OGDEN — Ogden Mayor Ben Nadolski has made no secret that bolstering public safety is among his top priorities as mayor.

During his recent State of the City address, he took time to tout the successes that the fire department and police department saw throughout 2025.

Last week, he told the Standard-Examiner it was one of his favorite parts of the entire speech.

“I’ve always put an emphasis on the critical services the city provides — public safety and infrastructure are that,” he said. “If we don’t get those things right, we can’t get anything else right. We presented some results in public safety and in projects completed in public services for infrastructure. that are astounding.”

One major win from 2025, according to Nadolski, was fully-staffing the Ogden Police Department.

“We have built a culture and an environment and an agency that is at its highest strength of force in the history of this city during a time when, nationally, departments can not for the life of them hire people and retain people,” he said. “We are not only retaining people, we’re attracting people that have the highest caliber standards and performance in the industry.”

During the State of the City address, he noted that 837 people with criminal warrants had been arrested in Ogden and that there was a 4% drop in calls for service to the police department.

“When you say 4% out of 80,000 calls for service every year, that’s a lot,” he said.

Nadolski said that this drop has its own impacts on the police force.

“We saw more proactive police work happening because we were full-staff and able to meet the need and the calls for service in the moment,” he said. “And then we had  discretionary time. Our officers are such hard-charging, driven professionals that they don’t just take that time off and sit around waiting for the next call, they put it toward proactive police work. Now we have patrol out there doing more proactive investigation work at the street level and bringing cases and crimes to a resolution in the moment.”

This has helped reduce the number of investigations by 17%, which Nadolski said allows investigators to catch up on their workload, bring cases to completion quicker and leads to better quality investigations.

“Politics would make us think, ‘Oh, they’re heavy handed,'” he said. “No. We saw a reduction in the number of victim advocacy cases, so a corresponding reduction in the number of victims in our city. Then we saw the highest satisfaction rating with our officers that we’ve seen in 10 years. Then we looked at use-of-force instances — out of 80,000 calls for services, we get in the double-digits in use-of-force cases. That’s an incredibly compelling statistic that we go hands-on with people so infrequently, and that is a reflection of our professionalism.”

Nadolski also made note of the fire department’s strides over the past year.

“I have my fire chief and we are providing him with all of the same systems and support to have the same levels of impact in public safety,” he said. “They are such a strong department of strong men and women that are hungry for this kind of improvement and growth. I look forward to the next year, two years or three years to show you the same statistics and data on how we’ve addressed prevention and how that has resulted in improvements.”

He said that with the large call volumes the fire department faces, the city strives to create the right environment for retention.

“They have a higher call volume per firefighter than any other department in the state by a large margin,” he said. “If we’re not careful, that’s going to lead to a lot of resentment and burnout. If we take advantage of their work ethic, that’s resentment. When people feel taken advantage of, they burnout and they leave. That’s not only wrong, it’s costly to the taxpayers too. So we create an environment they want to be part of, and it’s our responsibility as leaders to make sure we aren’t taking advantage of them.”