There is trouble in paradise. I don’t know if you saw the ad in Wednesday’s paper, but apparently all is not well within the rarified confines of The Colony. The Colony is one of those gated communities full of obscenely large homes clinging to unreasonably steep mountainsides. The access roads are hanging off cliffs, supported by very high retaining walls. It seems that some of the retaining walls have failed, causing the roads to slump down the side of the mountain. The developer (and the contractor, engineer, and others) have acknowledged there is a problem, and have moved in to make repairs. But as we all know, sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. The road repairs are moving slowly, and the construction has things pretty snarled. The mood in The Colony is apparently ugly.
Last week’s full-page ad featured photos of cracked pavement, torn-up streets, a parade of excavation equipment, mountains of orange traffic cones, and endless road construction with the noise, dust and delays. It’s just horrible. Life in The Colony has become just like life in the rest of Summit County, where we all deal with cracked pavement, torn-up streets, excavation equipment, traffic cones, and endless road construction with the noise, dust and delays. When life in our gated communities becomes as brutal as life in the “free-range” portions of the county, well, something is wrong. We can’t have our rich people suffering like the rest of us.
I’ve had an earful from a couple of past and present Colony owners. To hear their stories, you would think they were all up there, living like survivors of Hurricane Katrina, huddled in their 14,000-square-foot FEMA trailers, waiting for the helicopter to drop some brie and a good Chardonnay (chill it this time, please). The road conditions are such that they actually have to put their Range Rovers and Hummers into four-wheel drive and take them off pavement in places.
I tried to work up some sympathy for them. It has to be inconvenient and unpleasant living in a construction zone as every Summit County resident knows. Since Talisker bought United Park City Mines and began mountaintop removal strip mining, nobody can escape the sound of back-up beepers. Local toddlers can recognize a half dozen different makes of track-hoes and dump trucks.
But try as I might, I can’t shed a tear for the folks in The Colony. Part of it is the gate. Put up a gate that says you’re separate from the rest of the community and guess what you’re separate from the rest of the community. What happens behind the fortifications is their problem. But it’s more than the gate. There are just places that shouldn’t be hacked up for development. There are places that should have been left alone. When the only way to develop the property is to build roads with retaining walls that are three or four stories high, maybe it’s nature’s way of telling us that nothing should have been built there to begin with. The failing roads are karma.
At least there is a solvent developer and repairs are getting made. That’s inconvenient, but it sure beats the alternative of everybody going bankrupt and allowing the roads to fall off the mountain completely. The roads in The Colony failed sooner than expected. But this is a story that will play out in other locations where development has occurred on slopes that are too steep, and rely on retaining walls to hang the roads in places where there shouldn’t be roads at all. Eventually those walls will have to be replaced. There are some big HOA assessments looming out there. Watch them try to pawn the private road off on the city in about 20 years.
Earlier this week, I got a call from a neighbor that there were cattle in his front yard. I don’t have any cattle these days, but they still call me. This neighbor is pretty fussy about his yard. He catches the leaves as they fall and has them bagged up before they hit the ground. So, of course, the stray cattle gravitate to his house. It’s not enough for them to munch on his manicured lawn. When they have full bellies, they move on to the front porch and settle down for some serious cud chewing. They crap all over, producing ten times their body weight in manure every hour.
Based on the color of the ear tags, I figured out whose they were and called the owner. He sent out a couple of employees to round them up. I was eating dinner when I got a knock on the door. It was two Mexican cowboys. I’d met them before and knew they worked for the owner of the cattle.
Their English was far better than my Spanish, but conversation was still a little difficult. They were very polite, almost overly so, and apologetic about interrupting my dinner. But they weren’t sure they understood where the cattle were last seen. Could I help them? Explanations weren’t working, and it quickly became easier to get in the truck and drive around than try to describe where the cows were. Again, they were so polite and appreciative.
As we drove around, he pointed to a side road and said, “We went down there and didn’t find s#%t. Then we went that way and didn’t see s#%t.” Given the politeness of the conversation up to that point, I was a little surprised that the barnyard epithet was flying so freely. We drove around a bend, and there in the middle of the road was a fresh mound of, well, s#%t. The cowboys were quite happy to see it, and I realized that they were not being rude. When you’re in the business of looking for lost cows, stepping in a fresh pile of s#%t can be a good thing. It’s all a matter of perspective.
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs On Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for nearly 20 years.