The Park City Rotary Club on Tuesday celebrated those in the community who have made Park City a better place to live.
One was Rhonda Sideris. For her professional contributions to the area’s lodging and hospitality industries, Sideris won the Linda Singer-Berrett Professional Citizen of the Year Award, named for the club’s first female president.
The Rotary each year forms a committee to decide who will receive the awards. The club gave the honors during its weekly meeting at the Sheraton Park City on Sidewinder. Rotarians took turns tallying Sideris’ successes over the years.
Sideris started R&R Properties, now Park City Lodging, 42 years ago. The business manages about 230 vacation rental properties and 12 homeowners associations. Her history is also the story of modern-day Park City itself, said Christian Loredo, chair of the Rotary’s awards committee.
She’s served in leadership roles with the Park City Chamber/Bureau, the Main Street Merchant Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Businesses Committee and numerous other community organizations that have made Park City into the ski and tourism-focused destination it is today, Loredo said.
That’s in addition to running a business that itself was key to that effort.
“Rhonda didn’t simply build a successful company. She helped build Park City,” Loredo said.
Tonja Hanson, Rotarian and Summit County councilor, echoed the sentiment. When Sideris rolled into Park City in the mid ’70s, the town was in an identity crisis, Hanson said.
“Miners on one side, hippies on the other,” she said.
That was a transitional time, and Sideris helped steer the town for more than 50 years, Hanson said.
“And let’s be honest,” Hanson added, “our city has spent most of that time just trying to keep up.”
Rotarian Hans Fuegi, who nominated Sideris for the award, said much of Sideris’ success is due to maintaining a terrific and loyal workforce.
“Property management is very, very demanding,” Fuegi said. “Rhonda has become a pillar of this community. … That’s what prompted me to nominate her as professional citizen of the year, which she more than deserves. Congratulations.”
Sideris said she was surprised to win. She made sure they hadn’t told the wrong person.
“I can’t believe the support,” she said. “I’m totally taken aback. … That’s what makes this community so great is that anybody can do anything as long as you try really hard.”
Though that might have been easier back in the day, she said, when people were more willing to extend credit.
“The town was small back then,” she said. “Less than a thousand people here, so everybody knew each other. To be afforded the opportunities I was afforded, that was pretty amazing.”
She came to town in 1976, when she was 21, before what would be Park City Mountain Resort, then called Treasure Mountain, opened. There was no snow, no skiing, she said. She used to visit Desert Industries in Salt Lake City to buy wool pants to ice skate at a Silver Creek pond.
“We just did what we could, you know?” she said.
Eventually the skiing started, and then summer came, and she realized she was in love with the area. Besides Park City Lodging, she opened Rockin’ Rhonda’s Hard Rock Cafe on Main Street, operated a catering business and worked as a whitewater rafting guide in Colorado. She was even a bull rider in Park City, earning her the nickname Rodeo Queen.
She started working in lodging on a bit of a lark. She was working for Bill Coleman at Coleman Land Company as a receptionist, making five bucks an hour while also washing dishes at Mileti’s, a now-defunct Italian restaurant on Main.
“I had a friend say, ‘Hey, I want to rent a palace in Deer Valley, and I only want to spend $1,200 a month,’” Sideris said.
Working in real estate, she found a place for $1,500. She called him back with a pitch: Take the place, rent furniture and then I’ll rent it out when you’re not there.
The business just snowballed, she said. While Sideris was catering a party, someone asked for her help managing homes they owned. She said yes, worked out of her house until the phone rang so much it kept her up. She got an office for $220 a month, where The Nelson Cottage by High West Distillery is now.
“I just kept going,” she said.
It was not uncommon to get phone calls in the night from renters asking for this or that. She answered. She ran the business in the way that made sense to her: people first.
In fact, Sideris credited her success with small-town kindness. Help your employees and do what’s right. Be empathetic.
“Just be nice, you know?” she said. “Be nice. Don’t yell. Not one employee has ever heard me yell.”
And if you have to ask if something’s right, that’s how you know it’s wrong.
“Don’t ever have to wonder if you did the right thing,” she said.
Cheryl Soshnik won the Jack C. Green Volunteer Citizen of the Year Award, named after Park City’s mayor from 1978-86. See the accompanying story at swiftcharge.net.