Retired television producer Bob Sertner said his love of Park City and his ability to find common ground to make things happen prompted him to seek public office.
Sertner is among the nine candidates seeking election to one of the three open seats on the Park City Council.
“Park City is on the verge of what I call a tsunami of growth and development that’s going to radically change the city,” Sertner said. “If we don’t get ahead of it, it’s going to roll right over us. For 40 years, I developed a set of skills as a television producer that are exactly what Park City needs right now to help bolster ourselves against that tsunami.”
Those skills include the ability to solve complicated puzzles with a focus on the big picture and to bring people together, he said.
Another motivation to run was his disgust with “the national dialogue of hatred and division” and his desire to effect positive outcomes at the local level, Sertner said.
Sertner, 67, grew up in Dallas and earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration, specifically statistics and computer-based operations research, with a minor in drama from the University of Texas in Austin. On a whim, he moved to Los Angeles and worked as an executive producer of television movies and scripted dramas for 40 years.
In 2003, Sertner and his partner bought a home in upper Deer Valley. After the COVID pandemic started, he decided to retire from the entertainment field and has lived full-time in Park City since 2020.
Sertner serves on the LGBTQ+ Task force in the community and on a City Hall committee that is studying options for municipal land off the Kearns Boulevard-Bonanza Drive intersection, which has been discussed as a possible site for an arts and culture district.
He is fiscally conservative and socially moderate, a change from the beginning of the AIDS decade, when activists had to make a lot of noise to get attention, Sertner said. He discovered he had the ability to swoop in behind those activists and find common ground with politicians to make things happen, he said.
“I haven’t always considered myself a centrist, but I think that both the far left and the far right have currently lost their minds,” Sertner said. “And that’s a problem, because we need both conservative and progressive voices at the table. It’s only by having a healthy debate among all parties that a strong path forward for Park City can emerge.”
The biggest issue for Sertner is the need for Park City to develop a long-range plan and decide “who we are as a city.”
“Are we a resort community who caters to visitors or are we a community that really wants to take care of locals first? I don’t think it’s an either/or. I think it’s a yes/and, but we have to figure out what the priorities are and how we make it all work,” he said.
Sertner said Park City, which has a population of approximately 8,500, needs to consider how many more people it can support living in the town through workforce housing and who should have that option.
“How much of that apartment and condo-style housing do we want as a percentage of the whole affordable housing puzzle?” Sertner said. “I think we’re leaning too heavily on that percentage. We have to move more to the middle. The middle being, support and nurture and encourage the middle class and look hard at the critical workforce, which is police, fire, nurses, teachers. How are we making sure they can live and work in the city they’re supporting?”
Another big-picture question is how much of the housing problem Park City can solve and how much must be solved on a regional level with Summit County and Wasatch County or on the statewide level, he said.
The housing issue is tied in with the transportation challenge, according to Sertner.
“We have 12,000 to 15,000 commuters that come into the city every day,” he said. “How much of that community workforce can we house? We can’t build our way out of this challenge. We can’t house them all so we’ve got to solve the transportation challenges of how we bring them into our city efficiently.”
To address those challenges, Sertner said he wants to have large park-and-ride lots off Interstate 40 and U.S. 80, with buses to take commuters into town. That system was successfully used in the Park City area during the 2002 Winter Olympics, he said.
Sertner believes the Olympics are going to return to Utah and said Park City should be looking into upgrading its electric and communications infrastructures, which would set up the municipality to be an even more successful town. The 2002 games put Park City on the map as an international ski destination and the upcoming Olympics could showcase the town as a “climate positive destination,” he said.
“Park City is already pretty green and an amazing, forward-thinking place in that sense,” Sertner said. “I think we can take it even further and advertise ourselves as that. The world is heating up as we’re facing the reality of what we’re doing to the planet. If we can come up with another thing to tout about ourselves, then we can expand the economic base of Park City in another way.”
Sertner said there’s no easy answer about what to do about the shortage of child care options in Park City. He noted it has become a bigger percentage of parents’ budgets and said the city should work to figure out a long-term solution.
“There may be a way to look at local businesses and say how do we help them provide more employee benefit,” he said. “The city could step up and give it as an employee benefit to its employees. With all the growth coming at us, it’s going to be harder and harder to find and retain employees. I think child care is going to become a critical issue in that conversation.”
Sertner said as a fiscal conservative, he is staying neutral on a proposed general obligation bond that would fund recreation improvements including pickleball courts, an outdoor ice sheet and expanded fitness space. Voters will decide whether to approve the bond.
The other candidates running for a council seat are Bill Ciraco, incumbent Ryan Dickey, David Dobkin, John Greenfield, Matthew Nagie, Ed Parigian, Betsy Wallace and Jody Whitesides. Incumbents Max Doilney and Becca Gerber are not seeking reelection.
A Sept. 5 primary will narrow the field of nine council hopefuls to the six top vote-getters, who will advance to a Nov. 21 general election. The three candidates who get the most votes in that election will take office in January and serve a four-year term.
Voters will get to vote for three candidates in both the primary and the general election because there are three open seats. State law requires that a primary be held if more than twice the number of candidates file to run than are to be elected. The election is nonpartisan.