Activist Ed Parigian says Park City is at a critical point in its existence and that he has the background to find win-win solutions for a variety of issues facing the town.
“We’ve gone through all of these phases from mining town to bust town to ski town and then another bust and then now another boom post-Olympics,” Parigian said. “I think we’re at a crossroads right now. It’s imperative to elect leaders who know and respect the history, know what can and cannot be done within existing laws, know what has been tried before and know what the community expects.”
Parigian is one of eight candidates vying for three open seats on the Park City Council. The issues he wants to address include affordable housing, development, traffic, recreation, child care and the future of Bonanza Park.
Park City is a tourist destination, a road it took years ago, and “there’s no turning back at this point,” Parigian said.
“What we need to do now is to manage that with the realization that we also have a solid community here and we need to balance the two,” he said. “I want to focus on policy and issues that support and enhance our quality of life. The tourists could come but I want to focus on the community and what it takes for us to be happy here and stay here.”
Parigian, 66, an Old Town resident, grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts, and earned a business management degree with a concentration in accounting from the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He worked for a CPA firm but decided that wasn’t for him and returned to his alma mater to study mechanical engineering.
When he was partway through the program, Parigian said he knew that wasn’t right for him either, and went to work as a controller and treasurer at several companies. He got a master’s in business administration from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and had his own consulting firm serving entrepreneurs before moving to Oregon and working for Nike as an image coordinator and footwear pricing manager.
Parigian semi-retired and moved in 2006 to Park City, where he works at several part-time jobs, including as a hockey referee, curling instructor and kickball umpire. He got involved in community matters, serving on committees and speaking out on issues, and played a leading role in efforts to protect the field outside the Park City Library from development. He is the Recycle Utah treasurer.
His pet project now is the planning of Bonanza Park, which is city-owned land originally acquired with the intent to develop an arts and culture district. Parigian envisions a vibrant art-centered village at the site with lots of affordable housing above art spaces.
Parigian also is chair of the city’s Recreation Advisory Board and supports a proposed general obligation bond that would pay for pickleball courts, an outdoor ice sheet and expanded fitness space, among other projects. He pointed out that if voters approve the bond in the November general election, their taxes will not increase because another bond will end.
Affordable living is a priority for Parigian and he said one of the most important things in life “is knowing you’ve got a home.”
The municipal government could support affordable housing through public-private partnerships, he said. As an example, Parigian said, the city could provide the land, and the private sector or a nonprofit could build housing on it and manage it.
The same approach could be used to address the availability and affordability of child care, he said.
It’s tough for a private company to make money and child care workers can’t afford to commute to lower paying jobs, Parigian said. If parents can’t find good child care, they might have to drop out of the workforce, he said.
The city could provide building space, which would reduce exorbitant rents, Parigian said. In addition, his platform calls for direct investment from the city’s largest employers.
These investments in housing and child care pay for themselves many times over, according to Parigian.
“It’s a win-win solution,” he said. “We get people in town, we get commuters off the road coming into town, they spend all their money here, our local businesses get the money, we get the sales tax.”
Parigian said he thinks the Olympics are coming back to Utah and the Wasatch Back will be host to many of the events. Being on the world stage will lead to the same growth that followed the 2002 Games and Park City needs to be prepared for the long-term aftermath, he said.
Many people who see how beautiful Park City is, either in person or on TV, are going to want to buy property in town, Parigian said. He wants to develop policies that preserve neighborhoods, “so we don’t have a gold rush coming in here to buy up all our property and covert them to nightly rentals and fractional ownerships.”
“Those things have turned neighborhoods upside down, not just here but pretty much all over the country,” Parigian said. “We need to do what we can do to maintain these communities.”
Park City also would need to deal with all the traffic generated by an Olympics, he said.
“I will do everything in my power to mitigate the long-term impact to our community and extract as much funding as possible,” he said, adding that funds could possibly be used for park-and-ride lots and buses.
Parigian also said the town needs a traffic plan and not just for the Olympics. He is calling for Park City and Summit and Wasatch counties to work together to tackle housing, transit, growth and other issues.
“At this point, it’s not just about Park City,” he said. “It’s about the whole region, the whole Wasatch Back. We’re all in this together. We really need to do some cohesive planning together. We just can’t keep going our separate ways.”
Parigian said he has always been an independent and has never been a member of a political party. He describes himself as a social liberal and a fiscal conservative.
“I don’t go way left. I don’t go way right,” he said.
The other candidates running for a council seat are Bill Ciraco, incumbent Ryan Dickey, David Dobkin, John Greenfield, Matthew Nagie, Bob Sertner and Jody Whitesides.
Betsy Wallace, who was in the race, suspended her campaign on Aug. 2, saying her life had become “significantly more unbalanced” than she had anticipated. Incumbents Max Doilney and Becca Gerber are not seeking reelection.
A Sept. 5 primary will narrow the field of eight council hopefuls to the six top vote-getters, who will advance to a Nov. 21 general election. The three candidates who get the most votes in that election will take office in January and serve a four-year term.
Voters will get to vote for three candidates in both the primary and the general election because there are three open seats. State law requires that a primary be held if more than twice the number of candidates file to run than are to be elected. The election is nonpartisan.