OGDEN — It was a double-billing Wednesday evening as Ogden City Council and mayoral candidates participated in dual Weber County League of Women Voters debates at the First Presbyterian Church.

The first forum featured City Council at-large Seat C candidates Levi Andersen and Shaun Myers along with District 4 candidates Dave Graf and Steven Van Wagoner, while the second forum included mayoral candidates Taylor Knuth and Ben Nadolski.

City Council

Among other topics, the four candidates were asked what steps they would take in order to increase economic development in Ogden.

Andersen, a teacher at Mound Fort Junior High School, said he’d like to make it easier for businesses to come to Ogden.

“As we do that, it increases everybody’s standard of living, especially for a lot of my students,” he said. “When their parents can get a job at a better place because they have more opportunities within Ogden, it makes it better for them, makes it better for me as their teacher, makes it better for my school and our community.”

Graf said he’d like to make Ogden a magnet for others in the region by providing a space that many area towns currently don’t.

“Ogden City has great potential as Northern Utah’s downtown,” he said. “The surrounding communities really don’t have the historic downtown that Ogden does. Let’s invite those folks in for our events and our functions like our Christmas Village and our Pioneer Days parade and our farmer’s marker. Let’s help them spend their money here to bolster our budget rather than leaning on those of us who own homes.”

Myers, who is the chairman of the Ogden-Weber Chamber of Commerce, said 90 new businesses have opened in Ogden since January and believes the trend must continue.

“There’s amazing opportunities for us to go ahead and grow and develop and bring new jobs, higher-paying jobs, higher-skilled jobs to people in our community,” he said. “The beautiful thing that I like about economic development in our community is that we reduce the government’s dependence on our tax dollars.”

Van Wagoner said he would like to curtail the building of rent-only apartments.

“Take 1,500 rental units at $1,800 per month, calculate that out over a month and that’s over $2 million of revenue coming in to the landlord,” he said. “Is that staying in Ogden? No. That’s being sent to Beverly Hills and Wall Street. Multiply that out over a year, it’s $32,400,000 being sucked out of our local economy by the structures that our Planning Commission has continued to allow be built in this community.”

City Council candidates also were asked about green space, what they see as the most pressing problem in Ogden, ideas for making the community safer, expectations of the council versus the mayor’s office and ensuring service for all Ogden residents.

Mayor

Nadolski and Knuth were asked about the ongoing saga over the apartment complex being built at 144 25th St. and how their administrations would seek to avoid a similar project slipping through the cracks on their watch.

Nadolski said he’s thankful for the city employees who did catch the issues with the structure early.

“I think there was a huge error made by the builder or the contractor or the developer — they’re still fighting about whose fault it is,” he said. “I’m very thankful that we’ve got laws in place that make sure that we have the ability to take possession of that building to make sure we take it down. If that happens at the city’s expense, we will bill the parties that are responsible. We are keeping track of the costs that we’re incurring.”

He said he’d like to get to the bottom of this incident to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

“Moving forward, I want ot have a really deep dive and debrief on, ‘What were the steps through the inspection that allowed it to get this far?'” he said. “I think it’s standard practice that it gets to this point, but we’ve gotten so far that it’s more expense on the backs of our people. So we need to get to a point and have adverse possession of products and projects like this to make sure that any building that is not meeting our specifications for safety can be mitigated immediately.”

Knuth also praised the city staff for doing a hard job under hard circumstances.

“The Ogden City staff do an incredible job with the limited number of resources and limited capacity to engage in the realities of a growing city,” he said. “We are a growing city. We are building in nearly every neighborhood across the entire city and it’s really important that we have a present and engaged leadership apparatus within the city to ensure that projects like this don’t get as far as they’ve gotten without proper checks and balances. We have a code services department in the city that’s understaffed and under-resourced.”

He said that his administration would invest in the necessary positions.

“From a city’s perspective, we have the right people in place to address this concern in a way that will provide a resolution to our community in keeping us safe and secure,” he said. “A Knuth administration would continue to invest in the personnel and code services to ensure that things like this don’t happen in the future.”

The mayoral candidates were also asked about infrastructure projects they’d like to tackle, water conservation, the city’s General Plan, homelessness, the Community Renewable Energy Program, apartment development, green space and small-business support.

For a replay of the forums, see the Weber County League of Women Voters Facebook page.

Newsletter