There has been a lot of talk lately about a development moratorium. Both the city and county have raised the idea without much enthusiasm. It sounds great — shut it down. Let us catch our collective breath and figure it all out. In reality, it’s a blunt instrument. A moratorium would only put new applications on hold. Anything already in the pipeline would continue. Our problem isn’t new applications. What’s got us all tied up in knots is that we’ve already exceeded our reasonable capacity, and have a bunch of zombie applications approved a generation ago threatening to make it even worse: the PCMR parking lots, the Deer Valley parking lots, the Dakota Pacific project, Mayflower, Jordanelle/Hideout. A moratorium won’t stop any of those.
While a moratorium is a clumsy tool, it’s about the only tool there is. So here’s a proposal. Actually a couple of proposals. First, the city and county ought to be discussing the moratorium idea together because the problems that need to be solved are joint and overlapping. Despite the divorce of the bus systems, there is really only one community here, and the problems don’t adhere to arbitrary jurisdictional lines. And what’s on the moratorium to-do list?
First is water. We can build roads, parking and buses. We can build as much sewage treatment capacity as we need. What we can’t do is build more water. There is a finite limit on water. Unless we can see that there is a reliable supply of actual, wet water, and quantify it, we should shut the rest of it down.
The other issue crushing us is transportation/housing, which is really the same thing. Back in the 1980s, when the city was hiring consultants even faster than they do now, there was a report that said we needed to switch the front and back doors to Park City. The consultant said S.R. 248 should be the main entrance because S.R. 224 would become a clogged local artery that couldn’t handle the in-bound traffic from Salt Lake. It was dismissed as ridiculous for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was that the consultant wore clogs and carried a man-purse.
Turns out, the guy was right, except about the purse.
Opportunity comes in strange ways. For 50 years, the tailings pond has been the wasteland nobody wanted to own (the bank was loath to foreclose on it). Suddenly it is highly sought after, and was just purchased by the Larry H. Miller Group to develop. There is a whole city planned at Hoytsville, also with Miller money behind it. The Iron Horse Drive neighborhood is being proposed for redevelopment. The Rail Trail connects them all.
The current operation is broken beyond repair. About 8,500 people every day commute into Park City for work. A similar number stop at Kimball Junction or Canyons Village, for over 15,000 a day commuting into the greater Park City area. If we could divert even half of them to park at the tailings pond, and get on a train for the last few miles into town, it would greatly reduce the traffic on all of the local streets. Locals could make left turns again and not need cops to block neighborhood streets.
If some portion of the workforce actually lived in a new community at Richardson Flat it would relieve pressure on the transportation system all the way to the mouth of Parleys. The rail line used to extend west to the present Walgreens parking lot. If it did again, Walgreens could become a transit hub where you could transfer from the train to a bus to Deer Valley/Main Street, or a gondola to PCMR. Over time, the train could extend north to Wanship, Hoytsville and Coalville, essentially creating a series of streetcar suburbs. The workers we rely on to keep this community functioning might actually be able to afford to live nearby, and wouldn’t have the expense and frustration of the grind up and down I-80.
That’s a profound change in the way our world functions, and embraces the idea of significant new growth in the county generally. It’s expensive and culture-changing, more like the Hudson River Valley than the wild west. We know for certain that what we are doing now is broken and getting worse. It doesn’t work for local residents whose neighborhoods are overwhelmed by commuter traffic. It doesn’t work for local businesses that can’t find employees willing to make the commute, and it doesn’t work for the employees who lose hours a day to traffic. It’s impossible to build housing for 8,500 employees in town, no matter what the cost. So suddenly, Richardson Flat looks appealing.
I’m not advocating this approach. Personally, I’d prefer that 10,000 people pack up and move back where they came from. Spending a ton of cash to facilitate whole new towns (drinking what water?) along the rail line doesn’t appeal because we’re crowded enough already. Having that many more people standing in the morning lift lines, or trying to get into a Main Street restaurant for dinner isn’t attractive. But unless we can figure out a way to shrink back to what actually worked, we probably need to figure out a way forward. A six-month moratorium to figure that one out is probably time well spent.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.