For his successors retiring Summit County Commissioner Ken Woolstenhulme has one piece of advice.
“I would say the formula for failure in public service is to try and please everyone,” Woolstenhulme said in an interview Monday at a diner in Oakley.
Most of his life has been spent in this South Summit hamlet where Woolstenhulme, a Democrat, has had stints as mayor, councilman and a school board member.
Woolstenhulme began his first stint as a Summit County commissioner in the 1960s when the area’s first planning commission was formed.
“We were dealing then with Summit Park, and Silver Creek was just beginning,” Woolstenhulme said.
Before retiring in 1971 to become the U.S. postmaster in Oakley, he served on the County Commission at the time of the “gentlemen’s agreement.”
“That just meant that one person in North Summit was elected, one from South Summit and one person from Park City was elected to the County Commission,” Woolstenhulme explained.
But today most of the people in Summit County live in the Snyderville Basin and future elected officials could be mostly westsiders.
“The population is over there,” Woolstenhulme said.
His fiery, conservative approach to politics often put Woolstenhulme at odds with his more liberal County Commission colleagues.
He was born Nov. 30, 1930, in the midst of the Great Depression, which is the direction he sees the economy headed today.
“We have to be worried, we have to be concerned about it,” Woolstenhulme said about the current economic recession. “This thing is going to go on; it’s going to get worse.”
The economy in Park City was slumping in the 1960s when mining activity was nearly nonexistent, Woolstenhulme said.
He recalled a meeting he attended as a commissioner with Treasure Mountain resort officials in the 1970s at a hotel in Salt Lake City where drawings of the future Park City Mountain Resort were presented.
“We looked at that and just shook our heads, wondered how in the heck it would ever happen It happened and far exceeded what they had drawn up,” Woolstenhulme said about the growth of the ski industry in Summit County. “It’s far surpassed anything that we thought.”
Woolstenhulme’s latest County Commission term began in 2003 and ends in January when the new Summit County Council is sworn in.
Woolstenhulme said he regrets that he was unable to help facilitate construction of a golf course at The Canyons in the past six years.
“It was to the county’s advantage, supposedly, to get involved in trying to promote the golf course because The Canyons is less than 50 percent built out. There is considerable tax base over there and with the golf course there, it could raise tax dollars, both sales and property tax,” Woolstenhulme said. “But it doesn’t seem any closer today than it was six years ago.”
The nearly 25 landowners surrounding the ski resort are unable to get along well enough to move development at The Canyons forward, he said.
“There have been so many involved in The Canyons that they’re always looking over their shoulder at the other guy thinking they’re going to get taken advantage of,” Woolstenhulme said. “It has cost the county hundreds of thousands of dollars for outside attorneys to deal with these things.”
Meanwhile, he lamented that, even in local politics, God is being removed from the public square.
“I’m a firm believer that we were put here on the Earth for a purpose,” Woolstenhulme said. “I believe in a Supreme Being and, as a society, we need to recognize God and show more respect in that direction.”
He considers his greatest political accomplishments in the town of Oakley where he participated in decisions that led to development of a rodeo grounds, public park and high-quality municipal water system.
“I’m mighty proud of what Oakley has done,” Woolstenhulme said.
By becoming cities, the heavily populated Snyderville Basin could similarly benefit, Woolstenhulme said, suggesting that unincorporated areas of western Summit County incorporate.
“It could be one city, or two or three cities,” he said. “The people over there need to govern themselves.”