Park City leaders recently approved a set of restrictions designed to ensure the City Hall-owned Treasure hillside overlooking Old Town remains open space, a step that had been anticipated ever since the municipal government acquired the land in 2019 but one that stirred joy nonetheless.
The Park City Council OK’d the conservation easement that will regulate the land in perpetuity. There was a round of applause inside the City Council chambers after the unanimous vote. The vote capped a momentous week for Park City that also included the announcement of the Sundance Film Festival’s upcoming relocation to Colorado and Mayor Nann Worel’s statement during the State of the City address that she will not seek reelection in November.
Park City in the spring of 2019 finalized the acquisition of the 105-acre Treasure land, which is along the route of the Town Lift and provides a scenic backdrop to Old Town. The $64 million agreement with the Treasure partnership ended a hotly contested development dispute that stretched for years. It was, by a wide margin, the most expensive of City Hall’s open space acquisitions.
It was expected a conservation easement would be drafted to protect the land from development in perpetuity, as has been the case with many other municipal open space purchases, but the pandemic and the complexities unique to the ground pushed back the effort.
Under a conservation easement, the land remains with the owner, but the development rights are stripped from the acreage. A third party enforces the restrictions in a conservation easement. The Summit Land Conservancy will hold and enforce the easement. The group also holds conservation easements on other City Hall-owned open space.
The members of the City Council at the recent meeting continued to discuss the details of the language of the conservation easement, but appeared ready to approve the document even before the vote.
City Councilor Tana Toly described the decision as a long-awaited moment. The crafting of the easement followed an overwhelming 2018 voter approval of a ballot measure that provided most of the monies for the acquisition through a property-tax increase.
The elected officials received input in support of the approval of the conservation easement.
Cindy Matsumoto, a former member of the City Council, described that the conservation of Treasure should not be left to future officials at various levels of government or Park City Mountain.
“We cannot trust the ski resort, the next Planning Department, the next planning commission, the next City Council, the next state government or, for that matter, the next president of the United States to be the watchdog for Treasure Hill,” Matsumoto said as she described why she sees a need for Summit Land Conservancy to have authority to enforce the easement.
John Stafsholt, an Old Town activist who supported the acquisition, read the text of the 2018 ballot measure to the elected officials as he asked for the conservation easement to be approved.
“It’s now six years since that vote was made and the bond is already over one-third paid off. And we still don’t have the conservation in place, easement in place, that we voted for,” he said.
The acquisition brought an abrupt end to the long-running talks regarding the Treasure partnership’s concept to develop the land. There were concerns about the amount of development that was proposed, the height of the project, and the traffic it would attract to Old Town. The partnership made little progress in the discussions with the Park City Planning Commission before the city’s elected officials and the Treasure side began negotiations about a potential acquisition.
The recent round of discussions between City Hall and the Summit Land Conservancy centered on the precise wording of the conservation easement. There was attention to a section centered on the Park City Mountain lease of terrain that covers some of the Treasure acreage and the future of improvements there, including to the lift that serves the terrain.
The conservation easement will allow the skiing operations to continue, which had been anticipated. Summit Land Conservancy, though, will be noticed of any planned improvements and holds the authority to determine whether certain future proposals for the resort operations are allowed under the conservation easement. The organization does not hold that same authority if a proposal for a lift upgrade follows the same alignment of the current Town Lift.
The Summit Land Conservancy expects the conservation easement approved by the City Council to be signed by the mayor this week. The easement will then be recorded with the County Courthouse in a final step. A ribbon cutting could be scheduled in April.
Cheryl Fox, the CEO of the Summit Land Conservancy, in an interview described the Treasure hillside as standing with the McPolin Farm along the S.R. 224 entryway as the most iconic tracts of open space in Park City.
“The Summit Land Conservancy is honored to be the final step in the decades-long process,” she said.