The Summit County Council postponed a vote on a proposed ordinance that would change how the county rezones properties in the Snyderville Basin after councilors and residents expressed concerns about unintended consequences and the potential for state interference in local land use issues.
Developers currently need to provide “construction-level drawings” to the county Planning Department before requesting a rezone for a property. However, the Snyderville Basin is largely zoned for low-density neighborhoods, which means developers need to rezone properties to build apartment complexes, mixed-use buildings or other large-scale projects.
Community Development Director Peter Barnes previously told the County Council the necessary level of detail, such as the exact placement of mailboxes, often costs companies millions of dollars. He speculated that developers are less likely to change site plans using feedback from county officials or residents when so much time and effort have already been spent engineering the project.
As a solution, Barnes proposed an ordinance that would change the requirements and process for obtaining a rezone. The drafted document outlines the creation of a “concept development plan,” which developers would need to submit along with their request. The plan would include information on density, land use, open space and traffic, with public hearings scheduled during Snyderville Basin Planning Commission and County Council meetings to take input from community members.
If the County Council liked the proposal after the public hearings, councilors would vote in favor of the rezone, which would then trigger negotiations between the county and the company to create a legally binding development agreement.
“Applying for a rezone is the most complex process we do,” Barnes said. “Changing this process doesn’t make the workload any easier, but hopefully it makes it less abortive, less wasteful and much more efficient for all concerned, including the county, members of the staff and the public.”
Barnes said it’s possible the proposed change could make it easier for developers to build affordable housing in Summit County because costs up front would be lower. It could also make it easier for developers to amend aspects of a project that the County Council or residents dislike because public conversations about the proposal would be held before developers create a fully engineered site plan.
“When the plan is changed, when we decide to go from 10 units to nine units, or we decide to relocate an access road, all of that civil engineering drawing has to be re-reviewed,” Barnes said. “Every one of those projects goes back out to a service provider for a re-review. It involves a huge amount of time, energy, effort and money. … The ability to change is far greater earlier than later.”
Residents say proposal benefits developers, not locals
However, Snyderville Basin residents largely opposed the proposal at a public hearing for the ordinance last week, with several community members voicing concerns that the change would benefit developers more than locals.
Thomas Cooke, a former Snyderville Basin planning commissioner, said he understood the appeal of the ordinance for housing advocates, but he didn’t think the proposal would help the county direct or control growth.
“Applying for a rezone should be the most challenging and complex process there is. That assumption should be a feature, not a bug,” Cooke said. “The problem is the community never gets what they see in the pretty pictures, so that’s one of my concerns with frontloading this process.”
Sophie Karp, who also spoke at the public hearing, urged the County Council to vote against the ordinance because she thought it didn’t have enough guardrails to protect the county. She called the proposal a “significant reduction in (County) Council control” and said she was nervous the ordinance would shift oversight from elected officials to administrative county employees.
“The devil is in the details,” Karp said. “We all know a lot of abuse can happen when unelected personnel make decisions instead of elected officials who are accountable to voters. … You should absolutely reject this.”
Nic Norsk echoed Karp’s fears, saying the County Council should avoid creating “new legislation with hubris” and should instead focus on ensuring the county is protected, with specific guardrails and enforcement measures in place. He also said the Summit County community is largely unempathetic toward developers who are spending millions of dollars on a project.
“I think it makes everything easier for the development community, and I think they’re salivating about this,” agreed resident Kathy Mears, who also spoke during the hearing. “I think it minimizes public input from the start, even though you say it’s there. I really think the public has to be able to look at more than just a concept.”
Affordable housing advocates support flipping the process
However, not every speaker opposed the ordinance.
Tony Tyler, a partner with Columbus Pacific Development and a longtime Summit County resident, said the county’s approach to rezone requests works in theory, but not in practice. He pointed out that the Snyderville Basin General Plan, which outlines how the county should direct growth, encourages the County Council to use rezone requests to ensure projects are placed in appropriate areas of the Basin.
“You have a General Plan that dictates, from a dream perspective, what the residents are looking for in the community, and the zoning map does not follow that dream,” Tyler told councilors. “By the time (a project) gets to you, it’s fully baked. If you want to change something, it could take months, if not years, to redo it to get it back up to the same standard again. The ‘why’ is less about the community concern and more about what’s happening in real life today in Summit County. We haven’t had rezones occur. If you’re looking at the reason why, this is it.”
Tyler said residents often don’t understand the difference between the county’s zoning map, which shows how land is zoned today, and the General Plan, which shows how the county hopes to use the land in the future. He said the General Plan should take precedence over the zoning map, and the General Plan prefers that developers request a rezone.
“(Properties are) not being rezoned because the process itself is incredibly cumbersome for smaller companies, smaller individuals to take on that challenge of a rezone, even if it’s a use that appears to be clearly defined in the General Plan,” Tyler said.
He added there’s a common misconception that the County Council has continuously approved rezone requests or new developments. In reality, he said, the only rezone request the County Council has recently approved was the Lincoln Station neighborhood on Bitner Road. All other ongoing developments in the county were greenlit and entitled in the 1990s or early 2000s.
Tyler agreed with Barnes’ hypothesis that the price of a rezone request in Summit County causes developers to petition the state for relief instead of working with local officials. He said most developers would likely walk away from a project if it were in its early stages and received a lot of community pushback, but abandoning a proposal doesn’t feel financially feasible if thousands of dollars have already been spent.
“I fundamentally believe that what people like me are trying to do is something good for the community,” Tyler said. “This doesn’t make the process easier. It makes it more efficient up front so that you can come in and say, ‘Here’s my concept. Do you like it?’”
Summit County Housing Authority Vice Chair Rich Sonntag advocated for the ordinance and the possibility for it to decrease affordable housing barriers. Mountainlands Community Housing Trust Executive Director Jason Glidden agreed.
“As a nonprofit that’s limited on resources and trying to develop affordable housing, every dollar counts,” Glidden said. “When you’re going through a process that requires you to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars with the risk that you won’t even get an approval for it, for an organization like ours, we can’t take that risk.”
Glidden said the change would likely make affordable housing less expensive for taxpayers, too, because developers wouldn’t need to ask the county for extra funding to include a higher percentage of affordable units if they didn’t need to spend thousands of dollars on design first.
“It’s really important that we look for these efficiencies to help to create housing affordability, and I think that this does this,” Glidden said. “By doing this and making this change, you’re actually helping to lower the cost for us as an affordable housing developer.”
County councilors nervous about state interference
County Councilor Chris Robinson said he still had some reservations about the ordinance, echoing speakers’ statements about wanting to install more guardrails, but he thought the disconnect between the General Plan and how the county approaches rezone requests likely encourages the state to get involved in local issues more often.
“We are exposing ourselves to higher powers that do not believe that we are acting in good faith because we have a general plan that says you ought to be able to do this, but we don’t tell anybody whether we’d ever allow it until the very end, and they’ve spent years and a lot of money,” he said.
County Councilor Tonja Hanson referenced Altus Park City, formerly known as the Dakota Pacific project in Kimball Junction, and similarly said a change in how much it costs companies to request a rezone could relieve some of the tension between local officials and the state Legislature.
“I like that idea of moving that financial burden to a different place in the process so that we can eliminate some of that undue pressure on us,” she said.
County Councilor Megan McKenna firmly supported the ordinance, saying she valued the Planning Commission’s unanimous positive recommendation and that she believes the change would encourage developers to build smaller affordable housing projects.
“Zone reform is often the No. 1 tool that comes up in thoughtfully and effectively addressing affordability when it comes to housing,” McKenna said. “The current process right now really favors large developers because they’re the ones who have the biggest profit margins. They can take that risk, and they also have that power or those relationships at the state.”
Meanwhile, County Council Vice Chair Roger Armstrong decried the county’s attempts to lower housing costs by increasing the housing supply, saying the creation of market rate units each time new affordable units are built only worsens congestion without making a dent in the “housing problem” itself.
“It feels like a big correction, not a small correction,” he said. “Chasing housing without a plan is a recipe for development on the scale that you see in Wasatch County. … I choose to keep Summit County and Park City as close to the same way as I found it, not making drastic changes to it to increase housing. I support affordable housing, but I want to know how much we’re going to build. I don’t want 10,000 more units and 30,000 more people.”
Armstrong suggested establishing a “preproposal process” with a public hearing to give community members a chance to comment on potential developments without changing the rezone process.
“I don’t think our zoning process is broken,” he said. “I think a rezone should be hard. … What I don’t want to see is a line out the door for rezones. That’s the problem with making changes.”
County Council Chair Canice Harte said he was “skeptical” of the ordinance when Barnes first proposed it, largely because of his own concerns surrounding the state’s involvement in local issues. He said he wants to ensure protections in place for the county in the ordinance before the County Council considers its approval.
“Regardless of what we write in here, the reality is the end result is often different than what our rules are that we set up, so we have to contemplate the ‘what if’ when we’re creating policy and creating code. We’re trying to mitigate these potential negatives, not prevent a rezone,” Harte said. “We have to be careful about the vehicles we create that the state can weaponize.”
The County Council plans to revisit, and possibly vote on, the ordinance early next month.