Full disclosure: I wholeheartedly support Ryan Dickey for Park City mayor. Because I live outside city limits, I don’t get to vote for Ryan. If I could, I certainly would.
I live in the unincorporated Snyderville Basin, which is in the Summit County Council’s purview. We are the “other” Park City of the greater Park City-area. We don’t have an elected mayor. Rather, we have an unelected county manager, who incidentally plays an outsized role in major developments that we as residents may utterly despise, such as the Dakota Pacific abomination.
How lucky you are in the 84060 to have a choice, and how lucky you are to have a candidate like Ryan Dickey, who in my opinion and based on my experience from working with him, is a warrior for protecting neighborhood character and quality of life.
I first met Ryan in 2017 when we were relative newbies on the Snyderville Basin Planning Commission. The thrust and import of the projects that we were immediately faced with required us to learn on the job quickly and effectively. We did not always agree on everything, nor did we always vote the same way, and years of public record would provide evidence of that, but we fast became colleagues who respected each other’s opinions and became mutually supportive of the good that comes out of serving the public interests in the planning process.
I don’t even want to mention it to give credence or credibility to this idea or the uninformed people who are spreading it, but there is some vague rumor floating around Nextdoor and other social media sewer lagoons that Ryan is “in the pockets” of developers or never met workforce housing he didn’t like. I find this absurd, based on my experience working alongside Ryan.
One only needs to casually search the archives of KPCW and The Park Record to know that as chair of the Snyderville Basin Planning Commission, Ryan led the charge against the original Dakota Pacific project, development in open space at Highland Flats, and against the expansion of Outlets Park City — even though all of those projects, the developers offered some coin of the realm: affordable workforce housing.
The questions have always been how much, for whom, and at what expense to the community? Ryan has always asked these questions and considered the answers thoughtfully.
As a Park City Council member, he also stood tall in voting, in the minority, against Studio Crossing — a project like Dakota Pacific that delivers too many market-rate nightly rentals to justify the affordable housing it offers. And he was the only council member to vote against waiving the developer’s building fees. This is the value of experience and toughness at work.
Ryan’s compass points towards the North Star of serving the public’s best interest, whether that is in the basin, the city or the broader region, and he has the record of that service to back it up. I hope you will vote with confidence for Ryan Dickey for Park City mayor in November.
Thomas Cooke
Former Chair, Snyderville Basin Planning Commission