With Park City developers telling us lately that their scaled-down, up-zoned, compromise developments will actually make traffic better or that a proposed golf course will actually use less water than the worst-case development scenario, or that another proposed zoning change will make things better for everyone, it makes me wonder. Do they think we are stupid? We have all heard these kinds of negotiations before. If something is too good to be true, it usually isn’t.
I read recently about the four primary mental health components of our intelligence: IQ, which is standard school-type intelligence and learning; EQ is emotional intelligence, happy/sad sensitivity and how you read and react to people; SQ is social intelligence on how you make and maintain friends and lovers; and AQ is adversity intelligence with the ability to stick with things when the chips are down and to get up when you fail. The last is new, and a surprise to me. Resilience is intelligence. Who knew? We might need it.
But I would still round out the list with these secondary intelligence components: PR which is practical intelligence on the day-to-day workings of the world; NB which is nuts and bolts intelligence on how mechanical things work; PY which is physical intelligence on athleticism and how to ski, ride or play pickleball; CR is our creative side; EM is empathy for others; and HW is holistic understanding and general wisdom that you gain with age.
So I wonder how developers and regulators are thinking when they propose these preposterous ideas and solutions to our first world problems in Park City, like development, traffic, water, and powder skiing. We should all be involved in critical thinking to define and solve problems and priorities.
I’m not sure what critical thinking is because I have not seen much of it lately. I think it is the ability to tell if someone is blowing smoke up your butt. Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear. Trust but verify.
So when crazy ideas like a $50 million arts district or a $100 million railroad to Salt Lake City, a $500 million gondola up Little Cottonwood Canyon, a $5 billion pipeline to an empty Lake Powell or $100 billion pipeline to the ocean for the Great Salt Lake are proposed, I have to ask, “What are you thinking?” ll this is proposed using other people’s money but in the end we all pay for everything. For everything you do, there is something you don’t do. You can’t do it all and you don’t get something for nothing.
As the Corporate Industrial Ski Complex ostensibly improves our town and local alpine skiing, proposed upsized developments create less traffic and use less water, our nepotistic State Legislature meddles in local approval affairs and pays lip service to the shrinking Great Salt Lake while the feds ignore the climate and drought at the peril of the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon, it is not enough just to sit back and wonder. It is time to personally research and think seriously about this process, then stand up and be counted with your best opinion and options, solutions and priorities. Follow the facts, data, science and economics. Use your personal combination of intelligence components to develop your own critical thinking capabilities. Participate in this process as thinking and knowing constituents. Think for yourself but think about others. Don’t let them blow smoke. Just think. Then act to make things better for all.
Matthew C. Lindon
Park City