The Park City planning commissioners must love their work, considering they’ll spend Valentine’s evening not in candlelight but poring over details and hearing comments in the first public hearing and opportunity to vote on Matthew and Tatiana Prince’s plans to replace two homes overlooking Old Town.
The proposal for their new home itself is not so remarkable through all the back and forths between applicant team and Planning Department in what both describe as an “iterative” process. The five other homes in the Sweeney Master Planning District have all been through the process, rather more quietly.
What stands out in this one is the relative wealth of the owners in a small state, their purchase of The Park Record last spring, and especially for going to the state Legislature a year ago to avoid this very gantlet.
Park City leaders did some lobbying of their own then to protect local control, and news stories blossomed at the time. Ultimately, the effort failed.
The work since last fall has been decidedly more prosaic and includes two discussions in non-voting work sessions of the Planning Commission as the city and applicants grind through the many nuances of the structure itself on a steep property.
Planning Department reviews of plans have been outdated as soon as commission meetings begin, for instance, and the applicant shows revisions and asks for feedback. Details for lay people fly past as snowflakes in blizzards on I-80 with the arrival of atmospheric rivers.
What has emerged most visibly, so far as the view from Old Town is concerned, is the exterior height (lower than the current houses), the main building footprint (smaller than now), floor-to-ceiling windows that some critics worry will make the structure too bright, and a long, straight roofline of 117 feet that suggests more Silver King Mine structure than a quaint, historic mining town residence, even with a slight new revision aimed at breaking up the line.
But the main argument for the Planning Commission to settle is which rules apply to the proposal for a large family home overlooking the rest of Old Town.
The applicant team — based on previous meetings and suggested by detailed letters Pat Sweeney has sent to the city concerning the land including open space on Treasure Hill he and his brothers sold four decades ago to the city — is most likely to continue to make a case that guidelines and regulations governing this proposal should be applied to the Sweeney MPD and specific notes for the property, not the Old Town district that lies largely below.
Thus far, the Planning Department, which advises the Planning Commission, has used the mostly stricter codes of Old Town to find much of the proposal non-compliant in reviews of the evolving plan. The applicant team, for its part, has scaled down some of those plans in revisions it has shown the Planning Commission in the two work sessions. It is likely to show further revisions Wednesday night as well, based on feedback Jan. 24 and since then, including more ideas for breaking up the long roof.
Two dozen neighbors and other residents had written letters to the city as of Feb. 9, most in support and some in opposition. But a critic in a letter to the editor in the Saturday edition of The Park Record suggested other neighbors oppose the project who have not spoken up publicly. Wednesday night offers the first opportunity for community members to tell the Planning Commission their thoughts directly. Those who don’t opt instead for romantic dinners, that is.
The public has a chance to weigh in. The Planning Department will weigh in. The applicant team will weigh in. The planning commissioners will weigh in. And after all that weighing in, the Planning Commission may vote on the proposal. If there’s time left in the evening or new questions requiring research or further information don’t arise.
The list they will consider is long. But features of the building that stand out as decisions to work out have to do with the length of the roofline; whether the building footprint should include a below-grade parking area with room for fire trucks to turn around and a home office; questions relating to the steepness of the slope; and perhaps how to measure the interior height, which would affect the finished square footage and lower levels of the structure with two floors below grade. The latest revision of the plans shows nearly 7,500 square feet of finished space, and nearly 6,000 square feet of unfinished space to meet the interior height standard as measured from lowest finished space.
Perhaps, because this depends on which set of rules will be applied to the proposal, Old Town’s or the master planning district the address shares with the five other large homes, all with interior heights and other factors out of compliance with Old Town code without Planning Commission exceptions. This also is the case with the houses on the property now, as the applicant team asserted often in the work sessions.
The proposal is complicated, though not wildly more so than the other homes in the Sweeney MPD that never made the news, even the local news. The details, the questions, and the Planning Commission’s work here are all familiar ground for veterans in the business.
What’s different this time primarily is the notoriety and celebrity nature of the owners, their role in the community, and the knowledge among everyone that indeed the Legislature is in session into March and has a history of spot overrides of local control, around here including Dakota Pacific’s Tech Center, the Hideout annexation, and the Park City Film Studios. Not that this path for the Princes would be a sure thing when it has failed before.
Should be a lovely night, if not particularly romantic.