“Not every town is like this, is it? Mean like this?” The longtimer asking in a phone conversation meant other ski communities where I have been lucky enough to live and work.
It’s been a minute since Conde Nast dubbed Park City the friendliest city in America in 2015, and Forbes called us the friendliest of all ski towns a handful of years before that.
Has the mirror turned funhouse? Now we’re some kind of horror hall of mirrors? When did all the good feeling go sour and wilt? What happened to us?
This isn’t me asking. I only just reached my three-year anniversary at The Park Record. My daughter just had the perfect wedding at Sundance over Labor Day weekend. I’m still on a high with my dream job and a terrific crew, fun-loving while serious about the work. I love this place and the people here more than anything. For me, there’s nowhere better than Park City.
But I knew what my caller was saying. I’ve heard it often enough over the years at my various stops. This conversation concerned the 5-acre site.
I overlook that postage stamp from my office. Daily, I make the turns in and out on the terrible intersection at all hours, during the peak commute and when you can drive just as fast as you dare. I know what three-story buildings in the flats look like, trees poking higher. I know what actual density is. I have an understanding of Park City’s demographic trends and the antidote, that tough seed for fat starlings to swallow.
“This is nothing,” I told my caller. “All the ski towns are like this.”
Aspen, the angriest, has the most obvious solution to its aging bridge in and out of the city that clogs traffic like Park City will never see. About half a century so far has passed bitterly as citizens fight over doing anything but the solution straight across a small gorge, which the state of Colorado will solve for them eventually. Hourlong bumper to bumper downtown doesn’t abate much all the way down to Glenwood Springs 40 miles away. The bus really does work best there. It’s all that’s left, save a train.
Vail went through a bare-knuckles referendum over whether to build a 100-foot-high condo-hotel building beside I-70 and then promptly forgot all about it once it blocked freeway noise and the plaza became another well-used gathering space bedecked with two stories of stores, restaurants and a cool dine-in movie theater that closed during the Covid pandemic.
Every “world-class” ski town suffers from what the Eagles song “The Last Resort” says about paradise.
The only thing worse is all the communities that remained impoverished. I’ve worked and lived in some of those, too. Logging towns in spotted owl country, the Rust Belt where factories relocated away.
A big difference is there are more retired lawyers and type A moguls in ski towns who have bored themselves silly in a few years of golfing and skiing. This works for and against a community. A lot for the good, considering the charitable work and fundraising. But they’ve pushed out regular folk who make a town, even a tourist town, tick.
We forget amid our rhetoric about unity that a community is really an amalgam of cliques. Greater nuggets swirl and coalesce in political episodes, such as around the plans for the 5-acre site owned by the city, and break apart. Among these are catalysts, often enough retirees who need a cause, but also the inevitable advocates operating in and below public view.
This also is every town, but especially ski towns where there is more wealth, more cleverness, more confidence and more free time to expend somewhere. This tends to show up in, um, spirited debate over comparatively small matters, not to mention ridiculous lawsuits.
The length of delay and dithering over 5 acres next to a corner whose main traffic problem is Snow Park stands out. The level of utter BS has grown remarkable, threatening to drown out more rational reasons to scrutinize this plan.
But the swift shifts of community sentiment from supporting an arts and culture district to not so much, and being for affordable housing on the site before being against it, along with opposing anything, everything even reasonable — well, that shouldn’t be surprising. Not here.
It’s not even bad. Frustrating, yes. Time consuming, for sure. And there’s no guarantee that delaying as long as Park City has with the 5 acres alone will result in that perfect use of the land, a sliver of the greater Bonanza Park aching for revitalization.
But this does reflect the high level of civic care residents take with these decisions. They don’t everywhere.
You’d like people to cooly trade ideas, including challenging the conclusions of others from the facts, over making stuff up and disparaging others. There’s the low, mean side, being rough with each other as has happened in this rumble.
I will take this every time over that terrible roar of silence, though. We may not always be so kind to one another. But we sure do care. This is home.
Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.