I recently attended the Park City Council’s town hall on planning for the Park Meadows area, one of several planning areas that divide the city into geographic communities. I came away convinced that the city is not serious about enabling the public to influence its planning in any material way.
There was actually no meeting and no attempt to find community consensus. Instead, our “opinions and ideas” were reduced mostly to pasting blue dots on lists of predetermined categories or sticking Post-It notes on a panel.
There was nothing in the predetermined categories to seek opinions about fire protection, nothing on public safety, nothing on street improvements, and nothing helping to identify ways the city could reduce waste or improve its use of public funds raised through our taxes.
It seems clear that the city wants to create an illusion of public concern and influence before proceeding with its own agenda, which, based on the category lists, is skewed away from doing a good job of providing basic services.
As a case in point of our city’s misaligned priorities, our public seem not to be serious about their responsibility for fire safety. According to Section 14-4-10 of the Park City Municipal Code, the city “requires property owners to mark, uncover and remove accumulated snow and windrows of snow from over and around fire hydrants located at the perimeter of the owner’s property” within 72 hours.
This provision is totally unworkable in a town such as ours. Many owners are not full-time residents, many hydrants are placed between two properties so that responsibility for snow removal is not clear, and fire hydrants serve multiple properties so that assigning the responsibility and expense to any single one of them does not make sense.
Suppose my house burns down because a neighbor had not cleared access to a nearby hydrant that was buried by one of the city’s snow plows. Who is responsible?
The only sensible solution it for the city to take full responsibility for clearing the access. I get that public officials gain no prestige or glamor by focusing on basic services first, but that it what the public deserves.
Richard Smith
Park City