Gene Moser’s early days as a rodeo clown served him well during his tenure as chairman of the Summit County Commission. He was both tough and gregarious — unafraid to enter an arena filled with rollicking challenges and quick to win over even his most ardent opponents.
Moser, who lived in Park City, died last Sunday, March 15, while vacationing in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife Laverne. He was 86.
Though Moser served only one term on the commission, his tenure was precedent setting and he is often credited with ushering in a new era of professional planning in the county.
Moser was the first ‘westsider’ to breach the decades old gentleman’s agreement calling for one commissioner to be elected from each of the county’s three distinct regions. He accomplished that feat in 1990 by bypassing the county’s tradition-bound party caucuses and running as an independent candidate.
Once installed in Coalville, however, Moser earned the trust of staff and constituents throughout the county and went to work representing North Summit, South Summit, Park City and the suddenly expanding Snyderville Basin.
According to Sheldon Richins, a lifelong rancher from North Summit who served on the commission alongside Moser, “Regardless of what part of the county we were dealing with, Gene studied it to find out how it would affect the people there. He was a hard worker. He was the type of person who wanted to make sure we touched all the bases, that we heard from all sides.”
When Moser was elected development applications were flooding the county’s understaffed planning department and, at the same time, local residents were deeply divided about how the growth should be handled. That meant a lot of long days and nights reviewing tedious legal documents and managing contentious public hearings.
“We had some difficult times,” he recalls, but thanks in part to Moser’s good spirits Richins says, “I loved every minute of it.”
Chuck Klingenstein, who served on the current Snyderville Basin Planning Commission, refers to Moser as his “mentor.”
“Gene turned the course of the county — the Basin could have filled up. The county had never dealt with this kind of growth,” said Klingenstein noting that Moser insisted on hiring the county’s first professional planner and introduced the county to the concept of “concurrency,” ensuring adequate services and infrastructure were in place before new development was approved.
“He was very principled and ethical, he always tried to do the right thing,” said Klingenstein.
After a trying four years, during which the county successfully settled more than a dozen development-related lawsuits, Moser declined to run for a second term. Still, he was devoted to public service. He turned that passion toward training citizens in small rural communities how to serve on their local planning commissions. From 1995 through 2006, under the auspices of the Utah Local Trust, Moser traveled across the state offering seminars about how to be an effective planning commissioner.
In an article Moser authored that appeared in Utah’s American Planning Assoc. chapter newsletter he wrote: “Arguably, community planning is the most important responsibility of local governments. The conversion of pastoral scenes into buildings and roads is an action that will last 100 years or more. You can’t start over again when mistakes are made. Because planning is so important, the role of the planning commission becomes a key ingredient in the success of community planning efforts.”
Gene Carr, a former professor at the University of Utah, traveled around the state with Moser setting up seminars from “North Logan to Kanab.”
“All of these little rural towns were required by the state to have planning commissions and a lot of them didn’t have any staff so they were on their own. Gene is the one who got it going, lined up the room and the caterers, then we would turn it over to the professional planners,” said Carr. “Gene said his experience on the commission had shown him how important it was.”
The Utah Chapter of the APA eventually established a citizen planner award named in Moser’s honor.
Moser’s impact on Summit County was not limited to the landscape, though. Along with his rodeo talents and experience in business, Moser was an enthusiastic hot-air balloon pilot and his love of the sport quickly spread to the skies above his neighborhood. In the 1980s Moser rounded up a gang of fellow aeronauts and helped to establish Park City’s first balloon festival. The annual event continued through the mid-1990s and, after a 20-year break, was held again last fall.
According to the family, a memorial service and celebration of Gene Moser’s life will take place at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, 1505 White Pine Canyon Road, Wednesday, April 15, beginning at 6:30 pm. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations to Summit Land Conservancy at www.wesaveland.org or another worthy cause.