Ogden officials are looking at new modeling to see just what the city needs to do to generate revenue well above its expenditures.

“We’ve got to provide essential services and we are trying to do that without taxing our people excessively,” Ogden Mayor Ben Nadolski said on the city’s function. “The directive and the direction for my administration is that we are going to find ways to find efficiencies, consolidations in our operations and we have to grow revenue without taking it out of people’s pockets.”

He said that economic development is one point that many people tend to oversimplify, especially in the current political climate.

“There’s these narratives out there, especially now during election season, that try to boil this down into some simple talking point,” he said. “It might make a good talking point, but it doesn’t make for good, sound fiscal governance. Fiscal governance takes expertise; it takes planning and thought and execution.”

Nadolski noted that the city currently faces an uphill battle when it comes to development.

“We’re a built-out city and we don’t have a lot of opportunity to go expand and build more open space,” he said. “We have a lot of built-out city that needs to be redeveloped. Development in Ogden is more of an effort of redevelopment and that requires the use of our Redevelopment Agency in ways that no other city in Utah is pressed to do because they aren’t as built out and they don’t have the legacy infrastructure challenges that we do.”

He said that the city is now reimagining how it assesses budgeting and projection of revenues and at what point expenditures may outpace them.

“We are working with the City Council, and Chair (Marcia) White has been really insistent on this — that we have a financial model that projects when that crossover point is,” he said. “We’re going to do everything we can to accelerate that point of crossing over, including finding efficiencies in our services so that we can find cost savings, consolidating services where we can so we can achieve cost savings, finding partnerships through the Ogden way framework so that we can still provide services in the community, but not necessarily through the city, through other partners. That’s how we keep costs down as much as we possibly can, remembering all along that the cost of these services continues to escalate solely as a function of inflation.”

Ogden City Management Services Director Lisa Stout said the new modeling would be a shift in the city’s monetary policy.

“This is going to be a new model for the city where we want to add downward pressure … to delay that break-even point as long as we possibly can,” she said. “That is different than we’ve done business in the past. We’ve done budget adjustments based on what last year’s budget is. We are developing a different model where we are going to question every cost and really look for those cost savings.”

Nadolski said that residents don’t want their taxes raised and it’s up to the city to make sure they’re finding those points of new investment.

“The people of Ogden don’t want us touching that rate anymore,” he said. “So we’ve got to be making investments to make sure we don’t have to.”

He said the city is poised to release more on its evolving economic vision in January and tie it in with the city’s new general plan.