The potguts have hibernated already, which can only mean one thing — it’s election season. Actually, the potguts hibernated about two weeks ahead of schedule in my area, and I don’t know if that means an early winter or, maybe, they are just as fat as they are going to get, so there was nothing left to do but sleep it off for 10 months.
For people inside incorporated cities, the primary election is Tuesday. Mail-in ballots should be in the mail by now if you want them counted. If you haven’t mailed them, find a drop box and hand deliver your ballot. The Legislature keeps tinkering with the process, and it’s different this year.
Looking around the area, there are primaries in some municipalities, and not in others. Where there are primaries, there has been a lot of interest.
Francis is tied up in knots over two hotel approvals. Why anybody wants to build a hotel in Francis is beyond me. The town can’t support a gas station, but developers think there is demand for not one, but two hotels. The zoning allows it, but there are enough ambiguities in the code that both hotel projects are in litigation or appeals. There is a whole lot of dirt being moved at both locations even though approvals aren’t final. Needless to say, growth is the key issue in the election.
Park City’s election drew a lot of interest for two council seats. There isn’t a primary in the mayor’s race. It’s been interesting hearing friends who live in town strategize on which combinations of people to vote for. Electing Ryan Dickey as mayor vacates his current council seat, meaning that a majority of the council could be new. That seems to appeal to some people.
The overriding issue seems to be a frustration with the inability to get things done. Of course, that’s complicated because there isn’t a real consensus in town about what should be done, and about what things.
Somebody should do something. But who and what? More affordable housing, but no more traffic. A train from Richardson Flat, but only as long as it isn’t on the Rail Trail (where there was a train for about 100 years), or on the 248 right of way, or anywhere that it can be seen, and somebody else pays for it. And only as long as other people ride it and I don’t.
We have to do something about traffic, but not if it takes widening the two highways into town. Those proposed extra bus lanes are ugly. Satellite parking lots are great as long as they aren’t where anybody can see them.
And why are we trying to pack more people into town anyway? Is there anybody out there asking for longer lift lines at the resorts?
The foundational issue is that Park City seems to be adrift, without a consensus vision of what it wants to be in the next 25 or 30 years. The Olympics will happen, but it’s stupid to plan everything around a brief event.
Worse than lacking a vision, the forces shaping Park City are almost all outside of the city. Growth in Hideout, Summit County, Wasatch County, and MIDA/East Pillage are a much bigger factor than whether the Yarrow gets redeveloped or the city-caused blight at Bonanza Park gets turned into something else.
The vision that my generation had of Park City came to fruition, perhaps with consequences we didn’t anticipate and aren’t completely happy with. But the defunct mining town became a really appealing, successful resort because that’s what the town wanted.
A new generation has emerged, and new residents arrived. Very few of the people who live in Park City make their living in Park City. Everybody used to. The tourism economy isn’t their livelihood — instead it kind of gets in the way of things.
There’s a tension there that I haven’t seen since the late 1970s when the first of the resort people (“hippies”) were elected to the City Council, relegating the remaining miners to artifact status.
We’re at that kind of inflection point again, but without a shared direction. Park City used to be something of an island able to control its own destiny. Now it’s a neighborhood in an urban area that stretches from Summit Park to the south end of Heber, and to Kamas and Wanship.
Regional solutions are needed to address regional problems. And that gets complicated because it includes so many jurisdictions at local, county and state levels. They don’t all talk to each other.
MIDA is like a volcano — there’s no point of engagement there. Park City is proposing yet another study on S.R. 248 — but the study doesn’t include Hideout, Wasatch County or the Larry Miller Group that owns 1,200 acres at Richardson Flat. Decisions about the corridor inside the city are fine, but the miles-long traffic jam isn’t originating from Wyatt Earp Way.
We are lucky there are so many qualified people willing to take on jobs like City Council. It’s difficult, frustrating work, and they can’t make everybody happy. Grand visions are shut down by financial realities or the inability to get to three votes. And sometimes, they succeed beyond expectations, creating a bunch of new problems. Thanks to everybody who ran.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.