Tuesday is election day, and frankly it can’t be over with soon enough. The Park City election has generated a lot of heat and very little light.
I can’t vote, so I haven’t studied things all that much. If I could vote, I would vote for the candidates I know personally for no better reason than that. I suspect that your decisions might largely hinge on that factor as well.
Of course, the problem with the city election is that the problems we all want solved are more or less unsolvable.
The figures from Summit County are that 15,000 workers migrate into Summit County every day. A fair number of them stop at Kimball Junction/Canyons and maybe 12,000 continue into Park City proper. The result is the traffic mess that we all hate (while contributing to it driving our own cars on our own errands).
Can we build enough affordable housing to make a material dent in that? That seems unlikely given the scarcity of vacant land. And each new development seems to need some supporting commercial with it, so if we could build housing for a couple of thousand workers, we also bite off building schools, grocery stores, clinics, and all the other businesses that regular people need to maintain regular life.
The county is spending $128 million on bus lanes along part of S.R. 224 for special rapid transit buses on the theory that some portion of those 12,000 daily migrants will park their cars (somewhere) and switch to the bus for the last several miles.
People who know far more about public transit than I ever want to seem to think it will work. The bar for “work” is something on the order of a 5% to 10% reduction in cars on the road. That’s enough to notice, but not enough to solve Kimball Junction, Quinns, or Silver Creek Junction where the off ramp to U.S. 40 now backs up to the fieldhouse or farther every morning.
The neighbors are having conniptions about a plan to build 201 units — 34 market and 167 affordable — on 10 acres at Clark Ranch. To make a material dent in that daily commute, 167 units doesn’t move the needle very far. Add in 99 affordable units at EngineHouse, and it might make a slight dent in that 12,000 commuter count.
That doesn’t mean the city shouldn’t keep trying, but the battle is lost. We’re into a kind of triage mode, seeing if we can cut our losses. While continuing to approve commercial projects that require more employees who have no place to live.
What I’d like to see at City Hall is a meaningful collaboration with other jurisdictions and the ski resorts. Park City Mountain is essential to the community as a whole. The business straddles two jurisdictions, and there doesn’t seem to be a unified approach to looking after community needs.
Vail Resorts’ management seems reluctant to engage with the city or county in any serious way, and the proposed lift replacements at the Park City Mountain base a few years ago left both sides hoist on their own petards. But making Park City Mountain something better than a dead last in the top 30 ski resort rankings seems important.
The more interesting election is the West Hills incorporation. Using a stupid statute adopted by our stupid Legislature, a group of property owners there have petitioned to create a “provisional city.” The state concluded that it is “viable,” applying a very low standard, and the residents in the area were supposed to vote on the proposal Tuesday.
There were 47 registered voters to begin with, and now there are close to 100. With an electorate that small, it doesn’t take much to steal an election, and either side (or both) can get their extended family or friends to come and live in the basement for 30 days and register to vote. There are rumors of camper trailers loaded with new voters.
To complicate it, the election has been on again, off again several times as it churns through the courts. The Third District Court found the statute unconstitutional. The Utah Supremes heard arguments, but aren’t going to rule by Tuesday. I honestly can’t tell if the election is on or off, but either way, the outcomes will be highly suspect, given the uncertainty.
The county zoning on the West Hills is very restrictive, not because it is such special land that it must remain untouched, but because there is no infrastructure there. No water system, no fire hydrants, no sewage treatment.
As best I can tell, there also isn’t a plan for any of that in the current proposal. Under the provisional city statute, the developer gets to write his own zoning laws, plat lots all over creation without providing for schools and public service facilities, and then, after deciding that it is not really going to work, pull the plug. It all then gets dumped on the county, with the developer-written zoning intact, and becomes all of our problem to fix.
The neighbors in Garff Ranches moved there because they chose to live on 40 acre tracts with privately built and maintained roads, sketchy public services, and frontier living. They aren’t wild about the idea of having “son of Daybreak” plotzed down next to them. So keep an eye on that one. It isn’t over on Tuesday.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.