure that everybody has a win-win.”

He said that he’s seen a few instances of this while serving on the Ogden City Council.

“I had a one-on-one conversation with one of the commissioners almost exactly a year ago, and we were talking about the old jail back behind the Ogden Municipal Building,” he said. “This commissioner acknowledged that Ogden City ought to have that.  Ogden City has been in negotiations with the county on this for a long time. The City Council has identified the money and put it away for this transaction, and the county continues to hang on to that building for, we don’t know why. It seems like they’re just kind of holding our head over something.”

Experiences

Hyer said he’s been prepared for the role both by his time in business and public services.

“Other than my roles as a business owner, I understand budgets,” he said. “I understand that any service or any product is only worth so much. If you price yourself out, your customers won’t buy from you. That’s the way it is. That’s a capitalistic approach.  Government doesn’t seem to get that particular concept as well. It’s too easy to go to the taxpayer or to kick that can down the road a little bit.

He said, if elected, he would like to implement some new practices to make sure departments are running efficiently.

“My intention would be to instigate efficiency audits, and Ogden has benefited from those for years,” he said. “We know how to do those. So I’d like to bring that into the county culture and the county calculus to make sure that those things are happening. I think everybody’s happier when they’re being more productive and things are running smoother, and it certainly happens. It works out to be cheaper.”

Challenges

While many have seen growth in Weber County as a challenge to be delicately balanced, Hyer also sees it as an opportunity for the county’s future.

“The West Weber County area, there’s a lot of pressure to develop there and I think there’s a lot of opportunity to develop,” he said. “Development in a reactive state doesn’t usually work out too good, so I think it’s very important that proactive planning happen. My many years on the Planning Commission taught me the value of planning and how to look forward and to plan for what it could be as the best end result rather than to just always react.”

He said there are some consequences when development happens without much of a plan in place.

“A developer comes in, and they make a proposal, and they make a proposal to change the zoning, and then you react to that,” he said. “You end up with a patchwork and a mishmash of things that really don’t work cohesively. That is one opportunity to do some proactive planning and work with the residents in those areas to see what can best be developed there.”

Another opportunity Hyer sees is boosting the capabilities of the Weber County Sheriff’s Office.

“Public safety is very important,” he said. “Our sheriff’s department needs a stable budget. He needs to know what his budget is going to be so he can plan ahead of time.  An example of the kind of things that we did in Ogden that I think our sheriff would love to do if he were able to do it is we got our pay scale into a reasonable (level). We don’t pay our officers in Ogden the most, but we pay them fairly and we have other perks that really give them a lot of benefits and give them job satisfaction.

He said one of these perks pertains to mental health.

“We have a wellness program that they really — as they’ve talked to me — appreciate,” he said. “It’s one where they don’t have to go check with the boss to see if they can go get a mental health checkup. Officers have a lot of trauma in their jobs, and they need to be able to work through those things in a proactive and in a way that will really help them stay mentally healthy.”

Hyer also sees potential in bridging the gap he sees between the county government and the cities.

“They need to know that the county is a partner and we will use the resources that we can to help them be successful as a city,” he said. “Small cities don’t have the same kind of staff as the county in a bigger city. They don’t have full-time planners. They don’t have full-time engineers. But yet they need to have access to those sometimes, maybe even just momentarily. Just ask a question, and our county needs to be able to help people or help the cities in that way.”

Positives

Hyer said he’s seen great initiative out of the staff working for Weber County.

“Our county has some amazing people that work there, very bright,” he said. “I think that it’s important to let people that are qualified and have good vision,  to give them a little bit more leash and make sure that they have the opportunity to exploit the good things about them.”

From the voters

Hyer said that, as he’s spoken with voters, he’s seen that it’s not just the cities that feel a major disconnect with the County Commission.

“They’ve kind of felt that the commissioners are a little bit disconnected,” he said. “They don’t have good access to that body of government. That’s evident by when the commission holds their commission meetings. They have them in the middle of the week, in the middle of the day and so citizens are not likely to be able to attend those. They don’t have public comment at those meetings. So while they do stream them, they aren’t generally very accessible.”

He said this is very different from his experience with the Ogden City Council.

“We probably have the most accessible government of any that I know of,” he said. “We stream our meetings on Facebook and YouTube. We use Zoom — people can connect through Zoom, they can make comments through Zoom during public comment. We have them at 6 o’clock on a Tuesday so public can come. We quarterly have open houses where the citizens can come in and they wander around and talk to the individual council members, share their concerns and ideas and collaborate. The county doesn’t have any of that. So I’m kind of looking forward to seeing if we can instigate some of that transparency and some of that interaction with public. I think it would be really easy. I don’t think that would be hard at all.”

‘Shining county on the hill’

Hyer said he sees a lot of great potential for Weber County moving forward.

“Since we do have so much undeveloped land, we have a great opportunity to be a county of real substance — to be that shining county on the hill, as it were,” he said. “And that is only possible with being proactive.”

Due to state law, Hyer noted that, if elected to the Weber County Commission, he will be stepping down from his position on the Ogden City Council.