The Park City Council hung up Thursday night on whether to legally protect 96% of the 344-acre Clark Ranch as open space into perpetuity now or hold off a few more weeks for 97%. After a quick closed huddle with their attorney, they all agreed on the latter.
The city bought the land straddling U.S. 40 south of Quinn’s Junction in 2014 with sales tax revenue earmarked largely for open space, and an advisory committee in 2016 recommended putting a conservation easement on all but 10 acres between the Park City Heights development and the freeway.
There the easement languished undone for nearly a decade, at least as far as a council vote was concerned, until Thursday.
Meantime, the land the committee carved out from the easement to recommend as “TBD” for the City Council to determine evolved into an affordable housing proposal next door to Park City Heights as that neighborhood filled in.
This fall those 10 acres burst into a major election issue, and Park City Heights voters helped boost Jack Rubin to within 12 votes of Ryan Dickey in the race for mayor. Outside of Park City Heights and Deer Valley, Dickey carried a comfortable 55% to 45% lead across the rest of the city.
All the members of the council were eager to end the nearly decade-long wait Thursday night, only not with the 15 acres for which the staff had prepared documents providing wiggle room in the city’s negotiation agreement with the developer, the Alexander Company, that covers about a dozen acres.
Speaker after speaker, most from Park City Heights, railed during a public hearing against the expansion of acreage from the advisory committee’s recommendation in 2016. The difference between 10 acres and 15 acres is 3% of the total land and 4%.
“I want to put a conservation easement on this tonight,” Councilor Tana Toly said. “I don’t want to extend it any longer.”
She wasn’t the only one. Councilors Ryan Dickey, Bill Ciraco and Jeremy Rubell voiced similar urgency. But Councilor Ed Parigian pointed out the easement had waited nearly a decade so far and wasn’t going anywhere. They could take a little more time and get it right.
City Attorney Margaret Plane cautioned the council that it had a legal commitment to negotiate in good faith an affordable housing proposal for largely rental apartments in the plot seven-tenths of a mile from Richardson Flat Road in an agreement with The Alexander Company that will elapse Nov. 20. Reneging on the size of the parcel might risk bigger problems, she warned.
“Can we discuss what the assumed risk is, or is that appropriate?” Rubell asked her.
“I’d be happy to hear a motion to go into closed session,” she replied.
And so the council left the full chambers to confer for 10 minutes.
The fervor to finish had cooled when they returned.
Dickey explained.
“A number of important questions have come up that need to be addressed,” he said. “We’re on two parallel paths to get the conservation easement done and also stay true to The Alexander Company.”
Ciraco chimed in.
“All of us up here are committed to getting this done as quickly as possible,” he said before the council voted unanimously to take up the easement again before the end of the year.
Several of the 20 who spoke during the public hearing appeared to believe the whole 344 acres was at risk of development, conflating the values expressed about the vast bulk of the land with the relative speck the committee had set aside from an easement as “TBD” for a future council to decide.
Others who spoke about guarding the city entryway along S.R. 248 with Clark Ranch open space appeared not to realize the land straddles U.S. 40 and on the west side runs south of Park City Heights, well out of view of the stretch between Quinn’s Junction and inner Park City.
One speaker, who began expressing dismay at the thought of building on the property east of U.S. 40, said “never mind then” and sat when he learned that’s what the easement would protect against in any case.
But nearly every speaker was clear and very accurate about the committee’s recommendation of no more than 10 acres to be set aside, and all were as clear about their distaste for giving away 15 acres.
For Park City Heights resident John Greenfield, the issue is a quiet redefinition “of the deal, turning 10 acres of flexibility into 15 acres of entitlement without a hearing, without an amended … recommendation, and without public explanation. The site is being adjusted to fit the (housing) project rather than the project fitting the site.”
Election cycle scrutiny of the advisory committee’s minutes in 2015 found no direct reference to “affordable housing” before an erroneous reference to that in a staff report months later, but the council by 2021 was formally looking at such housing for the site.
The closest the committee came in its recommendation in March 2016 to acknowledging the possibility of a residential neighborhood was this line: “After careful analysis we believe Steve’s Point is the area most suitable for development if the city has to.”
Former City Councilor Becca Gerber said she had clear memories of discussing affordable housing on the land as far back as 2016, when she was on the council.
“Our goal … was to preserve open space and cluster development and keep it tight and close and share utilities with Park City Heights,” she said. “Every time we have talked about putting housing anywhere in Park City, people come out and say they are unhappy with it.”
