Park City ends 2024 after a 12-month stretch that began to set a stage for the next decade or even longer.
Some of the most important news items of 2024 will not be fully understood until well into the 2030s, making the year somewhat unusual. Park City over the course of 2024 considered the future of Main Street, played a starring role in the talks about the long-term location of the Sundance Film Festival, and stood alongside Salt Lake City as a second Winter Olympics was awarded to the state.
The Top 5 news stories of 2024, as ranked by The Park Record:
5. A blue Election Day
The Park City area, solidly blue, has been a political outlier in Utah, one of the reddest states in the nation, for decades.
People brought their politics with them as they arrived in the community from Democratic strongholds like California and New York. Democrats control the County Courthouse and, although City Hall politics are nonpartisan, Park City’s elected officials have overwhelmingly leaned to the left in recent decades.
Park City-area Democrats, though, have not enjoyed the same success when they compete in Statehouse and congressional contests. The congressional election in 2024 was of special note for Park City, as two local Democrats carried the party’s banner into November. Caroline Gleich, a ski mountaineer and environmental activist, was the party’s candidate for Senate, while Glenn Wright, a former member of the Summit County Council, represented the Democrats in the 3rd Congressional District.
There was little chance either of them would win on Election Day. The statewide Senate electorate leans heavily Republican, as do the voters in the 3rd Congressional District. Gleich and Wright, as expected, suffered lopsided defeats in November.
John Curtis, a Republican congressman, routed Gleich to take the Senate seat. Republican state Sen. Mike Kennedy overwhelmed Wright to win the seat in the House of Representatives. Gleich and Wright performed well in Summit County and Grand County, but the results elsewhere illustrated the strength of the GOP in the state.
Even with the losses, the election highlighted the influence of the Park City area in statewide Democratic circles, with a small-population community having produced two congressional candidates in the same year.
Wright afterward said the unsuccessful congressional bid was his last campaign. Gleich indicated she planned to continue in an activist role.
4. Lots more to Deer Valley
There are development rights attached to the land where Deer Valley Resort’s primary parking lots are located, outside of Snow Park Lodge, and the resort by the start of 2024 had already been engaged in long-running talks with Park City officials about a project.
There seemed to be limited progress over the course of 2024, but even that sort of movement is notable given the importance of what will ultimately be a major development at the Snow Park base. Deer Valley envisions creating a full-service base area at Snow Park and building large garages to account for parking spots that are lost as the land is developed.
Deer Valley seemed to spend much of 2024 in discussions with various parties about the project rather than engaged with the Park City Planning Commission itself. There was chatter about a gondola system that is under consideration, information compiled about the broader transportation plan and discussion of a significant off-site workforce housing project related to the Snow Park development. A public-private partnership between City Hall and Deer Valley related to Snow Park also continued to progress.
“I think the gondola is a tremendous opportunity as a transportation strategy. And I’d like to see that pinned down to a more specific timeline, more specifically how that can accommodate, potentially, employee parking that’s coming from outside of the Park City limits, the hours of operation,” Planning Commissioner Henry Sigg said during an October meeting.
Late in the year, meanwhile, a 3rd District Court judge ruled partially in favor of City Hall in a lawsuit brought by several homeowners associations centered on Snow Park.
Snow Park will likely continue to be one of the key planning-related topics in Park City in 2025, but timelines and the precise definitions of progress are not clear.
3. A Main controversy
Main Street throughout the year is already one of Park City’s primary draws, attracting crowds of Parkites, visitors from the Wasatch Front and travelers arriving in the community from outside of Utah.
Some say the shopping, dining and entertainment strip could become even more popular with a series of improvements. Park City and Main Street spent much of 2024 crafting a vision designed to ensure the street remains competitive against outlying commercial districts. The concepts, if pursued in their entirety, would transform Main Street in the coming decade in ways that some may not have understood at the outset of the talks.
A committee seated by Park City leaders spent significant time in 2024 preparing a conceptual plan for public spaces along Main Street or in close proximity to the street. Concepts included the construction of new hotels, the opening of a grocery store and housing. The supporters see the improvements as adding vibrancy to the Main Street core that would boost the customer base and sales numbers.
The ambitious nature of the concepts, expectedly, stirred controversy as the wider community learned of the vision of the Main Street Area Plan. A hearing in late December highlighted division regarding the concepts. Main Street interests argued for the improvements while some of the other speakers without business ties to the street expressed concern.
Monty Coates, a Main Street businessperson, encouraged leaders to move ahead with the planning and work in the Main Street core.
“There’s so much investment in large-scale projects going on around us. We are excited to see the public spaces in the historic district get some needed attention,” he said.
Old Town resident John Stafsholt was one of the critics.
“There’s zero quality-of-life improvement for locals. There’s increased congestion,” he said.
The Park City Council at the late-December meeting decided to delay a decision, providing more time to consider the slate of improvements and extending the talks into 2025.
2. Film festival drama
The Sundance Film Festival drama typically is on screen each January.
This year, however, festival organizers wrote a cliffhanger into the script that stretched through much of 2024.
The Sundance Institute in April launched a process that could end with the relocation of the festival to another place, starting with the 2027 edition. Park City suddenly was forced into a competition with places across the country that were interested in nabbing the top marketplace of independent films in the U.S. and the most lucrative special event on the community’s calendar.
There was known to have been interest from large metropolitan areas like Atlanta and medium-sized places like Santa Fe, New Mexico. Park City and Salt Lake City mounted a combined effort, with the capital city tapped to play a wider role than it traditionally has held during the festival.
Sundance in September narrowed the field to three finalists: the combined effort between Park City and Salt Lake City, Boulder, Colorado, and Cincinnati, Ohio. Festival officials toured the potential locations, reviewed the bids and held talks with leaders in the communities. Precise details about the Park City-Salt Lake City bid, such as the total dollar figure and the screening split between the two places, are not known.
Sundance is expected to announce a decision sometime after the festival in 2025. The selection will almost certainly be one of the most closely watched items of the year, as a wide swath of the Park City-area economy and rank-and-file Parkites alike learn of the fate of the festival.
“As we move to the next phase in our search for a sustainable home for the Sundance Film Festival, we see great promise and potential in Boulder, Cincinnati, and Salt Lake/Park City,” Eugene Hernandez, the festival director, said in September. “Each has shown us the blend of exciting possibilities, values, and logistics needed to produce a vibrant, inviting, and inclusive Festival. We’re excited for a future Sundance that can discover, support, and inspire artists and audiences for the next 40 years.”
1. On track for 2034
There were many people still awake in Park City and elsewhere in the state in the overnight hours of July 24, fixated on what was occurring in Paris on the eve of the Summer Olympics in the French capital.
The International Olympic Committee, as was expected, awarded the 2034 Winter Olympics to Salt Lake City, prompting an outburst of excitement that stretched from the City of Light to the Beehive State. There had been talk of hosting a second Winter Olympics in the state since just after the Games in 2002 closed, and the selection followed several years of concentrated work toward that goal.
The Park City area will be critical to the Games in 2034, as was the case in 2002. Park City Mountain, Deer Valley Resort and the Utah Olympic Park are identified on the competition map. The area will also have outsized importance as plans are crafted for the Games transportation, security and celebrations.
The selection launched what will be nearly a decade of work for Park City as the community readies for the Games. Leaders in coming years will likely draft plans for infrastructure improvements that could benefit from any Olympic-related monies that may become available from Washington. They will also need to draft timelines for the actual preparations for the event. The Games will, essentially, have broad influence on the community’s work plan for nine-plus years.
Some of the effort started in Paris with several figures from the Park City area traveling to the Summer Olympics for fact-finding purposes, observing transportation systems and the security operations.
The work continued as 2024 ended, with one of the upcoming steps expected to involve disbanding the bid committee that successfully sought the Games and seating an organizing committee that will stage the event in 2034.
“Our venue communities are very, very important to us. And they will have a way to participate, for sure, in how we’re pulling the Games together,” Fraser Bullock, the president and CEO of the Salt Lake City-Utah Committee for the Games, said late in the year.