The Summit County Council selected four commissioners to oversee the governing body of the newly established housing authority on Wednesday after a last-minute change upping the total number of commissioners from five to seven.
“The pool of candidates was so strong that that’s what motivated us to enlarge or increase the size of the board to seven so that we could pull in more of these great assets that we have in our community,” explained County Council Vice Chair Canice Harte.
Three of the commissioners — Harte, Tonja Hanson and Megan McKenna — are county councilors while the remaining four are appointed by the County Council to serve as at-large representatives for the community.
The County Council appointed Kristen Schulz, Jennifer Lewis, Joan Meixner and Rich Sonntag to fill the four open positions to make up the seven-person Board of Commissioners.
All four at-large commissioners have a background in housing, planning and development in some form: Schulz is the director of the Early Childhood Alliance, facilitated by the Park City Community Foundation; Lewis is a general contractor with personal experience working with and receiving help from housing authorities; Meixner is a commercial real estate agent; and Sonntag is a member of the Eastern Summit County Planning Commission.
Lewis, Meixner and Sonntag will serve on the board until Feb. 28, 2026, while Schulz will serve until Feb. 28, 2030.
The County Courthouse also recently hired Madlyn McDonough, a former planner and creative force behind the Community Planning Lab, as the county’s economic development and housing manager, a role that includes acting as the executive director of the housing authority. She will report directly to Economic Development and Housing Director Jeff Jones.
“Before I was a planner, I started as a teacher for seven years working in low-income schools in mostly urban areas, and that’s where I first got interested in the idea of how our planning decisions impact people’s trajectory in life, whether that’s access to housing, access to transportation, access to education,” McDonough said. “I was really interested when this position came up because it relates back to my original interest in planning, which was this idea of social justice. The lack of housing is really one of the biggest social justice crises of our time, so being able to work on that and make a real tangible change is something I’m excited about.”
McDonough said she doesn’t have any immediate goals for the housing authority because she’s focused on establishing it from the ground-up before working on any lofty ideas, but she encouraged the community to stay updated on development projects, the housing authority and the county’s two planning commissions.
“We’re looking for solutions that are going to be immediate, but a lot of them will be planning for 10, 20, 30 years in the future,” she said. “These are big overarching goals and policies that will impact the community for a long time to come. That’s hard to wrap your head around a lot of the time because this is change that’s going to be impacting the next generations just as much as anyone today. … That long-term lens is something that sometimes gets overlooked until a project is about to be approved or about to be built, and at that point, it’s a little bit late to be joining the conversation.”
The housing authority’s goal is to provide medium- to low-income residents with resources to find housing within their price range in addition to tracking housing trends throughout the county and incentivizing moderate-income housing, particularly on the East Side.
The County Council and the Park City Council explored the creation of a joint housing authority in 2023 and allocated $500,000 for the project. Those efforts stalled, however, and the County Courthouse decided to pursue its own housing authority with a smaller $250,000 budget.
The housing authority will mostly serve as a resource to Summit County residents and the County Courthouse as it navigates development and growth. It will not necessarily be in charge of land use decisions or authorizing development projects. Instead, the housing authority will work with other nonprofits, developers and landlords to provide and incentivize affordable housing units.
The housing authority board has not yet scheduled its inaugural meeting.