OGDEN — The city is looking for municipal partners on mitigating homelessness — a task easier said than done.

Ogden City Chief Administrative Officer Mara Brown told the Standard-Examiner that the homelessness crisis is one of her biggest focuses.

“Working with our partners in homelessness in the city is one of my big rocks as CAO,” she said. “It has a huge impact on the services that we provide, the strength of our community and opportunity here. I’m engaged with the Weber-Morgan Local Homelessness Council and I do attend all of those meetings. I also work closely with Lauren Navidomskis, the executive director of the Lantern House.”

She said the city, on a policy level, is trying to emphasize with its partners that homelessness is a county-wide issue that demands solutions involving multiple municipalities.

“It’s not just Ogden City’s alone to provide all of the solutions and all of the resources for,” she said.

Brown said it’s been a process over the last couple of years, but collaboration is happening.

“Since I’ve been CAO almost the last two and a half years, I think we’ve made some progress, we just have to keep driving it home,” she said. “Especially with Commissioner (Sharon) Bolos, she’s been very responsive. She and I worked closely together when we were planning for winter response and Code Blue. We worked very closely with her looking very hard to find opportunities for temporary housing for the winter response in areas outside of Ogden, but did face challenges with those communities in not finding spaces or the support from other officials outside of Ogden.”

She said while the county has been willing to work with the city on mitigating the homelessness situation, it has been more difficult to get other municipalities on board.

“I think there’s a lot of fear around homelessness,” she said. “That’s one thing that the mayor and I talked about really early on in our collective leadership — we’re not going to make decisions based on fear. We’re going to make decisions that are data-driven, that we want to help people, serve people and so we address it head on.”

Ogden Mayor Ben Nadolski said he tells the leaders of other municipalities that Ogden won’t stop its work, but it needs help.

“We’re not going to back out from doing what we do, we’re leaning in and doubling down on the things that we do,” he said. “The point is that the pressure and the crisis across America — including across this county and across this city — is bigger than we can manage by ourselves. That’s the point and that’s why the state stepped in and said every county is going to do this. We’re asking cities around us to help.”

He said that it’s been a source of frustration seeing many claim that the city is sitting on its hands when it comes to tackling the issue of homelessness.

“I think there is a human mandate for everybody to step up and provide for our fellow humans that are suffering and struggling,” he said. “Everybody is so quick to let us do everything. And then our own citizens are maligning us politically, which is not helping us get any traction with any other community to help lift people out of this crisis. It frustrates me to no end, not because of the politics or the way it hurts me. It frustrates me that people are using politics to hurt people, and to me, it doesn’t square with my conscience and I don’t understand how it squares with other people’s conscience either.”

Nadolski said there are some successes in getting other cities onboard.

“We just saw Harrisville City take on a project,” he said. “They didn’t make a decision out of fear. They made a decision carefully and with the right partnerships. I was in touch with the mayor the whole way. … I’m really thankful that Harrisville City stepped up, had the will, took the chance and it’s going well, and it’s going to continue to go well. We need every city to do that. Every single city in this county needs to do that, otherwise the scale of the human crisis is always going to overwhelm us.”

Brown said there is ultimately one goal, as far as Ogden City is concerned.

“We want to help people get out of homelessness and find a permanent solution that is better than where they are today,” she said.