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Lisa Stout talks to the editorial board at the Standard-Examiner in Ogden on Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025.

Jared Lloyd, Daily Herald

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The front of the Ogden Municipal Building, photographed Wednesday, May 31, 2023. The front doors, closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, reopened to the public earlier in May.

Tim Vandenack, Standard-Examiner

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Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of three stories following a Standard-Examiner editorial board interview with Ogden City Management Services Director Lisa Stout and David Sawyer, deputy director for community and economic development for Ogden City on a wide range of topics, including finding cost savings in city government, setting the economic plan for the city, Union Station and the WonderBlock and more. Ogden Mayor Ben Nadolski also joined the interview. 

OGDEN — Ogden City officials are searching high and low for where they can find efficiencies and bring costs down.

Helping lead that charge is Ogden City Management Services Director Lisa Stout.

Stout said this has included the creation of a position for someone in the city to achieve that goal.

“We did some strategic realignment to create more capacity in both the mayor’s office and in management services by adding a management analyst,” she said. “We reduced a position to do this, so it didn’t cost the citizens anything. His whole job is to go in and look for efficiencies, go in and see what we could better serve the citizens, that we could better collaborate. he’s got several projects he’s working on.”

She said the city is also looking to technology to help make operations more efficient and save money.

“We have a list of 80-plus projects that we would like to implement using AI — some with huge potential for labor savings that I think will really benefit the city,” she said.

In a handout provided to the Standard-Examiner, the city noted that possible AI applications include Facebook monitoring and transcription, and analysis for police and legal.

“One of the mayor’s big priorities is police and fire,” Stout said. “It’s those labor hours of those policemen and firemen, if we can find those AI tools that help them save labor hours, then they can spend more time on the streets serving the citizens. There’s huge potential … We’re trying to do a return-on-investment on every project we initiate and really find those efficiencies saving hours for employees.”

She said the AI implementations are overseen by a consultant and the city’s IT department.

Ogden Mayor Ben Nadolski used another position to highlight the city’s attempts to find efficiencies or alternate funding sources.

“Through cost-neutral consolidation efficiencies, we created a focused position for a grant writer for the entire city,” he said. “We’ve submitted 43 grants with a total of $22 million of potential money coming into the city that wouldn’t otherwise come in. That was as of April 2025. These are all part and parcel to the keeping costs down part.”

Stout said the city is working on creating a dashboard for the public to utilize and view where efficiencies have been created in city government and how much money has been saved.

Stout said there are also some changes coming to the city’s budgeting process.

“Some of what we’re going to do to change the budget process is have more formalized budget hearings with each of the department heads where they actually have to come in and present their budget, justify the cost,” she said. “We’re having accountants looking at what we’re doing that costs us money … It’s going to put more pressure on department heads, but that’s OK, it will be a learning process.”

Stout said implementing these measures helps the city without over-burdening the staff.

“Our people are so busy doing their daily jobs, it’s hard to step back sometimes and we’re a pretty big ship,” she said. “To get us to move, it takes some real effort.”