That's why we didn't educate the art and the writing.
Or my favorite call ever that I've gotten in this role as city man.
Nice.
You've buried somebody on top of my mother.
Seriously?
That was how the call started.
Didn't even say hello.
He said you've buried someone on top of my mother.
In the committee cemetery?
And it turns out Karen was awesome.
Has her database.
We know where her son is.
and it turns out that the company did the burial,
but the headstone in the wrong place
was not like the headstone of the doctor's mother
and the parents all did the same day.
Wow.
You're a very...
That's a rough day.
Right.
It's a rough day.
Are you going to push this right?
Is it recorded?
Maybe I'll...
Okay.
All right.
All ready?
President?
Hey, before you guys start,
I just want to thank you for your flexibility.
I think you were on the agenda a few weeks ago
and we ran over and had to do a last-minute audible, so thank you.
You're welcome.
We did.
All right. Karen's going to kick it off.
I'm just here for moral support and to run the PowerPoint.
But I'll introduce Karen.
For those of you who don't know her, Karen Yolkham.
She's a recreation supervisor and the cemetery sextant.
for the city and teaches fishing and archery multi-talented yes I wear many
hats I'm the only one in the state I think that runs recreation programs as
well as a cemetery I'm on the board for that reason I wanted to also introduce
Heather Todd she's she is a recreation coordinator and she also assists with
the cemetery so actually when she was hired she was the first she was
administering the cemetery directly, and we've kind of switched things around.
So I do all that, but she does it when I'm on vacation and I usually am on vacation
when she's on vacation.
So it works really well.
And Karen, as maybe an example of how much the work that you do matters, just yesterday,
right, we got a call and somebody had a, they had plots.
It was a, they had a family member die.
And I will, you tell the story.
Well, it happened Tuesday and that was, I happened to be at our state conference in
Provo presenting on the cemetery and the call came in, well, they called my desk,
they called Heather's desk, and then I'm not sure where they went next but I
know they talked to Michelle and then via that got to Ken, Ken called the
woman back and said, you know, not a, not an issue, we'll, we'll get you
handled. The person who died actually lives in Hawaii. Her mother, they all grew up in
Park City and her mother lives right on Little Cate. And so I spoke with her and she was the,
she's the cousin I believe. She was handling it for the mom who is now in Hawaii also.
So they're all set. They're not back here yet.
And the family was really distraught. And the idea that these guys could help that
person same day and get the family right. They really, this place means a lot to them
and that was really important to them. And I just appreciated that Karen had 18 other
things going on and yet later that day I don't figure it out.
Nice.
Yeah, they were anxious so it was good to be able to help them, which is obviously
pretty common if they don't plan ahead.
Yeah.
All right.
Planning out is, people tell me it's weird when they come to me ahead of time.
Yeah. So thanks for allowing us to come and talk to you about the cemetery. I know you've
all seen the report just as a little bit of a recap. We're closing in on the last sales
of plots that are viable for full casket burial. And in Park City full casket burial is probably
twice as common as cremation at this point. Nationwide statistics show that cremations
are gaining popularity, and we're seeing it to some extent, but not completely.
We have additional available plots for cremation burials. We've reopened plots on the east
side of the cemetery. So if you look at the map that you guys can see there on the far
right is the only area where we sell full casket burial plots. On the far left at the
top, the more rectangular piece, that's the private section. So that's the Snyder Evans
family extended family. And the lower C triangle piece is that wide open piece of
graphs that people often ask, why can't we be buried there?
And that's one of the oldest sections in the cemetery.
So there have been burials there.
Some of those burials were exhumed.
They were Chinese.
They were sent back to China.
And others weren't.
They're still there.
However, the wood crosses were burned in a fire.
So there's no records, and there's no markers.
So we don't really know what's in that spot.
So the next pictures are just closer pictures of where the spaces are.
So some of the reasons that we are not selling on the east end,
I was actually given that direction when I took over the cemetery.
It's really hard to look at that space and know that you're not going to come into something
that was buried close by with plywood caskets.
They disintegrate, so things move in our ground.
It's very rocky.
So they didn't use vaults back then, which we require now.
Now, vaults make it much easier when you're measuring and when you're digging, you know
where that is, you know, you have the space that you need.
So we're not using, that's why we're not using that large section of the cemetery.
Our plot prices are low, and I know that that was a consideration so that city residents
could afford to buy plots.
It does make it affordable when you're in need to buy that plot that you need.
It also allows people who can to purchase as many as they want because there's no limit so
That's one of the requirements you have to be a resident of Park City with property you have to own property or
Have lived in Park City for ten years or more consecutively
Even if you lived in here in the past and you moved away if you can show that you lived here for more than ten
years you would be eligible to purchase a plot here if you were born in the
miners hospital you're eligible so there's four or five criteria but can you
purchase plots for your whole family who might not have the same qualifying
status as you do if the person who is eligible is purchasing the plots the
plots stay in their name and they're able to make decisions as to who's
buried in those plots.
Assuming there was someone that met the requirements
purchased the plot.
When you buy a plot, you do get a deed that they need, the
people can't go and then sell them on the free market. They need to sell them back
to us those deeds. So it's actual. If you bought a couple you might be able to fit a
tent on them though.
You're always thinking about housing.
So we do have other alternatives
in the cemetery besides cremation. We have the memorial walls. The one question that we
often get asked is if I buy a plaque space on the memorial wall, is there a place for
me to put an urn? And there's not. So that would be a niche, and we don't have anything
like that, which is an above ground space. I have some pictures that you'll see down
the line where you could put an urn, but right now the only place we have for cremations
is in the ground. It's the same plot as you would use for full burial. It's just
that the ones I've reopened, we have deemed not viable for a full casket, but they are
viable for cremation burials, which are not as deep, and they're much smaller, obviously.
Is that for people whose ashes are spread where they weren't supposed to be?
I asked them not to tell me that.
We don't know.
Yeah, so they know that they're only buying a space to place a plaque to memorialize
someone whose name they put on there.
Can you put more than one person in a crematorium spot?
So a cremation burial space is a 2 by 2 by 2 foot cube.
So you could fit two urns in there,
or you could put one urn with more than one person's ashes
in it.
You can actually put up to four cremation burials
in one plot.
Okay. Oh, you put the whole urn in the spot? You don't know. My father-in-law was
It was just a little whole dug and you just poured the ashes right in
Into was it a into a niche?
It was it was at their church in the lawn right in front of their church, I don't know
But it just appeared to be this little hole, you know, like a little tube, Doug, somehow.
They probably had a, there's a round tube, and then there's a cap that goes on top that
would have maybe the, his name and his dates on it.
Is, are ashes not, you know, compostable or something?
I mean, is that just not what we, what they do?
No, they are.
I think it's reference to not for what people prefer in the composter.
Sorry,
Karen. Oh, no, you're fine. It's going to be a long day.
All right. Well, so once we so right now we have my the report that you have says
that we have 47 plots left, we actually only have 43 for the full casket left.
So once those are sold, the only thing we will be able to sell is cremation plots and
plaque spots.
And do we have a lot of cremation spots or are we worried about running out of those
anytime soon?
No, I don't believe so, we have, I reopened 55 individual plots, which you only sell one
to a family even if they're only going to put one cremation in there.
So there's 55 currently, but I've only gone through probably a third to a quarter of
the cemetery, and so I need to continue through.
I went through first, picked the ones that I felt visibly were viable, and then Jaren
comes through with me from the Parks Department and deemed them, you know, those are reasonable
for cremation burials, and then we open those so that people have choices.
So there's quite a few spaces for those.
I know that cremation gardens are very popular now, so that would be above ground cremation
niches.
How
many spots are left on the wall?
Pardon?
How many spots are left on the wall?
There's quite a few actually.
I have some statistics there.
I think it's right in your report.
Let me look.
So here you can see the stats from the past few
years.
Oh, we have 53 spaces have been sold,
which is only 15% of the total on the wall.
So it's 338 wall spaces.
But again, that doesn't help someone
who needs a place to put ashes.
And a cremation garden is not what it sounds like to me,
which is like, oh, just spread, you know.
It's not right.
I don't like that.
So, oh, you have a.
So those pictures are actually from my conference on Tuesday and those are
Provo just did an expansion on their cemetery and one of the things they added was this cremation garden
So on the picture on the left those big boulders
You can see a circle on them. Yeah, so they already have a core
Drilled into them and it's as wide as that circle that circle is just a
It's a stone cap that is placed in there that will stay put until someone purchases that.
And then they take that out, the ashes go in, and then a probably brass plaque goes on the top with the person's name and inscription.
And then the one on the right.
Um, I don't know.
Go in that cemetery whether all of those are set to be like a family one, but you could use
it that way where you have the larger block in the back and then the smaller ones in the
front so they could buy multiple. And on the top of the left picture you can see the building.
It's just a roof actually like a gazebo cover. And all four posts are stone and they have
cremation niches on both sides of where you can see the one side. They have them on the
opposite side and all four, so there's a number there. In their expansion, they put
15 different styles of cremation niche spaces, because they didn't know what people were
going to want, and so as they sell, they'll find out what's the most popular. They
They have lots of room for expansion, so they'll add more in the popular notes.
That was in Provo?
No.
Provo.
They're also adding a mausoleum up on the new part of their expansion also.
And that's for full cast of burials above ground.
It looked like the number you have left and the number you are selling per year is about
the same.
So it sounds like we're down to about a year of, I'll loosely call it, full tasking inventory here.
Yeah, one of the things that we want to talk about was, you know, limiting the sales of these last plots just to people with immediate need.
So really, those plots that you're seeing that were sold, those are a mix of people in immediate need as well as people planning for the future.
So if you looked at the number of statistics or the statistics for burials, that's really, you know, a good way to...
Well, sold in need. The far right column sold in need are the number of people who purchased a plot and did a burial all in the same process.
us, and so there were only 14 in three years. So if we took those 43 plots and only sold
them to people with need right then, and even if we sold them two at a time, say, you know,
my husband died, I'd want two plots, you know, we would do that so that they could be together,
it would last us a little longer before we would be completely sold out.
Could
we do one of those cremation gardens, like the rocks?
I hate to say this, but in the area in the southwest corner where we were not doing anything,
would it be at all appropriate to put one of those there?
I mean, it is on top.
That was my idea.
And Ken and I had a discussion about it today, and he's like, well, is that okay?
Yeah.
and so and I'm not I'm not sure but that was my idea was that that was a space
that if it's on top it's not going to impact and we don't have record of who
is where well and Karen maybe one of the things that could be done is at the
same time see if the is you know a little bit about what used to be there
and work with the museum and come up with some kind of small monument that
the city put up that had a little bit of history around what used to be there and then why the
space is being utilized.
Right.
I think that monument idea has been in back here for a couple of years.
I just haven't had the, I didn't know what direction to go with it or how to get there.
That would be really nice.
But that is something that we have talked about and it's a great idea.
Karen, I'm curious. The memorial wall I think is really classy and a good idea, but it doesn't seem to be getting a lot of use.
Do you think it would do better if there were accompanying cremation niches somewhere there?
It might. That might be. I know that if you have a cremation niche, you have a place to put the plaque.
So putting something like that in that same area might not be a bad idea.
I don't know that it'll increase the sales of the wall plaques simply because, I mean, there are people on that wall plaque
that are actually buried in the cemetery.
So I don't think there's very many, but there's a few.
Most of them are buried somewhere else.
What is the difference in price between like a memorial wall plaque and a plot and a cremation?
Personally, I think it makes sense to raise the prices at least a little bit on the plots
and then maybe incentivize the memorial wall, some of the other things.
So the memorial wall plaque space is $250 and that is just for the space.
It doesn't include the actual purchase of the plaque which they do on their own and the plaques are anywhere if I remember correctly from about
Maybe I think you can get them for less than 300, but it actually depends on what you put on the plaque
They're all the they're all the same price even some of them are five by eight rectangle and some are a six by six square
So those are 250 the plot is 300. Yeah
but the burial is 600 so there's a big difference there and then a cremation so
a cremation they still have to buy the plot so that's 300 a burial is only
$70 we
dig the hole the parks crew prepares the site
If when ours fills up, if we don't do something, then where do they get buried back in Salt Lake or something?
I know that one of our residents who was a county resident is buried in Heber.
The Midway Cemetery takes anyone. You don't have to be a resident of Midway to be buried there.
but all the other towns in Summit County have cemetery districts and Summit
County has a cemetery district for Western Summit County for our end of
Park City but they've not done anything with that they've not put a board
together nor have they found a piece of property and purchased it. I did talk
to a woman from the county who explained that from the time they made that
board they had five years to do something with it. The state could come in and say
okay it's they could dissolve the district because they hadn't done
anything. I don't think the state researches that every day so.
Just a
quick addition the county did when when we back in 2008 when we were doing
the PRI property, they did plan on having a cemetery, kind of near the substation and
Bear Hollow back there. There was a piece of that that looked like it would work well.
And it turned out it was, and that was the plan. It turned out it was really rocky and
you couldn't even dig back there.
Perfect for rocky cremation.
There you go.
You know, somewhere in the packet, you'd mentioned that I think both the Catholic
and Mormon churches now say that it's okay to they accept cremation and and yet
I would imagine that there's very slow evolution in this industry because what
do you do you go to a mortuary or guess mortuary and and of course they're
going to sell you the most expensive option but I did read I heard this
really nice report on NPR about green burials and and also all of the the
toxic chemicals that are going in the ground with formaldehyde and that you
know if you really look at it there's no reason to do it just to satisfy our own
sense of aesthetic around death or something but because it's slowly
changing you know maybe we're up against something like that but I mean have
you guys thought of places to I mean maybe part of it's like education that
So let people know it's okay not to put formaldehyde in your loved one's body
And then and then have you guys come up with other places where you could have something like a cremation garden?
Well, one of the original ideas that
Heather came up with
when we were talking about cremation was to put a
Moving cremation garden along the upper fence line because we have that hillside there
That's very rocky also, so it would be good to have that on top.
It would require putting a pathway that is accessible up there,
and so that would mean, you know, some digging and some leveling.
But that's, we had thought of that area as well as the niches down below.
And when I was in Provo and they, those big rocks, those are real rocks.
and they said when they priced out the fake rocks that have the space also,
it pretty much came back to, it was about the same price.
It wasn't much different.
So, I mean, a real rock is much more appealing.
I've always envisioned a bike path back there, a little trail.
You could just line the trail with those rocks.
Just kidding, just kidding.
Can we go to the items for discussion one?
So I just made a quick list of the things that we thought were viable options for the future to think about.
One being to determine another space within the city limits.
I can't tell you how many people live here that have not purchased plots,
but we're bigger than we were so I'm sure there's quite a number and and have a
viable space for both traditional and crematory burials and then start that
dialogue again with Summit County and see if they will make a plan to do
something or and that may or may not help us or we do it together so that it
is for anyone who lives in this part of Summit County.
At the cremation niches
above ground that might be an appealing thing for people who maybe aren't as
into cremation now because it's still in the ground, who knows.
The fence line
cremation area and then again as we mentioned to look at making a change now to prolong the
amount of full cast of burials that we have left, space that we have left. We'll be doing
burials for a long time.
It's funny how many seemingly inappropriate comments there are that you could make and
And this is just a question, just checking about any of, you know, our open space, the
deed restrictions, deed restrictor, conservation easement properties.
I mean, is that ever something that's included as a possibility that has to be specifically
delineated within the easement?
I can weigh in on two thoughts on the stuff we purchased with our resort sales tax,
it's not deed restricted in the same way.
So there is some carve-outs in the Clark Ranch property out by Park City Heights
that don't have the same sort of restrictions.
Nate might have some thoughts on it is limited to public uses.
We can't do public-private partnerships in that because of the bonding material
and Mark can probably look further into that.
But I think the summer parcel, the Clark Ranch parcel,
So those have been bought with flexible funds.
Yeah, because if you made a really flexible or not flexible,
sorry, the opposite, if you made it very restricted,
like it could be used for one of these cremation gardens
and it has to look like this, and that was the only use
you could have, it would be kind of a nice park or something.
What space do you need for something?
There are all sizes.
I mean, I think that the ones in the small towns in the county are much smaller than the one we have now.
So we're nine acres, and that's with two expansions from the original.
But I could jump in.
Yeah, I think also I absolutely think that it makes sense to limit the sales of the last plots to
qualifying individuals with immediate need or maybe even put a cap on how many people can buy.
Is there a discussion about raising the price of some of the full burial plots
and having, creating a bit more of a, I mean I think that it sounds great to have a cremation garden above the fence line
and the cremation niches and to create some opportunities to have some of those things in that area.
It seems like it makes a lot of sense and make those less expensive than the full plots
because it doesn't seem like a very good use of space and especially as we know that people's
minds are changing and it's kind of hard. We don't have enough space within city limits
for people who are alive. So unless it's a place that is unbuildable or I don't know
Well, you can't live there. I mean, maybe you could do something with it.
Yeah, but I mean, I just feel like our first, you know, our first priority would be to make
sure that we take care of people with immediate need and then make sure that what we have,
we make last as long as possible and create some alternative opportunities and, you know,
if we could make the wall cheaper and get some more movement on that, because it does
sound like if you've only I mean obviously there've been more than I think 50
people or whatever who've died or have had family members who've died in town
over the past year so they have to be going somewhere whether they're like
floating down rivers or you know bottom of the ocean if we can incentivize the
the wall a little bit and maybe move away from some of the other things it
seems like that would make sense and it doesn't make sense to work with
Summit County. The wall might look more attractive if the plot costs a
lot more. I did do that research and I think I was doing that prior to this
project coming up or this meeting and I did it with strictly municipal
cemeteries and I didn't include the county ones. The county ones I believe
are very similar in price to ours but in the rest of the people that I talked
to us, our cemetery in Roosevelt were the only two, and I found one more at my conference
that are $300 for the plot. They go up to $1,200 at a municipal cemetery. So there's a big
range.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think I make, I don't want to make it like unaffordable for people
who've been here for forever, but to create a bigger discrepancy between, you know,
the cost of the wall versus the cost of a plot versus the cost of potentially a
a cremation niche and start to create, especially if it only costs $70 to be buried, but $600
for the full casket burial?
For the full casket burial.
So cremation is a hand dug hole where the other uses a machine and several staff.
Okay.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's something that you want to really advertise, you know,
here are your options, buy your place on the wall now versus this, but yeah, to create
some incentives for us to use space better makes sense in the long run.
If there's a desire to look at those plot costs, I mean, obviously the fee schedule,
it's all part of the city fee schedule which would get adopted, again, through this
budget process and we can, you know, outline and we could go through and look at those
fees. Currently, we try to cover our actual costs for the labor of the burial. That's
why the burial is $600 versus the plot, but if there seems to be, hey, we should look
at that, we can certainly come back as part of the discussion on the fee schedule on
the cost of the plots.
Yeah. Incorporate the cost of expansion and doing other things.
What's the level of interest in that?
I've got a question on that.
I tend to question the elasticity of demand to pricing with something like this.
I mean, I think we should be covering our costs,
but I tend to think the people who want to put a casket in the ground
are going to put a casket on the ground.
It's not going to really be determined on whether that plot costs $300 or $600
dollars or $1,200. That's just my belief. I think they've made that decision. And I
think we're also looking at something that, you know, we're going to run out of space.
So the question is, what do we do when we run out of space? And whether we delay it
for a number of years, a decade, which we could do by dealing with just immediate
need, which I think is probably the right step, because over the next decade, attitudes
may change, and they may change more toward memorial walls and cremation, and that seems
to be the direction things are going anyway, so that sort of helps that process along.
But eventually, we're going to run out of space for burials.
So the question is, what do we do when we run out of space in the existing cemetery
for burials?
Do we want to go look for another plot?
I mean, that's the question.
Do we want to do that?
I mean, I don't know.
I would let the, you know, I mean, I don't know how to even frame this,
but it seems like the community should be telling us,
you need to go find another plot,
another place to create a cemetery that we can do burials.
Instead of us going, we need to go find another place
to have a cemetery to create burials.
I mean, this one to me is not us taking ownership
or leadership.
I mean, I would say we need to be listening
to what we're hearing and I don't know
that you could even help us with that
because again, people come
and I say, so-and-so just died or I'm about to die and I need a plot, and it's not one
of those things that people do tend to, I think, think about for long periods of time
and plan out.
Do you know how many of the existing sales are held by people who have bought with, you
know, an intention rather than an immediate need?
Do we know that there are 25 plots that are?
Most of them are with their pre-planning.
So in the last two days, I've had three requests to meet with me to look at plots for purchase
for pre-planning.
They all mentioned only two, which is a good thing.
And they want burial plots, right?
So you can see the sales versus the burials.
Well, look at how many sold.
I mean, that's the...
Sold 151 and only 39.
So, if we can turn those pre-planning into immediate needs, then we cut down on a bunch
and we extend what we have, but still, to me, the question is a little bit different.
It's, yeah, we could, we're going to have a problem in a year, or we're going to have
a problem in 10 years, and what do we do with that problem?
Are we to go out and look for another nine acres to create another cemetery?
Or are we to say, that's it, you know, we're done with burials, with full casket
burials, that's it, we're done.
You can do cremation. You can do a memorial wall.
We've got this great garden that expanded up the hillside.
Those are your options, and I don't know.
I don't really have a strong opinion on that, and I guess that's my point,
is I personally don't have a strong opinion on that.
Steve, the thing I just haven't figured out,
and I think it's kind of along the lines with what Tim was asking.
I mean, I came from North Carolina and having my aunt and uncle and folks pass away.
There's large cemeteries in our area that are all private,
and they range from very, very basic
to extraordinarily elaborate,
and I can't even think of in the Raleigh area,
which is half million people or whatever,
that there was a truly public cemetery.
There may well have been,
but I don't remember like driving by it or anything,
and I lived there for 30 years.
So my question is just, is this really, does this have to be a municipality's responsibility
versus, you know, if there's enough people who are looking for full casket burials somewhere,
somebody will take their 10 acres of land and open up something,
and it probably won't be in the city, it'll probably be in Heber somewhere,
or can this or whatever just from a price standpoint but is it really common
that the municipality really kind of is the only choice in in town or I know
that there are private cemeteries in the Valley I know that all the cemeteries
in this area there's a lot of municipal cemeteries in Utah so I don't know if
if it's this part of the country.
Other questions or thoughts?
Back up, back to you.
Well, I can't hear you, Tim,
but I wonder if we went to the public and said
there's only 43 plots left in the Park City Cemetery,
would there just be a mad rush
on those before we had a chance to do anything.
Yeah. They will.
So. I like immediate need.
Yeah, so I think immediate need makes sense
and will probably get us, you know,
know, at least 10 years and hopefully people will have evolved their thoughts.
But then people will be aware, once you make that decision and it's set down, when those
calls come in for pre-planning, that's when you'll start to hear what our residents want.
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree with the in need and I think we should do that as soon as possible so
that we don't sell out tomorrow,
but I think there's still, the question is, what's our
role?
I mean, are we to go develop a new cemetery site in our community, and that gets back
to, you know, whose role is that?
It has been traditionally apparently our role, and apparently there's strong precedent
for municipal cemeteries throughout the state of Utah.
But like Steve, back east, there's a lot of options, and they aren't all public options.
And I don't know. I'm not saying that I have a clear idea of what that should look like,
and that's my point. I don't have clarity on this whatsoever,
and I'm just raising the question for all of us to talk about what is our role with this thing.
And I think that's the real issue for me.
If we could determine our role, I think we could then start to create steps to achieve that.
Who instigated the Memorial Wall? Was that like a leadership class project or
something or it was a rab? Mary and Cohn.
Is this something like you have a blue ribbon commission on? I'm just
wondering how you go out and get the feedback on it and the knowledge without
having it just be an all-out. I think Karen's right. As soon as you
limited to immediate need. We're going to start hearing from people.
And Karen, as far as from a process perspective, do you
guys have, is this an ordinance change or is it an ordinance change?
And so this would, if council gave direction today that they wanted to do, that it would be considered a pending ordinance so people couldn't rush in tomorrow
and get plots, right? You would be operating as of today as if they had already passed it.
That was going to be my question.
Because I have three appointments and I need to call back if that's the case.
So it's an ordinance,
really?
Oh, because it's not planning.
It's not like an ozing.
Yeah, and I wouldn't overshake this.
We're going to run out eventually anyhow.
So it's just a matter of do we drag it out
or is it going to happen sooner than later?
So, I mean, I'm hearing from everybody there's interest
in changing the ordinance for limited need.
Yeah, so just offer to you that if you if you decide you're gonna do that and it
won't take effect for a while then I I think you'll be done with all the plots
by next Thursday. Well that narrows the discussion then. But part B I you know
it seems to me like there might be an opportunity now as we've been
acquiring a lot of city property for open space and other needs it might be
worth doing an analysis whether some of that property would be an
appropriate future location, and if so, we might want to consider that before, you know,
as we work out deed restrictions and determine uses and such, maybe doing an internal analysis
to see if there are any appropriate places, and coming back with that sometime in the
future.
So there's interest in something like that.
I would be, yeah.
And I think the county.
Hold on one second.
The other thing, I think I heard the majority of the saying is you'd be interested in exploring
some sort of cremation garden, maybe up on the hillside.
Yes.
Or potentially down on the west end.
Both.
Down there.
As far as action items.
And also fees. There was a fee.
There was discussion.
Would you guys like to increase the fees?
No. I'm okay with keeping them.
Even for the full casket plots?
We're covering the cost.
Yeah, I mean now the covering the cost was the cost of the actual go out dig the hole in the ground burial part of it
It wasn't the we're not part the the actual burial
Those fees were increased a few years ago to cover the actual costs of the parks crew having to dig that hole
the plot price has been
What's been the same same?
Unfortunately, I've found a lot of folks close to me died recently and that's something that
some of the families hadn't budgeted for, budgeted for a funeral and it's really expensive to
cremate somebody or to embalm or whatever you're doing.
And so I can't tell you how many GoFundMe pages I've gone to to have families with the funeral expenses.
And so I would, my preference would be to keep it as affordable as it possibly can be.
Well, let's, let's, anybody want to increase the fees?
Thumb up if you do. We've got one.
I mean, I think if a space on the memorial wall is $250 and a full plot is $300,
that there's some room in there.
And also, especially if we're talking about expansion or expanding services
or offering other things, like all of that's going to cost money, which is going to come
back to us in some way.
So I would like to see, you know, kind of to Tim's point, I feel like if people are
going to want a full burial, they're going to want that and they're going to, I mean,
some people will pony up the extra money for it.
But I do think that it makes sense to have a range of options.
And so maybe the plot is more expensive and you have the memorial wall plaque is
less expensive and the permission is somewhere in between, but right now there's only 50
bucks between a plaque on the wall and a full plot.
But you've still got to bury the body, right, whether you cremate it or you don't.
I mean, it's not a matter of, oh, grandpa died, so I'm just going to put a...
In the idea of the memorial wall with the pricing of it was that it would be that self-perpetuating
that we would generate enough revenue that we would be able to build additional memorial
walls as needed in the cemetery.
So I'm not hearing enough support for increasing prices at this point.
Yeah, where there are other questions you guys want us to make sure and address
No, well, I think the last one is
you know the
If there's any interest in trying to engage the county in a discussion and maybe that's part of a discussion of what's our role
In owning and operating a cemetery in the future
One of our biggest challenges as you know people that live outside the city limits in the basin have a Park City address and
they call, unfortunately lots of times it's at that time of need and we don't
can't sell them a plot, whereas when we first opened the cemetery, we had 100
plots that we could sell at a county residence, we sold out of those, it's
probably been six, seven years. I'd like to see that, yeah. Question though, if the
county were to create, they've got their cemetery board and they're exploring
it and I assume that all Summit County residents would be equally as
welcome there they wouldn't yeah I believe it's carved out that it was a
sort of a Snyderville Basin cemetery board the district so we would not have
access to that cemetery you would need to they haven't done anything to move it
along so again similar to a lot of things that say it might be an
opportunity to have those discussions and to collaborate on a potential I
I think it makes sense.
I think some clarification there would be good.
I'm not sure I want to get more in the middle of the politics.
They've struggled sorting through that by themselves.
I'm not sure jumping in is going to really help.
So we might want to find out whether we're welcome or not
there.
I think it's the same policy.
It would be repository.
All right.
Any other?
The one other thing that got mentioned,
I just want to see if we had agreement was there was
agreement to limit things to immediate need but the question was will you sell
one or will you sell two or you know that's in other words if I'm about to
die and I want to be buried next to my wife I have an immediate need but can we
buy two or can we only buy one or can we buy 11 like we can now I thought Karen
it's my thought would sell to would be to and I just never agreed to that so
I just wanted to make sure they have is everybody good with the answer is if you have an immediate
need you can get to.
And how do we do this so that it doesn't get there's not a rush on the road?
Again I come back to we're going to run out does it really matter if we run out this
year next year in the following year I mean if we're limiting it to our residents that
all have equal rights at it.
I just didn't know how we prevent that.
Yeah I don't know how we prevent that.
Well, I thought I mean the goal is to make sure that our residents end up in the cemetery. So yeah
I guess I guess if our fairs are going to be a run I can we might miss them
I can't do the I can clarify that just a little bit in that the plots that are left
There aren't all that many that are all together
So if I'm gonna buy I want them next to each other not head to foot head to foot
Which is we have many that are like that and we have some singles
So somebody's not going to come in and buy 20 because they're going to be all over the place in that.
And so, I mean, we may sell them all, but they'll be to maybe 35 people instead of just two.
Good.
Any other questions or concerns?
Thank you.
Karen, did you ever think you'd be a cemetery sexton?
She's like, when I grow up...
Yes, I got her. I got her.
Good. Good feedback.
Five minutes?
Good job.
We're out in the brakes.
We're just going to buy it now.
We've got to take it back out.
We're going to pay a million orders.
Yeah, I've got it up.
We're going to throw you this stuff down.
It's like, you know, I'm not going to say anything about it.
Yeah.
I look because I wanted to see pricing.
You're sitting here. In fact, I found out on KSL some of the plot for showdowns all the way through.
I think you could do one.
You? You can have mine. I already read it.
You have mine? You're in mine.
Have you sent this to us?
Of course I do.
You can have mine too.
Stop it.
Am I going to get caught in the middle?
Not for you.
Am I going to get caught in the middle?
You just need to die.
Can I present?
Yes.
Thank you. Matt Dias, Assistant City Manager, and I have some staff with me as well that
did a lot of work on this, like Rebecca and Beth Beynum, the Legal Department, Pauli Samuels,
and our Transit and Transportation Departments. Everyone sort of pitched in to summarize.
Over the past two years, since the state legislates are preempted, the city's ability
to regulate transportation network companies,
which is commonly known as Uber and Lyft.
The state preempted our ability to regulate that type of business in town at a local level,
and they did that across the state.
A lot of confusion occurred.
A lot of confusion occurred among our local drivers and people in the industry,
and at times people were suggesting that the city should be doing more,
and the city had somehow had a role in it.
Other people on the other hand were very informed and seemed to understand that although we lobbied against it at the legislature, there was really nothing we could do.
This was an affirmative action that the legislature took that preempted our ability to regulate transportation network companies.
The output of that or the outcome of that was it created a very unequal playing field between our local four hire and transportation companies and the Uber and the Lyfts and the Sidecar and the Swifts.
And because of that inequity, it created a lot of confusion and a lot of angst.
At that time, staff came back to a previous city council and updated our regulations.
So in order to create a more level playing field, we amended our regulations in terms
of type of vehicle, whether it needs to be inspected, what type of background a
has required to try to create a more level playing field with the Uber and Lyft drivers
that were coming into Park City from all over the state.
But even after we did that, there was still a lot of confusion.
And at your suggestion, we created a taxi stakeholder group of which Nan is a member.
She's the council liaison.
So Nan did a lot of work with me.
And that's my little history before I get into this.
And I think I should just, I wanted to start by saying thanks.
So, when you do something like this, there's a little bit of an intrusion on people's
lives.
We had four or five meetings that we always thought would take about an hour, but typically
Nan and I and the rest of the individuals that were there for about two hours.
And we're dealing with people's livelihoods.
A lot of people have built these businesses, have raised kids in Park City, have paid
taxes here for some of them in 30 years.
And so not all of these conversations were easy.
Some of them were difficult and some of them were spirited.
They were always respectful, they were always civilized.
And so I should just really just start by, you know, we tried to make sure that the stakeholder
group encompassed a broad spectrum of our transportation industry, and then also had
representatives from the consumer side.
So John Burns was a member of the stakeholder groups, Park City resident Michael Faulk
from the transportation industry, Michael Burrell at the time, the executive director
of the historic Park City Alliance, although I think he still is.
Sam Rubin from the transportation industry, Ryan Cray from our Chamber Bureau.
We had Rob O'Brien also from the transportation industry.
Anthony Bartholomew from the lodging industry.
Katie Bracken also from the transportation industry.
Obviously, I mentioned NAND.
We had Lucien Sosnowski and Clive Bush, a resident of Oldtown.
And again, the idea here is we didn't want to leave anyone out,
and we ran an application process for a few weeks where we encouraged
via the media, social media, our website.
We encouraged the public to apply.
And at the end, we ended up accepting every application that we received.
We just figured the more the merrier.
It might make the meetings longer,
but we'd be better to have more people involved than less people involved.
So we were really, really proud of that.
So like I said, we had probably four or five meetings,
typically between an hour and two hours.
And one of the great parts of the meetings is we were able to sort of level set the playing field.
We were all able to come in and provide a base level of information.
We had presentations from our parking team, from our transportation team, from our transit team, from our licensing team.
And we went through, top to bottom, our regulations.
We went through the whole preemption with the state legislature and what had happened there
and how hard you and the city's lobbying arm had tried to fight that.
And then we went through some work with special events and economic development
and what happens with the lodging shuttles come down and what it feels like on mainstream.
This group really, really ran the gamut.
Ultimately, though, we ended up with, I believe, eight recommendations.
And before, so my suggestion tonight is that we, you know, I would have been to you
probably a month and a half ago, but Sundance was coming and everyone got really busy.
And we had these recommendations formulated, and we said, okay, let's take a breather,
particularly in the transportation industry, they were about to get really, really busy
with their winter.
So we took about a month and a half breather, where I've had these recommendations for
about a month and a half, and that we'd come back to you after Sundance is when
the season quiets down a little bit.
I would like to say I think that I probably will get some attendance from the individuals
in that group tonight, but it's a Thursday evening.
So, there is one comment that was emailed to you for the record that I have forwarded
to you and I confirmed with the individual that provided the public comment that that
was received.
I see Michael Falk came into the room who was also really helpful on this stakeholder group.
But so, you know, I wouldn't take kind of the importance of the work and all of the
hard work.
I wouldn't take the indication that we don't have great attendance from that
group, that they don't care about it because they do.
They care about it passionately, but they're out working right now.
They're out giving rides.
It's obviously spring break, so people are really, really busy.
And Nan, before I kind of jump in on the recommendations, I didn't know if you wanted to say some words
or your thoughts about the work that we did.
I just want to thank you for herding cats, because that's what it was many times I felt
like.
And I really applaud you for the way that you organized the meetings and kept them
on track and really came out at the end with some really concrete recommendations.
So thank you for that.
And as you said, I mean, I was so impressed with the stakeholder group and the commitment that they showed to coming and offering their input.
And they didn't always agree, but it was always, it was always civil.
And they agreed to disagree, I think, sometimes too.
So thanks for that.
Great.
Thank you.
So tonight before you, I have eight recommendations.
And those are the recommendations of the Taxi Stakeholder Group.
And I will kind of run through them here, but also in addition, I want to note, again,
we didn't always have consensus.
This was not always, it was not always easy to gain consensus with 10 to 15 people in the room.
And so as part of my report, there are several other recommendations or suggestions
that weren't recommended, but we put those in here too.
And I'll highlight those and maybe why or why they weren't recommended.
So obviously this is a very, very kind of complex issue, all sorts of stakeholders involved.
And what we're looking for tonight is sort of a head nod from council or a policy direction
from councils, more or less saying, are there any of these recommendations that you
don't agree with?
Because in and of themselves, each of these recommendations will require staff time.
Some of them will occur amending our codes and our ordinances,
our parking fines, our fees, our licensing fees.
And so there will be plenty of opportunity for the public
and for the stakeholders to come back and provide you input
on when we're hypothetical going to increase the parking
fine for parking in a taxi staging area.
So that would have to be something that we do through code.
It would require a public comment.
And so just because you give me a head nod this evening,
I don't want you to feel like you're never going to see us
again. I think unfortunately you're going to see a lot of us because we have eight
Recommendations. And some of these will need to come alone because we're amending our fees
or our fines or our business licensing, pricing methodology and other things. So there will
be plenty of additional opportunities for public input.
So the recommendation number one, if that's okay, Mr. Mayor, the recommendation was to
create a local kind of taxi staging area in front of the post office. We had a very,
very lengthy discussion where we pulled out a big map of Main Street with the stakeholders
and we circled all sorts of locations and talked about the pros and cons of the locations
at the top of Main Street, on Lower Main Street, on Heber, Sweeber, Sweet Alley, and we really
circled around this one area because of its central location, because of the feeling
that, you know, at 10 o'clock at night it can feel like it has the most pedexern
activity.
It's the most kind of congested area where people are looking for rides and coming
out of the establishments and that if we could create an area there for our local business
owners and operators to have a special area that's just for them, that that would be a
benefit to the industry.
And we tried a little bit of this during Sundance and some of the other areas and I think
that's a separate animal and we're going to discuss that in a few weeks when we
do our Sundance debrief about how that worked.
But this would be 365 days a year.
We would be giving priority to our locally owned operators to try this out.
Obviously, if it doesn't work, we have an obligation to monitor it.
We have an obligation to enforce it.
But to try it out, to give them sort of the priority space, the prime time location on our main stream.
The second recommendation was to amend our business license fee methodology.
As you know, from Frequencing City Hall, and much of the public knows this, right before
Sundance, the finance department probably wincing over my shoulder gets slammed with license
renewals.
And it all kind of happens at the last minute, and it requires us to have additional staff.
We bring in staff from other parts of our organization, and we hire temporary staff
as well.
And so in essence, we are subsidizing the cost of a business permit over the course
of the year although it cost us more during Sundance and the idea would be to stop that
subsidy.
We would pick the period of time where it cost the most to issue a license and we would
charge more for it and then let's say in mud season or June when there is no demand
and demand is very low we could drop the price so we'd sort of have a seasonality
to the business permit renewal that would reflect the demand for the service.
That was also a recommendation.
The third one is to increase operating fines, and it kind of goes with recommendation number four,
which is to increase parking fines.
We would also look to increase the fines for someone who has found operating a four-higher
or a taxi vehicle with no license, and that would mean they're not an Uber or a Lyft or a TNC,
and they also don't have a medallion or they're not licensed with another jurisdiction in the state,
but they're going up and down Main Street offering rides.
This happens from time to time.
I think it happens in every jurisdiction across the country, but it was a recommendation
of the stakeholders that we could be a little bit more punitive here in time to take that
opportunity for people away.
They'd be less inclined to do that if we make the disincentive stronger.
The fourth recommendation, which was to increase parking fines for parking in
the taxi for higher staging area.
I mean, this is just to go toe and toe with creating the area.
You have to have a strong disincentive to violate the conditions of that area.
And that was a big concern for the stakeholders, is that, A, they were happy that we were willing
to create this zone, but we need to enforce it.
And then if we are going to enforce it, the penalty needs to be strong enough that
it's a disincentive.
They'll probably get a warning the first time, but the second time they're going
to get a penalty that's strong enough that they're not going to want to do it again.
And this is, again, to really preserve the benefit to our local folks.
A fifth recommendation, which is, truth be told, sort of already underway.
We already have our special events and economic development team working on this one.
But it's working with the lodging industry as an industry, working with their representatives
to improve their operations in Oldtown.
Kind of the efficiency, the parking, decrease idling,
and provide, hopefully, their guests with a better service.
It's no secret that when we're really, really busy, there's a lot of lodging shuttles around
town and they're doing pickup and drops off in around Old Town in our core and it can
cause congestion.
It can also be bad for their guests when they can't get to and from where they want
to go and they're getting let out in the middle of the street and a car drives by.
And so we have sort of a crack team of internal staff that's already engaged with
the lodging industry to see if we can come up with some better kind of rules
of the road training for the drivers at the beginning of the season and maybe even some
staging areas.
So you've got transit and transportation, special events and economic development all
working on that now with the lodging industry.
The sixth one is specific to special events.
There was a strong request from the taxi stakeholders that often they are a key
component to the Kimbell Arts Fest and Sundance and a Fourth of July and a Miners
Day parade.
There are people that choose to not use our transit system or carpool,
and they choose to get in and out of the event by using a taxi or a four-hire service.
And one of the complaints was when we are making changes to our operational plans,
sometimes they're required at the last minute that we communicate better with them.
There's been times where we've shut down roads or we've made roads one way,
and there hasn't been a way to easily communicate with our local drivers.
And so we've got buy-in with our finance team who's collecting phone numbers and emails,
and we've got a pretty good distribution list.
And so this is just a way we think we can communicate much better with, again, our locally-owned operators
so they can provide better service to their customers.
There will be hopefully less congestion, and they won't be caught off guard.
They're not going to get to Park Ave, find out that it's closed,
and then have to find another way to get to the top of Main Street.
So hopefully that helps everyone out.
The seventh recommendation is an increase for enforcement.
This is a common thread of the stakeholder group where at times they felt that the police
department needed to increase their level of service in terms of enforcing the moving violations
in and around Old Town that are congested, double parking, U-turns going the wrong way
on a one-way street.
This is probably no surprise to anyone when things get extremely busy here,
can get a little chaotic out on our roads. And as you know, our police department is all
hands on deck working 24 hours a day on all sorts of things, but in particular on traffic
and safety. And so they are prioritizing what they're doing when we're at moments
of kind of critical mass and the town is the busiest. And so the recommendation here
was that maybe the chief of police working with the staff could look at opportunities
to increase the enforcement and whether the chief needs to come back and show you
what that means to increase the level of service by asking for more resources or not.
I'm going to kind of leave that to the chief, but that's a firm recommendation of the taxi
stakeholders and I want to represent that fairly.
And then the final one was improving communication, just making sure that once a year we had
representatives from the finance department and from the police department and from
special events and economic development just sit down and hold an annual meeting
and I think the recommendation is broader than just this group.
It's going to be a call to anyone that holds a license, a four-hire license in our community
that wants to come, give either staff and usually the council is on input on the kind
of the year ahead, what worked and what didn't work.
I thought this was a nice way to kind of keep it local, that these guys know our
city the best and they know how it operates and they know where the points of congestion
are and they know where the points of efficiency are and they've got some good suggestions
for us, as you can tell.
And so their recommendation was that we go a little bit broader than them once a year
that we at least sit down and give people in this industry a chance to give us feedback
and that we formally resolve to do that, that we're going to do this at least once a year.
So before I finish, I just wanted to be really transparent that, again, there was not always
consensus on these eight recommendations.
We had lengthy discussions about completely deregulating this industry in our time,
meaning not regulating at all.
There are other jurisdictions in the state of Utah that don't regulate at all the for-hire industry.
Conversely, there are others that are more stringent than we are,
and we had a lot of discussion about this.
And there are various pros and cons that you'll hear walking around town
or you received in your written testimony,
and you might hear if you take public comment this evening
about public safety, quality of the ride, guest services,
quality of the vehicles.
But ultimately, we couldn't bring this one to consensus.
We couldn't get to a place with consensus that we had
to deregulate the entire industry and just let it evolve
and let the market do what it will do.
And just like conversely, we also couldn't get consensus
us on increasing kind of the stringency in making our regulations more stringent because
remember about 24 months ago we had just amended them to make them a little bit less stringent
and more parallel with Uber and Lyft.
So those ones sort of worked against each other.
We had, I don't want to call it a faction, but we had a group within the group that
said, you know, what the hell with this?
What the state has done by preempting us is we should just get rid of our regulations
altogether and let the market prevail.
We had another group that said, you know,
no, we actually are willing to be regulated more stringently
because we think it's going to be a safer service,
a cleaner service, cars with four-wheel drive.
We think there's some creative things we could do there,
but we really couldn't get consensus from either group
to make it a formal recommendation.
But I want to be transparent that that was out there
and those kind of segments exist within this stakeholder group.
We had a lot of discussion about using transit lanes
and the transit center and whether the four-higher industry could be concerted sort of a formal
spoke of our transportation system and whether or not we could allow them to use their facilities.
We had lots of discussion about this.
Our transit and transportation staff was strongly encouraging that we not do this
and ultimately we weren't able to come to consensus.
There are some limitations in terms of the federal dollars that were used to construct
the transit center, about allowing that to be utilized by a private entity that were
clearly restrictive, but I think at a policy level to be truthful are kind of technical
experts in those areas were strongly opposed. They were afraid of congestion. They were
afraid of consuming, I'm sorry, confusing the public when we're running transit lanes
to have cars, you know, a black car with a tiny, with a very small Park City medallion
may not be identified as a four-higher vehicle, and are you going to get a bunch of tourists
that are also in their black suburban jumping in and out of transit lanes, and if you're
going to do something like that, you need to staff up, and so ultimately that wasn't
a recommendation, but we had lots of discussion about it.
And so that's kind of what I have.
Those are the eight recommendations, and then I wanted to be really transparent about
the areas that there are these groups that think we should completely deregulate
or we should make the regulations more stringent.
I mean, again tonight, I think if there's anyone here in the public, I'd be interested
to hear a little bit of the public testimony if anyone is here from the stakeholder group
because I don't have eyes in the back of my head.
But we really are looking for a head nod that if any of these recommendations are something
you don't want us to work on, that's what we want to know.
Thanks.
Guys, we're not noticed for public input, but I was going to allow for some.
Would you rather we do that before we make any questions or comments?
Okay.
So I will open this up for public input. We are a little bit limited on time, so I just ask that you be concise.
But if anybody would like to speak, please come forward.
Thanks, Ron. Michael Falk.
Thanks for involving me in all these meetings. As Matt has said, I think we've had a lot of good conversation, but not always agreeing.
The one thing that I do want to touch on is for one of the non-consensus points was deregulation
because I think the term deregulation has misinterpreted a lot in our conversations.
There are other towns, as Matt has mentioned, that have gone the root of deregulation
but deregulation doesn't mean anarchy, chaos, no rules at all.
It still means I'll use South Lake Tahoe as an example.
They deregulated their taxi industry about a year ago
in order to help create a more level playing field with Uber and Lyft
that had then come into their town. They came in a little later in history
than they did here in Utah, so they were trying to figure out what to do.
To go do business there, you still have to get a business license. You still have to have your cars inspected.
You still have to have insurance. You still have to have proof of all those things.
You have to have a place. One thing they do there that we don't do here
is you actually have to provide an actual address where the cars sit at night.
There are places in town there where they're not allowed to have a commercial vehicle
and places there are.
So it's a combination of modification of the rules.
But that's about it.
It's just like any other business.
They apply for a business license and they do it.
It's still regulated by the city.
It's still monitored by the police where the cars are open for inspection and
all that.
So it's not complete anarchy.
So, I just wanted to touch on that.
Increased regulation, the research that I've done and shared with Matt in the meetings,
there are no cities anywhere that I've found in the U.S. that are increasing regulation.
Again, because of the advent of these transportation network companies, they've really created
an unlevel playing field where they can just operate as they please, in Utah especially
because of the way they mandated the law.
But they're more trying to find that, how do we find this level playing field?
Because what I've seen, and Rob can agree or disagree,
is our company, the taxi business, has really dropped off.
All of my vehicles, the exception of the ones that don't qualify for Uber
are left just because they're too big, are also Uber.
So we're under commercial Uber.
We – our business this winter has shifted to where we're either getting reservations
or we're doing UberLift.
There's very few – what we would refer to as traditional tax.
Taxi business on Main Street. That's really gone away as far as our business. Have you seen
the same thing? Yeah. So this idea that we've got this big taxi group that needs to be regulated
and monitored to us, it's shrinking. And it's, I think, shrinking a lot faster than it was
even a year ago. So in order to keep it from dying, because that's really what it's doing,
the taxi business is dying and you've got some really great local taxi drivers
here in this town and part of the reason I'm here tonight is because there's a
bunch of them couldn't be here so I'm kind of advocating for a lot of them
that that's all they do are taxi. They don't do Uber, they don't do Lyft, they
don't go to the airport. All they do is local business and local business
only and there's only hand there's maybe a couple dozen of them left and
that's it by adding more regulations and and making it tougher it's just
going to keep that separation going further and further, and it's very frustrating to
try to work that way and see everybody operating in one way and you having to operate another.
The other thing I'll touch on real quickly is the parking or the staging area.
Post office I think is a great staging area.
I think Rob would agree in general.
The problem with looking at other static staging areas is the town is very different.
At four o'clock in the afternoon, at seven o'clock in the evening, at eleven o'clock
at night. Transportation moves very differently. What might be a great staging area at 6 o'clock
in the evening, you're going to be in an oasis at 11 o'clock at night. So I think the staging
area, my recommendation would keep that to very limited. The post office is a great
one for events. Look at others. I'll wait on Sundance until it's time to talk about
Sundance. So that's all I have. I'm open to any questions anybody has as well.
Yeah, please.
Michael, you talk about increased regulation, but everything I see here tends to create a
preference for local for hire.
And if I were to categorize it, I would say the increased regulation is on others, others
being non-local for hire, trying to increase parking enforcement for, you know, in local
for hire staging areas, for example, if Uber or Lyft pulls in there, they're going
to get nailed.
That's increased regulation but it's not increased regulation for the local for
higher taxis. So when you talk about increased regulation do you see in this
list of recommendations increased regulation for the local for higher
companies? I think that was more of a conversation or meetings that really
didn't make its way in detail into here but to address specifically the
parking as far as increased regulation and enforcement on that. Two things
There'd be no advantage for an Uber really to stage in front of the post office as opposed
to 200 feet down the street.
The way their software works and all that, there's really no advantage whatsoever.
They can stage right behind in Sweet Alley, they get their request for a ride, they come
up and get it.
So there's no advantage there.
The enforcement would probably come more along the lines of if you've got a company
that is licensed with the city, with the white sticker and all that, and you've got someone
who's coming up from Salt Lake and has just picked up folks from Salt Lake and dropped
them off at dinner on Main Street, they're going to wait around for the two hours to
take their client back, which is perfectly legal and acceptable, but might want to make
some extra money while they're here. Well, I'm going to hop in the taxi line at
Park City in front of the post office. That's where that enforcement would come
in place.
I see that as, you know, on a Friday or Saturday night, do the police really have
time to enforce that? I just see that as an extra burden on the police that may or may
not be necessary by deregulating and having everybody work by the same rules or, I don't
want to say lack of, but allowing everybody to work in the same fashion right now,
Main Street with regard to the taxi companies has a decent flow it really
everyone has kind of a gentleman or ladies agreement of how they operate and
99% of the companies and people operate in that fashion I got it you're
you're advocating for deregulation and by doing so you were using examples of
increased regulation so you're really advocating for deregulation to create a
level playing field correct yeah okay thanks but but deregulating without
anarchy. I mean there still needs to be a business license and cars inspected and so
forth. Thanks.
Thank you.
Okay.
Hi guys, Rob O'Brien with 619 Taxi. Sorry I'm late, I was in charge of Herman's Hermits
tonight so I had to get Peter Noons to the radio station. Anyway, I missed the front
part but I did participate and I wanted to say thank you to everybody that I worked
with, with Nan and everybody it was great. I really like to watch how it kind of
works out.
My two points I want to make is on the parking, the staging area during Sundance, the brew
pub parking lot, although I thought it was a nice try to say that we never really used
it much.
It was kind of not really a convenient spot.
We did like the one at the bottom and we did like the one in front of the post office.
Those two were helpful.
So on that part that was part of the packet, I just wanted to comment on that.
The only one other thing I would like to comment on, which is about enforcement, what I'd like
to say is that my problem is still the same problem it has been for years, even though that.
And I'm asking tonight to see if you guys could put a little more authority to either
the police or the people that kind of watch for the stickers.
There are a lot of people driving around and a lot of companies driving around that
They might have 20 cars or 10 cars and they seem like they have three stickers.
And when I drive around, I just did it the last five days and I had a list of 12 companies
that I, you know, that all park in town, that all work in town, that would be very
hard pressed.
I mean, I know there's rules about, you know, if you start your trip from up here
or from down to Salt Lake and drop off, then you don't need a sticker.
I'm not really talking about that.
And the problem is that over the last few years I've been having to write a complaint form, if you would.
And I've written probably 500 complaint forms in my last three or four years.
I kind of gave it up this last year.
And when we had the meetings, we said we're going to try to deal with it.
We're going to make it more that when you have a sticker, that means something.
I even protested by not paying my business license for two weeks
and said, you know, is it worth anything?
Why should I pay it if I'm not going to, you know,
if you're not getting anything?
I was always going to pay it, you know,
I'm kind of a law guy, so I'm all for that.
And I did pay it.
And I have my five cars, they have five stickers.
And I think it's very important to try to say,
we want everybody to be 100% stickered on this.
And if you're not, it shouldn't mean something.
Now, me writing a complaint form to go to somebody to maybe write them a letter to go
to the company and blah, blah, blah, I'm just saying that does not work.
It hasn't worked.
We've given it more than one try and it's still not working.
I would ask for a different approach if you see a car then have, you know, you call
them and say, you come up and show us that, I mean, put it back into their ballpark
because we need a change and that change is necessary even though it's March, middle of March.
They've had six months to do that. There are some people that took the void of All Resort Express.
I don't really want to start throwing names out here. If you want to ask me, I have a list of them.
You know, I'd be happy to go over this or I don't want to do it in the public forum.
But there are a lot of people that have one and two and seven and eight and ten and twenty that are not registered.
If they park right in town here, you can go down and see them, 10 across, and there's
no stickers or one sticker.
So they're 90% out of compliance.
That is not fair to the people that are in compliance and to me, and I would like your
help to see this through the police, through the sticker people and the enforcement people
to say, let's try something different now.
And I would appreciate it.
I can wait for it.
I would be sure I can hear from the city on the follow-up.
but I would like you guys to show that it's important
because you said it's important before,
but it hasn't changed.
Thank you.
Was there anybody else who wanted to give public input?
It's great because we're out of time.
So on that note, let's just start at one end
and take any additional questions or comments.
Keeping in mind, we've got some swearing-ins
to do at 6 o'clock.
OK, just a couple of questions then.
And the number of parking spots in the front of the post office, about five?
And I should have clarified this, and somehow I left this out of my recommendation.
But the concept is, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think it was after 8 p.m. that we would make this.
So well after the post office closes, so there's no direct conflict with that service throughout the day.
And to the points that were raised earlier, it doesn't make sense to have that two o'clock in the afternoon.
but it would really be for that evening crush of dining and concerts and everything else that goes
on a main street. So probably four or five spots, yeah. And we would work closely with the parking
department who we've already spoken to and who can also help us with the enforcement a little
bit. Right. And so public obviously is precluded or would be precluded from parking there.
And I mean, you know, people go to get their mail at after eight sometimes. Obviously,
there are plenty of spots around the corner and on the side of the post office, but I
think it's, you know, for some people decades of habit and so we just want to make sure
that there was good signage and enforcement there.
And then I was just curious if you learned in this group what, you know, percentage
of our licensed local drivers for hire drivers are also with Lyft or Uber, one of the
companies?
I don't know. I just know that several of the, and Nan, you know,
jump in here, Nan, because there were several members of our stakeholder
group that did both, that were at the same time they were locally owned and
operated for a higher company, but would also use the technology of Uber and
Lyft and others to augment the income or augment the hours and the number of
rides. And so I don't know, Nan, if you have a better sense than I do.
Okay, just curious and
most do most okay
and then just a mention of when the
lodging industry shuttles you know areas staging areas or whatever you want to
call them it when they're determined I think that's so important because I you
know I know that some of them circle through old town and go back up to hill
side and then come down and and they are the the most egregious violators I
think of stopping right in front of the restaurant that their privileged guest needs to only make
ten steps before they get in the shuttle.
The good news here in the animal attest is Anthony Bartholomew, who is a representative
from the lodging association, I think also agreed that there's a lot of room for improvement,
a lot of room for cooperation and collaboration, so much so that even though it's recommendation
number five and I hadn't been for you, he's already begun working with our special
events in our parking department and others to see what work can be done there.
So the good news is I think we have a very willing partner.
Great.
And we also do have Hillside on the agenda for March 29th.
We'll be bringing that discussion back.
And there'll be some shuttle discussion in there too.
Good.
Just really quickly, one of the big takeaways that I had from attending all the taxi
stakeholder meetings is what incredible ambassadors for our city, our local drivers
Because they know where somebody can go and, you know, go eat or where they can go and find whatever at 2 o'clock in the morning.
And you can't get that with the TNCs that come in from out of town.
And so I think that everything that we can do to help level that playing field so that we can continue to have those ambassadors out there is really good for our city.
I would like to see us dive deeper and maybe have staff give us some recommendations on how do we
incentivize people getting their business licenses and how do we enforce that.
Great, Steve.
I've got, I think, a slightly different view on this, the norm.
It feels like we're fighting an uphill battle.
I think when the legislature said that we weren't allowed to regulate the Ubers and
Lyfts of the world, they completely, well, it wasn't even then.
When Uber and Lyft came into existence and became a massively popular thing with people
for ordering transit, that was step one.
Step two was the legislature stepping in and saying, hands off, you know, basically
deregulating that group of people. It feels like we're just struggling and trying to fight
to hang on to something that's going to be almost impossible or in my mind really impossible
to hang on to. Because, I mean, to really make this work, I believe it's going to require
just an incredible police presence to be pulling people over and checking stickers
inspecting who's parked where and idling and all this kind of stuff.
And quite frankly, I mean, just given the importance of things going on in the community,
I wouldn't really want to staff up our police force to be doing this.
And it feels like we're always going to be fighting against everything.
So I almost look at it. I think you've got to level the playing field.
And I think there's things like staging areas, which are a good idea.
I think working with the lodging companies to get kind of so they don't have as much
traffic impact is a good idea.
I think the idea of doing one thing for the lists and ubers and another for the local folks,
to me it's just going to be almost impossible to manage. And I could be wrong, but I mean
I'm just sitting here as you were talking. I'm just trying to think through what it
would take to do that. And I just don't see it. And so I would rather go the other way
that says, I mean, you've got to level the playing field. So don't put a financial burden.
don't put extraordinary requirements or whatever on our local taxis that you wouldn't put on
anybody else.
And so I almost look at it as going the other way because I don't see how to make this work.
I know that there's tremendous value to other locals and I look at what I don't do it that
much because I tend to just actually drive down to the airport but I look at what my second
homeowner neighbors do and they don't just like Uber down to the airport.
They have companies that they've used over and over and over because they like them because they show up on time
and their drivers are professional and their cars are clean and all that kind of thing and
That's who they go to for that kind of thing. They may not do the same thing for a you know
Quick $8 ride downtown or something, but I mean that's who they're using for the bigger trips. And so
When I look at most of these recommendations, I just look and go. I don't see how this can work without
substantial police enforcement and
And I personally am not ready to sign up for that yet, so, okay, Tim?
I think Steve's highlighting a major concern, which is either add value to the medallion
or the business license, which is very difficult to do, and most of these recommendations
attempt to do that in some way or another.
Number one, for example, you know, creating a staging area.
the only way we can give value to the medallion is by giving preferred access or lanes or staging
or parking to the local for hire companies. So that's a big undertaking. And to Steve's
point, you know, once the state legislature unleveled the playing field, it's then do
we meet that level or do we try to add value to the medallion? Huge undertaking. I think
I think it's been a great exercise for everybody to go through because it's getting us a little
further down the path of understanding.
So I like where you arrived on this.
I do have questions about number five, and I'd like a little clarity on this one.
You talk about working with the lodging industry with respect to the shuttles.
We've received two emails recently from the four higher community, both of them calling
out additional regulation of the lodging industry shuttles.
And I am just baffled that this continues to come up.
I do not believe we can regulate the lodging industry shuttles because they are not for
higher, yet the for higher community continues to think that we have the ability to regulate
the lodging industry shuttles.
Everything you said is we are talking to them.
We've got a good working partner.
So it all sounds voluntary to me it doesn't sound like there's any ability to do any regulation with those shuttles
And there's a reason for that. They are not for hire. They are
lodging property
Vehicles giving lodging property guests rides. That's much different than public for hire
Which is the only area we can regulate
So I'd like a little clarity on that and maybe the lodge or the you know for hire
community will understand why we can't do anything about those shuttles.
And that's what I would suggest.
When that little subgroup comes back to you,
that's the perfect time for that conversation
and for us to clarify that issue.
Yeah, just because we're out of time,
I agree with a lot of what has been said.
As far as the post office goes,
I do think that that's going to be a complicated one to enforce
if 90% of the taxi drivers are also Uber and Lyft.
there's no way that we'll be able to keep people who are operating under an Uber lift
even if they have a white decal and they're not. I mean, there's going to be a lot of overlap
in there. And I do think that we need to make sure that there are spaces reserved at
all times for locals to pick up their mail, even if it's just the diagonal spaces on
the side. And then in regards to recommendation five of the lodging industry, I do believe
that those are also some of the people that, I mean, to Tim's point I understand
but they are the worst at pulling up in places that are totally inappropriate trying to get their people into places.
There was one pulled up in front of Handel last week and one of our city buses almost took it out.
And they are not quick because they are often carrying many people.
So I don't know if there's a way that we can make some areas that are absolutely no pickup, no drop off,
especially in our intersections.
And maybe that would help some of it and absolutely no double parking for pickup or drop off on Main Street
and create areas where it's not available to anyone.
Yeah, and then a big thanks to everyone who participated in the group, in the stakeholder meetings. Thank you.
Well, Matt and Anne, thank you for undertaking this.
I think what you're hearing from Council is there's some nuggets in here,
but we're going to have to hear how they would actually be applied,
What the cost would be what the effort would be so we can make some choices whether this is where we want to put our resources
I I personally think there are some good ideas in here though
So I am interested in seeing how we might be able to make it happen. I have to agree on the
Lodging's shuttles I look forward to that conversation because I think they are the worst culprits and they are
Circulating through the residential neighborhoods non-stop
They are not pulling over, and when they do pull over, they double park.
Now, I know that's a generalization, but that's what happens when you drive a large van around.
It takes up a lot of spottings in the streets.
So I hope we can have that conversation.
And if the conversation doesn't work, I think there are laws being broken that can be enforced that'll send a message.
But thanks to you and your group for the good work.
With that, we're going to take five minutes and then reconvene for our regular meeting.
People listen to you.
Okay, Chief, why don't you kick us off?
All right.
Mayor, Council, we have another swearing-in tonight for our two newest officers.
We have one other officer that wasn't able to make it tonight and our victim's advocate that wasn't able to make it this evening.
And so we will do this one more time.
But we certainly appreciate the opportunity to be here tonight.
I would like to start by introducing Danielle Snelson.
Danielle started her law enforcement career in South Salt Lake in 2002.
She worked as an evidence crime scene tech for seven years and then transitioned to the
patrol division where she worked for four and a half years before moving to the detective
vision where she worked for three and a half years.
I happened to know from her chief that she had close to 100 cases on her desk at a
time and she worked very, very diligently there.
She worked everything from protective orders, threats, harassments, rape cases to
the homicides and everything in between. She has her associate's degree in criminal justice.
She currently lives with her boyfriend, Mike Fackerel, and their two dogs, their two puddles
Oscar and Stella, in the West Valley area. So we would like to first have Danielle step
forward. And then we're going to now introduce Jackie. Where are you at, Jackie?
I would
like to preface this by saying I'm very good friends with both of their chiefs
or was very good friends, but we keep stealing their officers. So right now I don't know
what our relationship is. Both of these officers were very valued in their agencies they came
from. Jackie Bittner comes to us from Layton City Police Department, which was my former
department at one point in time. She worked there for 10 years, was a detective, a field
training officer, a defensive tactics instructor, a taser instructor, a patrol sergeant for
two years, Jackie was also a captain of the United States Air Force Security Forces. She
holds a master's degree and she has one son by the name of Gregory who's currently going
through civil engineering at the University of Utah. So we are very, and the rest of
her family resides in New Jersey. All right. So we're very happy and very honored to
have both of these officers join Park City Police Department. With that, Mayor.
The
United States and the Constitution, the State of Utah, and the Constitution, the State of Utah.
And then I will discharge the duties of my office with fidelity.
We have a special guest here, so we are going to pull an audible and welcome Representative
Tim Quinn up to the front.
Would
you prefer me here or here, Mayor?
Where are you more comfortable?
You can have my seat if you want.
I would not be comfortable there.
Before you start, though, I just want to give you a hearty thank you.
You worked very hard on our behalf this session and stood up for local authority, and we deeply
appreciate that, so great work.
You're more than welcome.
I would like to just say to the rest of the council, I had several conversations
with your mayor and with Matt concerning this bill about the plastic bag band, and
I had gone over with them the language that I would use in my argument.
So I don't want anybody here to think that I was actually calling you dumb when I said
this is a dumb ban, but I'm going to fight for their right to be dumb.
We had gone over that language.
I thought it would work best and the results were good.
But I do want to make sure I clarify that.
It was to prove a point.
What would you like me to talk about?
Or I can take questions, either way, Mayor.
Would you like to just give us a little recap how you felt the session went
and what you feel we accomplished and maybe what you want to work on next time around?
As a whole, just for me personally, I think the session was a little frustrating.
That had more to do with process than what we accomplished or didn't accomplish.
There were some key bills that I think affects the state statewide.
The transportation bill, SB 136, that really changed the governance of UTA.
There's some serious issues and problems with the current way that UTA has ran,
and we think we've addressed many of those issues in that bill.
One of the more frustrating parts, and I may be shooting my nose off despite my face here in this meeting,
but we had $643 million of new revenue this year
because the economy in Utah is doing so well.
We're growing at a rapid pace between those two different reasons.
We had $643 million, and then we raised taxes as well.
And I fought the tax hike.
It's a property tax hike that will, in my opinion, negatively affect
both the school districts that I represent,
Park City School District and Wasatch School District.
We're considered, you guys are the wealthiest school district by far.
Watsats, I think, is number five out of the 41 school districts, as far as wealth is concerned.
With the basic levy freeze, I think that our two counties in particular have property
values that rise at a faster rate and ratio than the rest of the state.
So our property taxes are going to be increased at a higher pace or a faster pace than the
rest of the state, but yet our two districts will not receive any of that money.
It'll go to other districts for an equalization mechanism.
I fought that for two reasons.
One, because I don't think it was good for the districts that I represent,
but on the second point, we are the most equalized state in the country.
Our WPU, and that's not to say it's perfect by any means,
but our WPU is the most equalizing measure of any state in the country,
and we start toying with that to equalize it greater,
and I'm just afraid that we're going to have some unintended consequences
that won't be good for our education system.
Speaking of education, we did fund quite a bit of money to education, not only to handle
growth.
Both, but additional dollars to help with teacher salaries and classroom size reductions. Because
of the tax hike that went through, I guess, even though I voted against it, one of the
good things that will come out of it is there's two components to that property tax hike. The
second component, both Park City and Wasatch, will receive some additional dollars from
that. I think that the goal is to have about a 6.9 between those two metrics or
matrices will have about a 6.9 percent WPU increase for the next five years
ongoing. So that will be good for education and teacher salaries and
classroom reductions. So there were 534 bills passed. Not a number I'm extremely
proud of. I think that may be too many, particularly how we passed so many of
last four days of the session, but as you mentioned earlier, in the last hour and a half
we were able to defeat at least one of those bills.
Thank you.
And it was fun, besides that.
We had a good time.
Any questions from you guys?
Question?
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Well, not so much a question, but a comment.
I never stay up until 11 o'clock at night unless, you know, at the odd time I binge
watching some Netflix program, but I stayed up, and I watched live streamed the legislative
session that last hour, and it was so entertaining, and your presentation just before the vote
was priceless.
I mean, I just kept telling people the next day, you got to look this up.
You got to go back and look it up.
So I thank you for your consistent application of the notion that what we do locally is really
important to who we are locally and I think really making the legislature kind of understand
that a town like Park City of 8,000 people has big city problems when on any given weekend
can we have 40,000 to 70,000 people, extra people in town.
So that was a great thing to drive home about the,
the triple B, the bag ban ban.
So thank you.
I had texted Matt earlier in the day to ask those numbers.
So I hope I got them close to right
as to what you guys deal with as far as
an influx of population on a daily basis.
So it was just to help drive the point
that you're dealing with not just your residents,
you're dealing with five to eight times
your number of residents. And if we couldn't allow you to do something as small as a plastic
bag band, then we ought to dismantle all cities and just run it from Salt Lake, which no one
wants to do.
Right. I think there were a few people that wanted to do that when you said that.
You know, Mayor, I actually heard after we broke right after that, we sauntered
for a moment right after that vote. And so a lot of people were coming up and talking
talking about that issue, that bill, the speech that I had given on the floor.
And some people said, just to be honest with you, we only voted yes because it was Park
City.
And sometimes I have to deal with that down there, that I have to be careful not to make
it a Park City issue, but make it a philosophical issue, an ideology issue, because some people
will vote, unfortunately, some people will vote one way or the other, just because
which, it's not always Park City, there's others, but just because the, hi, I didn't
ever recognize you there. Good to see you. She's my neighbor.
So I just wanted to maybe
remove some of the Park City's side of that and just say this is about local government
control and this is something we ought to let them control, yes.
Keep fighting for the food tax, getting rid of that. I know it's an uphill battle,
but it's the right thing to do and I appreciate it and you got close.
We had success in the house 42 to 27 and everyone said that we couldn't do that and it was a it was a position that
my party didn't agree with the leadership of the party but I thought as I said many times in the committee hearings and on the floor
to me it wasn't an economic issue it was a moral issue and I thought it was the right thing to do and if I get to go back I'll run the bill again
And there's about six or seven Senate seats that will be changing.
So I'm hoping that there will be some more like-minded people in the Senate
that will at least give it a shot on the floor.
So.
Any predictions what we'll see next year?
With legislature in general?
Yeah.
It'll be different.
I can tell you that.
There's 19, sorry, 18 members of the House of Representatives
that are not running for reelection.
Some of those are running for state senate, one's running for US senate and some many are just retiring.
So it will be different from that perspective. There will be a large freshman class.
I think we'll continue to tinker with income taxes across the state and tax restructuring, rebalancing across the state.
Income tax is doing very, very well. Sales tax and transportation tax, fuel tax is lagging.
That's part of the reason they wanted to have a property tax increase is to kind of shore up one of the other legs
since income tax is doing so well and the others are lagging behind.
But it's a little early to kind of get a feel for what issues will be the big issues.
But we'll see. We'll see.
Great. Well thank you again for your great work.
You're more than welcome and thank you for the opportunity to come and visit with you guys for a little bit tonight.
Thank you.
Okay.
Let's give them some more applause.
One more.
Okay.
Next up is communications from council.
Becca?
Yeah, I had a really light week, but I did just want to acknowledge the students from
the high school and Ecker Hill and Treasure Mountain for their walkouts this week.
And it seemed like it went very smoothly and everybody was very respectful and I'm
just very proud.
I got a little choked up watching the coverage and just seeing all you guys go out there and stand up for something
so for everybody who's here tonight, great job.
And you definitely have a voice and you should use it and I'm proud of you.
Thank you.
I know I've been telling you all for a number of months about the relationship between
Mountain Lands Community Housing Trust and the county and how it was deteriorating.
There's been a significant change in shift and they're on much better ground.
And amazing what can happen in one month, but I think a lot of clarity was brought to
the process, the right people sat down at the table and things have improved dramatically.
That's the only thing I have to say.
That was my one board meeting.
Mayor?
Well, Steve treated me to lunch at the senior center this week so that he could learn
a little bit more about what goes on over there.
And I was surprised to learn that they just ran numbers, and now they are up
to 45% of the people attending our Park City residents that live in O6O, which is up quite
a bit, but attended a couple more meetings, but that was the highlight of the week.
Well, and we had chicken and mashed potatoes, which apparently wasn't the best meal to have,
but they made it clear to me, but I don't know what the best one to have is.
Did they pull sharky?
I watched some, but I stayed out of it.
They did puzzles.
I did puzzles.
smart and safer.
On Monday night I attended Pando Labs.
They do every other Monday course for Spanish-speaking people in the community who are also entrepreneurs
and it's a little course about whatever the theme of the evening is.
In this case it was marketing your business and it was delightful.
It was a wonderful course.
There was a guest speaker who is one of the,
I think, founding members of the brewery.
And I forget if it's Shades of Ale or Shades of Pale.
Pale.
Okay, thank you.
And she is also Hispanic of Hispanic origin.
And so it was pretty fun because she didn't know some of the terms,
the marketing terms, what they would be in Spanish,
even though she's a native Spanish speaker.
and it was just very helpful and a wonderful experience and very helpful and really nice
about 15 people attended and there was some great information passed on there.
Is this when I do a disclosure mark or before the agenda item?
On this one, why don't you do it right before just because it's so far down?
Okay, great.
That's all?
school and across the nation. Wow, I was only able to drive by really slowly, and wow, it was moving and way to go.
Well, I'm looking forward to your public input and hearing what you have to say tonight.
But my week was a relatively light week. It's nice to not have any crises for a week.
I was able to start meeting with some individual citizens and some small groups.
I do have one announcement that you might have heard, but the USOC, the Olympic Committee,
has announced that they are going to go into what's called a dialogue phase, which means
they're going to consider Salt Lake, Denver, and South Lake Tahoe to be – to allow us
to put an Olympic bid.
So we have a couple of months to pull that together, and we will hear more from them
in September.
They will narrow it down to one.
So I think that kicks off our need to have a community conversation on this.
So sometime in the next month or two,
we need to pull everybody together
and talk about whether we might want to host another games.
And then one other item,
I think probably before we reconvene,
this council will be having a baby.
So, yeah.
If not, we'll have a very crumpled council member.
So Becca, I just want to wish you the best of luck.
We're very excited for you
and we can't wait to to share in your joy and with that we will move on to any
questions on the staff communications okay then we will open the public
hearing so anybody from the public that would like to comment on an item not on
the agenda tonight please step forward I'm
Mike I've never done this before am
Am I supposed to put my name down here?
Yep, okay.
Just pretend we're the jury.
No problem.
Good evening.
For the record, I'm Mike Worrell,
and honestly, tonight,
I am speaking to you with three hats on.
One is, obviously, I am married
and proudly married to Nan Worrell, our council member.
My second half is I'm proud to be
a board member of KPCW.
And the third one is I'm most proud.
I'm a citizen of the United States.
And I'm here because I would like to speak about the criticism
that's circling around the Council's appointment of Councilwoman Peek.
Now, I've never spoken to the Council before. Don't intend to do it again.
But I'm going to say this is one, and what's been happening
is something that I have a perspective on from being on the board of KPCW
and also being involved in seeing what's been going on
that I can't stay silent here.
To set the stage though, I do want to first acknowledge
I was disappointed in the misguided advice
the council received from our city attorney
on whether it was appropriate to hold
the closed meetings or not.
That disappointed me that it happened.
I was also disappointed that council
waited until after receiving a grammar request
to turn over the tapes of the closed meeting.
Reason why I was disappointed there is very simple.
By any delay, it raises a suspicion maybe there's something to hide when I know and you know there wasn't.
But I'm disappointed that the way that worked out.
And to your credit, the council came forward, owned it and moved on.
And from my perspective, we should be moving on to bigger issues that are facing our city.
However, I'm equally, if not more, disappointed that the council has been accused, literally
accused by in some of the things that have been on our radio station that I'm a board
member of, and by some of the letters to the editor that in this decision-making process
you acted, and I'm going to quote it with injustice in discrimination, and how you
appointed Ms. Peek to be a councilwoman. I've heard the transcript. I've done more than
that. I've had the opportunity to have the transcript brought down to written word and
be able to read the transcript. And I would urge anyone that has any questions about
what actually happened to do that to actually read it because when you read it, you have
the opportunity to go back and see what was said before. You're not just relying
on memory of things that has been going on, but you can go back to see context.
You can see what was happening in real time and in pause and go back and look.
It's very useful to ensure accuracy.
And I'm going to submit to you that an honest, open, unbiased review clearly shows that what
we had in your discussion was a group of good-minded people, my representatives, wrestling
with a question.
And what's been distorted is what the question was.
But when you look closely, the question was time.
Do the candidates that wanted to be placed for a two-year appointment have the time for the job?
Let me show you what I mean.
The council ended up, if you read it, with a short list of three people.
and I'm gonna just go by the first
And the three people were Lynn, Diane, and Abby. All right? In order to get to the three people, when I saw what was read, what was actually discussed, the council eliminated an individual who had great qualifications, a man.
Had terrific qualifications, best I could tell. Yet he was eliminated because of a real question he had for the time to do the job.
Abby, when I look at the transcript, was ruled out at the top three because of one she was too busy evidence by she dances from meeting to meeting to meeting.
And while in meetings her laptop is open answering emails rather than focusing on the meeting at hand.
Second thing that I found is a lack of flexibility with the job that she has.
She has to schedule things far out.
If there's anything I know as being a husband or somebody on this council,
is there's a lot of things you can't schedule far out.
It's just the way the job is.
You have to have the time to meet the job requirements.
And the third, it was discussed about her having children or husbands
unpredictable schedule in terms of meeting the needs that need to come from this.
And the issue all the way through was time, not children, time.
Then it came to Lynn and Diane as the top two.
Interesting to note, Diane, who's the top two, has children.
And yet finally she was eliminated.
Well, first it was decided even with children she had more time.
But then it came down to, and it's very clear on the record,
that Lynn was chosen simply because she was the best candidate
it for the job.
I think one of you were quoted, she has the background to hit the job or hit
the ground running because of her background. She doesn't have to have months of trying
to get up to speed. However, following that, the KPCW did what I would call, and it's
me, a gotcha piece, and that Melissa Allison scripted. A careful comparison of the actual
transcript and her presentation clearly shows selected quotes, taking it various times to
in your conversation and put together in an effort to infer a pattern.
When you read the transcript, there's all kinds of stuff coming in between these quotes.
But there's no question any open-minded person would infer there's a pattern going on.
In fact, the byline for the piece said, quote, what Abbie McNulty takes issue with in the
discussion the council had behind closed door was about whether a working mother can handle
the responsibility the position requires.
Now I would submit that if you look very closely at this, what it was was a discussion
having to do with not a working mother, therefore lumping all working mothers together.
It was actually a discussion to do with these working mothers.
The implication has been elsewhere when we've looked.
And as I said, Diane, despite a working mother, was in the top two.
She just didn't have the background Ms. Peac had to be able to hit the ground running.
In the guest editorial that I read in the paper, the author says she recognized injustice
and discrimination in the transcript, quote, I was disappointed that a person's status
as a working professional and parent of young children is among the considerations for
counsel candidacy.
And she goes on to say, well-meaning leaders are going to need to listen, learn, and
change.
I take the issue with the change part. I'm frankly lost to understand how the conversation
wasn't exactly what it needs to be as citizens. When someone wants to take on the mantle of
representing me or any of us, it is a valid question. Do you have the time to do the
job? No matter what the circumstances are, it's a valid question. For instance, I'm
trial or some of you know that. I handle cases all around the nation. If I was to sit here
and apply for that position, would it not be a fair question to ask me, Mike, I see
how much times you're on airplanes. I know you do trials where you're called out for
three weeks at a time. I know you're handling cases all over the nation. Is that a discriminatory
question of my take to me? Or is it a valid question because of time? If you excluded
me because I just can't get it done under the circumstances of the job.
Is that discrimination?
I would submit not.
Was Eric discriminated against because he had great qualifications?
He just didn't have the time.
I submit to you that is nowhere near discrimination.
All right.
When my wife ran for this office, I had the opportunity to sit there and listen to
to the questions that were asked of her.
I tell you, every single time,
these were the questions that came her way.
Ms. Worrell, I hear that you're the head
of People's Health Clinic.
You're also on a lot of other boards
and you and your husband have been known for travel.
Do you have the time for the job?
Over and over.
If a citizen, would anyone argue
that a citizen doesn't have the right to ask that question?
I would submit to you what we have here
was you were in my stead, acting as a citizen, asking the questions that I would ask if that
person ran for office. But it wasn't running, they were being appointed. But in being appointed,
you have the right and I submit, you have the obligation to ask those questions. There
are the questions any citizen would ask before voting for someone.
Time is always relevant,
But no matter why, if you don't have enough time, regardless of the reasons, you simply
can't do the job.
This is a government position.
It can't be tailored.
I think that's gotten lost in what's been happening.
If I hire someone and they can't, for whatever reason, do the job, I've got a choice.
I've got two choices.
I can either tailor the job to make it fit what they want to do and accommodate
everything else family whatever because they're important to me or number two I
can fire them because they can't do the job this job was an appointment a two-year
appointment it strikes me when I look at this this was a situation you had to
ask those questions because of two reasons one if they can't do the job you
can't fire them you can't tailor the job to the person the person that wants
the job has to tailor their life to the job. And then the second thing is, if that person
can't do it for whatever reason, then you, counsel, are the ones that have to pick up
the slack for that person. And I'd ask you, is that fair? I would say no.
I do agree with
a guest editorial when she said social justice requires messy conversations. I'll submit,
yet, that's what you guys did. It was a messy conversation. Had to be. You were talking about
people that you liked that are great people in the community, but you have the right to
ask time. It's messy, but it was appropriate.
I want to say as a citizen, I thank you for
asking those questions and making a decision on who you placed in position. I would have
asked those questions. I wouldn't pause at all on that. You have nothing to apologize for
in my judgment. To quote William Shakespeare, this is much ado about nothing if you take
the time to actually read what was said when you were delivering. Thank you for
your attention.
Thank you, Mike.
You're all here. Somebody must have something to say to us.
Nothing from all the students?
What? First, oh, it's on the agenda. Okay.
Oh, I thought they might have- See?
They know the process better than I do.
Okay, any other public input?
We will close the public hearing then.
Next up, a consideration of the minutes.
Does anyone have any amendment?
I have to get on the right page here.
On page 25 of the minutes, I'm having technical difficulties.
On line 19, I had asked a question about partnering with local organizations to reach our housing goals,
and it was Glidden and I believe Stalford that responded.
I didn't respond to my own question.
And then on page 32 of the minutes where it talks about the motion I made for Treasure
Hill, the motion also included that we direct staff to remove the TDR section for this
property from the LMC.
Good catch.
Steve.
Just literally a typo. On page 26, it's talking about Dixon, it's line 16, and it's D-I-X-O-N,
which is right all the other places, but here it's spelled wrong.
I have one other point on the minutes from the retreat.
At the top of the page, the date is February 28th throughout the minutes and it should be
March 1st.
That's all.
I have one on page 39, line 28, where I was speaking about having done outreach on Main
Street in the parking program and talked about having spoken to a few employees that didn't
know the community. It says, indicated the employees working in Old Town, which makes
it sound like it's every employee, which certainly is not the case. So I don't know
if you could replace it with a few or? That's all. Okay. Anymore? Over in the quiet
Your Honor, I move that we approve the minutes from February 15th and March 1st as amended.
Second.
Okay, all in favor.
All right.
Any opposed?
Okay, it passes.
And we are on to new business.
Item number one is a consideration to approve the Level 3 First Amendment event, March for Our Lives.
Sorry, I'm skipping ahead today, eager to get to this.
Okay, consent agenda.
Any questions?
Mr. Mayor, I move that we adopt the consent agenda.
All in favor?
Aye.
Any opposed?
Okay, I'll check in first this time.
Are we ready for new business?
Ready.
Okay, Jenny.
Good evening, Mayor and City Council.
Jenny Derson, Special Events Manager.
I just want to introduce Maya Levine.
She's been organizing the March for Our Lives.
Maya has taken on a lion's share of the work,
coordinating with many students,
as well as many community organizations for this event.
I am going to let Maya take care of the presentation for tonight and then I believe we will turn
it over to Council for questions and comments.
And with that, it's okay, I'll turn it over to Maya tonight.
As you can see, we have quite a few students here who are also helping organize the March.
The March, basically why we want the March, I think it's pretty obvious, although it
still needs to be said.
we should not feel unsafe going to school, and we would like – we would love the opportunities
to stand in solidarity with our peers across the world and in Parkland, Florida, to stand
and protest gun violence and declare the need for gun control in the U.S.
The date of the march is March 14th, 10 a.m. Right now the route being planned is we
We are starting at Lower Main Street by Atticus and Vinto.
We will walk up Main Street towards the Marriott and take a left on Seventh Avenue, walk across
the Marriott Plaza to Poison Creek Trail, walk down Poison Creek Trail, and end at the
bandstand where we will have around four or five student speakers to end with a rally.
So for the parking transit and volunteers, Park City High School has allowed us to use
their parking lots throughout the entire time of the March end rally and the city has also
increased or has offered to increase the yellow bus line which is a direct route from
Park City High School to Main Street.
So far, we have nine volunteers for the beginning stages of the March from 9 to 945 and 14 volunteers for 11 to 11.
1145 to take down and do any cleanup. The surrounding areas of Utah, Provo Salt Lake,
have their own sister marches, so we aren't expecting many people to come up the canyon
or from neighboring cities as well. For outreach, we have already talked with KPCW,
the park record, and we'll follow up with them after this meeting
and up until the March to update them on any new specific things that will happen during
the March, including speakers, if there is a time change, things like that.
And we have also coordinated with Mr. Robb and PCTV.
So we will hopefully be on there soon as well.
For the residents of Park City, they will have a pass.
I think Jenny can talk a little more about this.
But they will have a pass if they need to drive in and out of the area because of some of the street closures as well
And so that's all it for me right now at least and I just wanted to add really quickly
We do anticipate doing some additional resident and merchant outreach next week leading up to the event
and then also
Maya is requesting a fee reduction of a little over $8,000 for the city services
They have started a GoFundMe page and have raised some funds.
Many of the funds that they have raised are going to go towards some of the hard costs,
like bringing in restrooms and a stage, so on and so forth.
And so they did submit a letter of hardship in the packet tonight,
and they are requesting a full waiver of those fees.
And with that, I think we will, if it's okay, turn it over to Council.
Okay. Go ahead, Becca.
I want to know who is predicting a powder day if we approve this event.
Every time we have one of those big events, we have a powder day.
In the women's march, we always have a big powder day.
Does it usually make it into the packet as proving an event may result in a powder day,
which will likely be enjoyed by the community as one of the pros.
But if you can make that happen,
I am really excited about this event, and I thank you for putting all the time and energy
and effort that you're doing with your group to make this happen.
I am a little confused about the route.
It seems to me, and I know that we have a lot of events and closures of Park Avenue,
But the visibility that this event deserves, it seems to me,
needs to be on a city street rather than on a trail.
That's my opinion. And I'm curious why.
So I think as we continue to have these first amendment events,
we continue to look at ways to mitigate some of the impacts.
There are concerns, just like we had with the women's rally,
that having an event where we would close down Park Avenue
not only makes us need to remove parking from Park Avenue
in that residential area, but it also shuts down a pretty main thoroughfare for city transit.
So we would have to divert and reroute transit during that time, and there is a concern in
doing that.
Okay.
Thanks.
Hi, Tim.
Oh, Jenny, what about the closure of Lower Maine for the entire time of the event?
8 a.m. to 12 p.m., it seems.
Is there an ability to limit that closure?
There is a possibility that that could be more in the 9 o'clock to 10 o'clock
hour.
We do want the approval to start that as early as 8 o'clock.
We are anticipating 1,000 people to show up.
If that number grows, then we may need to take that earlier if people show up.
But the idea is in the morning people can still go and park down there and
grab their skis or their coffee to the businesses that are open in the early morning.
Yeah, I was thinking more of the 12 o'clock's end of things and maybe I'm off on that.
No, I think you're right.
I think as soon as the march has left the street, we'll reopen parking.
And when is the March supposed to leave the street? It's supposed to start right at 10 o'clock. So I'm anticipating that by 10 30
Okay, thanks. I
Think in the packet I
May be wrong the original route had you going up to Heber and then across and down Poison Creek
I thought that's what I saw
Okay, no, there is a if we do get a large enough crowd
We may go down just straight down through 9th Street
So we are trying to also maintain 9th Street being open for a drop off
Okay, that was well, so that's why the route was established as that is okay. That was one of my questions as well
for me
It doesn't bother me so much that you would be going down Poison Creek path
I think for reasons of mitigating impacts, especially to transit and
Considering that we are still in our high season. I think it's fine. And I think that there is I
mean
And everyone has a different view of the point of a march, but I think that there's so much
solidarity in everyone that will come, that the big part of it is walking together with
other people and families and kids.
So that doesn't bother me specifically, and I also think that the big gathering space,
well, will be in the beginning and then at the end at City Park.
And I assume it's going to the same setup as the respect rally, like the stage and
And that sort of thing it'll be very similar same same place and just not not same place
It'll be by right by the skate park the bandstand. Oh, okay. Okay. So much easier much easier
And I also love that you're doing this. I think it's wonderful and
What a great learning experience as well as
Just really making your voices heard
I think there's so much that we can learn from young people and I don't know
I do have some questions about the fee waiver, but will that come after public comment or now?
It's good time for questions, okay?
And and these are more general questions not reflective of my support or
non-support of a fee waiver for this specific event, but it's my understanding that we have a certain
amount at 200,000 in fee waivers that we can give.
And then after that it requires this sort of discussion and approval.
And it just seems to me that – does that go by fiscal year and the events that come
up first, it's more easily granted those approvals for – yeah, there's something
that seems amiss about that, like it should be some – I don't know – it should
be based on criteria that is, I don't know, it's hard to say less subjective, but something
that can be applied across the board, you know, maybe a percentage of fee waivers if
we approve it, just so we don't get to this point in the year. And yes, Jenny.
So we do have a fee reduction process. So we have hit a limit. It is based on, to
be quite honest, after the Las Vegas Massacre, a lot of our costs specific to public
safety have gone up. Special events department along with public safety and a couple other
departments does intend to come to the March 29 council meeting to discuss this item in
particular. We do have a process where it is just twice a year that events can submit
for fee reduction. This is an event that we just found out in middle of February
that was going to happen. And so as per the policy, once we hit that $200,000 threshold,
hold, those items do come back to City Council. I do also want to be clear that we do believe
the cost can be covered within existing city budgets, department budgets, but that threshold
was really developed as a way to see if we can stay within that $200,000 a year, and
we have exceeded it.
Okay.
Steve?
She asked about the same question, and I think I was going to say that I just
I need some educational, what the feed waiver process is and what the determining.
All I was going to ask is who do we talk to about that?
Should I get that from you or I need some education?
And I, yes, we can get you that information.
And there are seven criteria that events do answer to when it goes to a city staff committee to evaluate.
They make a recommendation and then depending on the threshold level,
If it's under $25,000, it goes to the city manager as an authority to approve that.
If it's over that amount, it would come to city council.
Okay, thank you.
Just a little bit of background on those fee waivers.
That was council policy, so we could keep track of how much we were spending.
But we do always have the opportunity to override those and grant fee waivers
if we think it's important enough.
Other questions?
Okay.
Well, we'll take public input.
Would anybody like to speak on this matter?
Hi, Angela.
Good evening.
Angela Mosqueda, Oldstown resident. Hi. I'm going to read my comments this evening
because I'm a little emotional about this one. As you know, Sarah Berry and I moderate
a group called Future Park City. The future of our community and our young people's
participation in it are of paramount importance to us. And I believe we share this value
with all of you counselors and Mayor Andy.
I personally communicated and met with some
of the students involved in organizing
this First Amendment march to say that I'm blown away
by their emotional intelligence, planning
and social skills, sympathy, empathy, logic, organization
and poise is an understatement.
And it breaks my heart that their generation
is having to literally fight adults for safe classrooms
and preventative measures to protect their friends
and fellow students from murder.
future. These students give me hope for our future, specifically the future of Park City,
the progressive ideals we promote, and the aggressive initiatives we adopt. Mark my words,
they will save us from ourselves.
Supporting March for Our Lives Park City is not about
whether or not we as individuals support the students' message. It is simply about
whether or not we support our students, period. But every single adult in this
This room on this council and in this community is not rushing to bend over backwards and give
these students our dollars, our volunteer time, and the most public stage possible blows
my mind.
They have earned a national stage, they have developed their voice.
Our local students have proven to us in their comments online and on the radio in their
remarkable organization of yesterday's Walkout slash Diane in their earnest fundraising
to support associated event costs and in their notable leadership in Park City that
that they are just as deserving of a visible platform as say the March for Science or the
Women's March. And so I am here to advocate for not only the waving of 100% of their permit
fees, but also for the students preferred March route. Please don't imply a lack of
significance by sticking them on a trail. Let them march in plain sight on Main Street,
on Park Avenue, and into the park as they have legitimately and respectfully requested.
To be sure, the route posed to you today is one recommended to the students by staff
in order to limit impacts.
The students want a more public route, allow them to explain that to you here.
You have an opportunity to affirm for our youth and for all of Park City that we value
the voices of our young people, the same as we value the voices of everyone in our
community, that we will give their freedom of speech the same consideration that we
give to the women of Sundance and to our postulators of theorems and formulators
of equations.
This event is as Park City as you can get.
I implore staff and council to work with our students right here and now to determine their preferred route today,
not the one adults are foisting upon them, and to do whatever it takes to enable that.
So you have to shut down Main Street for a few hours, you have to reroute transit, so it's another level 3 event.
We as a community fight for the environment, for open space, for affordable housing, for our wildlife.
If we are not fighting fiercest for one another, what are we really fighting for?
These students are literally marching for their lives.
Nothing is going to change without disruption on a national scale.
Let's give them everything we've got locally.
This is as much an investment in our youth as it is the future of Park City.
Thank you.
Hello.
Sarah Berry.
I help moderate future Park City with Angela and not nearly as eloquent as her,
but these kids deserve to be seen.
They are fighting for their lives.
We cannot marginalize them. They need to be seen, and it needs to be a disruption.
That's the point. Make it visible. Help them out.
Let's waive all the fees and give them the route that they want.
Thanks, Sarah.
Who else would like to speak?
Hi. My name is Faith Staley, and I'm here with Sadie Ortiz, Olivia Henry, and Karsten Baling.
We are from the high school. We were organizers of the walkout yesterday,
And we're also helping Maya with the march for our lives.
And we're here reading a letter that Adam Herbst has written, and unfortunately he had
to leave just a moment ago.
In the year of 2015, there were 17,000 total homicides.
About 13,000 of those are from firearm-related.
Firearm-related.
In 2016, there were approximately 38,000 gun-related deaths.
Again, in 2015, there are 427 gun-related deaths in Utah.
The youth of Park City High School and the youth of many Utah schools have walked out
in order to protest the lack of gun control within the United States.
Students have recognized the inherent, inverse relationship between gun control and gun
violence.
The more gun control, the less deaths.
In 2014 in Australia, where guns were banned outright, there were 35 gun-related deaths,
Obviously, Australia is far different from the United States, but what is it to be recognized
today is that there are too many available guns in the United States.
Gun switch po-
The primary purpose is to assault and not defend. How many of you all saw the teachers block their windows, not because of the sun, but because administration asked teachers to do so, for maximum safety?
How many of you weren't allowed to enter the building through certain doors because teachers can't tell if the person is infiltrating the school?
How many of you walked out for gun control because you didn't feel safe in your school?
My point is not to tube my own horn for walking out but to illuminate the facts that gun violence has drastically increased.
How is this okay? The simple answer which many agree is that these regulations birth from the lack of gun control
in order to preserve student safety without addressing the issues of guns or inherently dampened of civil liberties.
Civil liberties being the foundations of our democratic processes.
These foundations are shot apart by those who insist that gun rights should be preserved over autonomy, autonomy, my bad.
The systematic destruction of our livelihood is not formulated from those malicious intent, more so manufactured from the machine being our school district with the intent of only appealing to as many people as possible instead of valuing the quality of our education.
We are asking you to respect our civic duty to be politically active.
We are asking you to stand with youth who are eventually going to take the places of
our representatives and senators.
We are asking you to respect our want to be safe and live unrestricted by the worries
of a firearm.
This is what the march is attempting to promote, a life unrestricted by firearms.
Thank you.
Well done.
Thank
you.
And thank you for helping with this.
Well, I just wanted to say for those who weren't aware that one of the problems
the kids were having was getting insurance and it was about $9,000 worth of insurance for them to
do this march. We looked into our insurance policy at the Park City Institute and found out that we
could wiggle and make sure that we could cover this for them. And we're doing that because
we are so proud of them. Many of these students have been TED speakers. We've been involved
with them in a number of things and seen their terrific growth, but also seen their
leadership. We were there yesterday when they spoke and as the officer should have done,
we didn't get to hear any of it because the adults were on the outside. It was the kids
event but we've heard and watched on TV and we're just enormously proud. I too would
advocate that they deserve to be seen. I understand that it's ski season but it's
It's no less important than the accommodations that were made during the Sundance Film Festival.
That was a pretty busy time, too.
So I hope that you're able to give them the attention they deserve.
Anyone else?
Okay.
We will close the public hearing, and I'm open for comments or questions.
Tim?
Maya, let's hear about your preferred route.
The students and I would prefer to be more publicly seen, whether that's on Main Street
or Park Avenue.
So was your original intent to go all the way down Main Street?
I know you're kind of doing a combo event between what the Women's March was the first
year and the rally, being up at the flagpole, now it's down at the park, which is a lot
further for people to march than what the Women's March did the first year.
But is there, I would wonder if there would be some sort of happy medium like maybe
marching down lower Main Street and having that all and then Jump on Poison Creek to get
to the Raleigh area. I just feel like that's a long time to march down Park Ave.
The top of Main Street to the bandstand is about almost one mile, it's .9. So the very
first proposal was to start at Lower Main, go onto Park Avenue and then cut across
at the, where the miners' hospital is to the bandstand.
So that's another.
So like starting where the trolley turnaround is,
that roundabout or that coalition park?
Yeah.
And then go, because I do think that there,
it would make sense to give them some room
on one of the main streets.
I feel like blocking off all the way down Main Street,
all the way down Park Ave is a really long ways
and that could take a really long time.
But if there's a way that we can do more of a street
and then pull you off the, you know, back the sideway or start at lower, I don't know.
And I know the other thing that's going to be hard is that we only have so much time.
Council doesn't meet, but, or doesn't meet, doesn't meet up next week before.
I think if I'm not mistaken, there is a modify alternative in Council's packet where you can,
I believe, change the course.
I'm looking at the attachment.
And then I do I do just want to mention as well
I think it's important to note if we do modify that route and include Park Avenue
The cost will go up and I don't have that estimate off the top of my head
So is could they just do all of lower Main Street rather than you know cutting around start it
You know at the top of that Hebrew corner and just go all lower Main Street and then
Connect to Poison Creek or is with that drastically effect because that would keep it on Main Street for a longer
So, from Heber down to Ninth Street?
Heber down to, yeah, to the trolley roundabout and jump on the Poison Creek Trail?
We could start at the top kind of by Zoom and then go down the street to Poison Creek.
We would end up closing Ninth Street and then funneling kind of down a narrow pathway.
One of the reasons we had chosen the Marriott Summit Watch Plaza is it is a larger space
for that amount of people to get through and there was some concern about having
a large group of people trying to get into a narrow pack, and I'll leave that at that.
And then I just want to clarify so that this is being organized by students, but this is
a community event where everyone in the community is welcome to come and join and march with
you.
Yes.
Okay.
So the preferred alternative listed in the packet has you leaving from between seventh
7th and 9th, not from Heber, we're just trying to get.
So the students would gather on Main Street.
We would remove parking from Main Street
between 7th Street and 9th Street.
We would keep both 7th and 9th themselves open
so traffic could continue to flow.
The students would gather kind of underneath
Townliff Bridge.
They would actually walk up Main Street
to the 7th Street where kind of like Atticus is
and go through the plaza there,
then catch Poison Creek down to South End City Park.
But that's not the preferred alternative.
If you were to go on Park Avenue, you would gather...
Still on Lower Main Street, likely.
Okay.
I would let Maya answer that.
You would most likely gather on Lower Main Street
and then move on to Park Avenue.
Okay.
If we, because time is of the essence here
and we don't meet next week to approve,
I'm just wondering if,
I don't know, if the additional fees, you have no idea.
I'm just wondering if somehow the community could come together with that GoFundMe site
and, you know, raise the extra money above what, you know, because don't we have to
approve a certain amount tonight?
And, all right, go ahead.
I was just going to say, I think it's almost as, I mean, I think the fees are
one side of it, but I do think that the other side of it is that it's a long ways to march.
The Women's March was fairly contained on Main Street, and then they went to the flag
pull-off, and that did cut off traffic and all kinds of things for a really long time.
But then the second year, when they just did the rally, it was just at City Park,
but making it all the way from Main Street to City Park for the rally.
But that's what they're going to do anyway if they go down Poison Creek Pass.
Yeah, but that's a long time to have those roads all closed, whereas the Women's
March you close Main Street it was kind of you cut off that circuit or if you cut
off one circuit but that's a long ways to cut off because most of all of our
transit that comes up and down Park Ave and everything like that so I feel like
if we can find a closed circuit or if the staff can find a closed circuit area
that they can march and still get to the stage they can find it it's not
what they're asking for this is ridiculous I mean they're asking for
something and we're talking about what can be found so the question is do
do we want to support their preferred alternative, or do we have reasons that we don't want to
support it? That's the question. We can certainly find all sorts of different options and variations
and all that kind of stuff, but it's pretty simple. They want to go down Park Avenue.
Do we want to enable that or not?
Well, Tim, and I just want to put it in context. It's not just a – maybe saying
the same thing, but the support is in the or enabling is in the context of the transportation
concerns that the staff has arisen and that's your authority not support for or against
the.
Yeah, you got to take all that into consideration.
Everything that's been presented, it's all been presented very clearly in the staff
report.
You know, there are such things as rolling closures which are not presented or discussed
here.
I would think that might be an option.
I don't know that we have the time to explore what the various options are
going down Park Avenue, but we still need to say,
do we support them going down Park Avenue or not?
And if it's a not, then it's pretty simple.
And if it's a yes, then maybe we need to do
a little additional work to figure out
how to make that happen and what it's gonna cost.
Well, and my question is,
do they want to go down Park Ave or Main Street?
Do you want to be on Main Street
or do you want to be on Park Ave?
We would love to finish at the bandstand,
but getting there, we just would like
to be in a more public setting.
So whether the city decides by doing that, it would be best to start on Lower Main and go directly to Park Avenue, or if the city doesn't mind closing down Main Street for that amount of time and starting on Main, then proceeding to Park Avenue then going down, I believe either would work just as long as we have a more public setting for everyone to see.
I think Steve was waiting and then we'll go right down the line.
The one thing I would just caution, I mean, I think it's fantastic what you guys have
done, and I've put it on my calendar, I will be there.
But I just want to be careful that we don't – this is a First Amendment thing, and
we don't want to get sucked into A, we love that the high school kids are doing
it, and B, that it's about gun control or whatever.
This could be – don't take this the wrong way.
This could be the First Amendment white supremacy movement, and we would have
to be having the same discussion about what to allow whether we agree with it or not because
it's a First Amendment, right? And so I struggle. I actually agree that what I think was a balance
of trying to find a good way for you guys to start and gather at a good place and end
and gather at a good place, but not basically shut down, you know, a Saturday in Main Street
and whatever and it feels like most of the discussion is around we love that you
guys are doing this and I for one I just I struggle to make that decision
because it's easy for me to go what if it was a completely different group with
a completely different message but it's still a First Amendment discussion and
you can't you can't make these decisions based on the topic or or the
a person. I mean, it feels like you should, but you can't. And so I want to make sure
that whatever we decide about shutting down roads, that when the next group that comes
in here and you hate what they want to say, and you hate the fact that they're doing
it, that you're going to make the same decision, and you're going to shut down the road
or not, because that's what we have to do. I mean, that's the whole First Amendment
thing. You don't get to like or not like the people or the message.
And we already shut down Main Street for the women's march during Sundance.
And so there's a precedent that we've already set, that we've already endorsed.
We've done it for the Science March.
And so now we're telling this event, and it's not a decision on the kids and support.
It's we're telling this event that they can't do the same thing to your point.
Exactly.
So I'm fine.
Again, I just want to make sure that whatever we decide, we realize that either we've already
set the precedent and all we're doing is following it, or we're reinforcing or setting
the precedent, and we're going to do it consistently.
This is a Saturday in the middle of a ski season, kind of a high season, and we're
talking about shutting down an area that's the town lift and the ski rental businesses
and all that stuff around there.
And I just, you know, I want to make sure that we agree that this isn't a one-off thing,
that this is the decision we're going to keep making, because I think that's kind
of what we're doing here.
Nan?
I believe with all my heart that this event deserves the same visibility
that we've given other First Amendment events, which is why I asked my question
at the very beginning here.
I really support, whatever, modify the alternative route, option number two there.
And if it's going to involve more city funds, then can we allow funding up to maybe $10,000 for that?
Is that possible?
For the fee waiver?
Yeah.
My only recommendation would be to go at least 12,000 just from a public safety perspective. Okay
Lynn
so
my mind has been changed and
thanks to all the comments here tonight and
You know something I thought about earlier today also was depending upon the numbers that come
There could be a huge bottleneck trying to fit into Poison Creek pathway. I'm sure that's something you talked about Jenny
Yeah.
Um.
Yeah.
Rolling closure would be great. Just a question about the sentiment of the merchants on Lower
Maine and the outreach you've done.
So we targeted outreach specifically on Lower Maine. The outreach also went out in a newsletter
that went to all merchants and their settlement has been extremely supportive of the event.
There are not concerns because the road closure and the parking removal and all of that
is for a very short period of time.
I would leave that at that.
And Steve, to your point, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I bet Charlottesville,
Virginia would have a few different things to say about, oh, we have to treat every
First Amendment event the same. I don't believe we do. If we think it's an event
that's going to incite violence.
I don't think we need to treat it the same at all.
That's all I'm gonna say about that.
Becca.
Well, I absolutely hear what Steve is saying
and Tim is saying.
I think the hardest part is that this event
has a very different layout than any of the events
we've done in the past.
There was a reason that the Women's March
switched to just doing the rally at the park.
And a big part of that was, I believe,
because of trying to mitigate some impacts
on Main Street and during Sundance.
and you know the Science March I guess went down mainstream kind of around the
back but it was a very different time of year and so I do think that we have a
responsibility to balance you know wanting to support these great events
and making sure that people get seen and also trying to make sure that our
town functions at some level and doesn't end up shutting down so I
think if we can find a way if they're going to meet at park on like
in the coalition park area or the trolley roundabout and we can keep traffic on Main
Street keeps whatever 9th Street opens so the buses can keep flowing and they march
down that and shut down that part of Park Ave. That's great. If that's where you want
to go. I think doing like the combination of Main Street down Park Ave to the park
that starts to get a lot. I mean that's a much bigger event than anything we've
done or than any of the marches have been in the past. So that's kind of where
If it's your preferred option to go down Park Ave, I'm happy to support going down Park Ave,
making sure that we can keep as much running up the street, Main Street as possible.
And if you said, you know, we want to march down Main Street and that's our priority,
then I would say then march down Main Street and then jump on the Poison Creek
so we can keep the other side open, but that's kind of where I'm at.
Okay, just a really quick one. Just on staff's behalf, we have standing direction from City
Council to mitigate impacts on neighbors. We can't do a roll-in closure for parking.
We will have to remove parking on Park Ave. It's I want to make you aware. I know I see
where Council is going and I don't want to get in that way. However, Jenny's done,
she's followed Council direction. And I want you to know I am so passionate about
this event. I changed my donations on Amazon to go to the Brady Fund. I made a GoFundMe
donation while Maya was presenting, and it's March for Our Lives Park City in case you
want to know. And so I do want you to know that staff, we believe in this event, we
support it. And this is about residents and neighbors and impacts, and we do look
at it, and I think there's some truth between Steve and Lynn about whether you do or don't
have to treat it the same way. As staff, we do feel like we have to treat them all the
same way, and we want to bring you that objective, and that's why we bring your alternatives.
Yeah, Diane, and thanks for bringing that up. And I do truly believe that staff is
absolutely supportive, and that's been evidenced by how we've scrambled to pull
this together. I also believe that no matter where this is held, the community is going
to come out and support you. I think it's going to be a wonderful event and it could
be in the far reaches of town and we would come out and cheer you on. That being said,
I would like to give you the prominence you'd like on this and I would like to see
us work out a way to do that. I throw the question out to you, Jenny. Logistically
with both parking and with our transit system, what is less disruptive, coming down
main street and then going into Poison Creek or starting on to the trail so
essentially you only went after closed park or going starting on lower main and
just going down Park Avenue and closing that I'm not disrupting it having lower
main street and going on to the trail is far more or less disruptive to
transit so I that's why the recommendation from staff is the
recommended route I actually the question was if they were to start
at the top of Main Street we would close Main and let them go down and then join the trail versus
starting on the bottom of Main and going down Park Avenue. If it were an either or,
which one do you think would be less disruptive?
I think Main Street would be less disruptive to
transit. Okay. Yes please. So I would agree with that with Main Street. I think that
But we've talked, I heard rolling closures a couple of times, and rolling closure is
a good way to mitigate traffic, but it doesn't allow us to keep the event as safe as we would
want it to be.
We would rather have it be a hard closure, especially with the prominence of vehicular
attacks on these kind of things that have happened across the country.
So I don't think from public safety we'd feel good about the rolling closure part
of it.
And if we're going to close the street, main street's a lot easier for us to
do.
We would take less officers because there are less intersections.
So Main Street would be preferable for us.
Would you guys be okay? I mean, Main Street is actually a great location to have a march.
And you get, I mean, as far as like a backdrop drop goes, are you guys opposed to marching down Main Street if that actually...
No, we would love to march down Main Street.
And would that be preferable to park out if that would be actually easier for us to pull off?
Yes, absolutely.
Okay, well, that would be then my vote would be to give them the space to be seen, march
down Main Street, and then Hopon Poison Creek to get to the rally, and if that would work
for you, then I think that that might be a nice compromise, and it would be great
attention for you guys still.
How do the rest of you feel about that?
Okay.
Not to keep.
Does it work at all?
Then hit your button.
Oh, does it work at all to come from the Transit Center, gather in the Bear Bench, and then
go down from there, the Bear Bench Plaza?
I mean, I'm just kind of thinking about the ease of movement of everyone coming on transit.
I know the Bear Bench Plaza is not huge.
Just a thought, but I'm in support of this.
Jenny, are you going to use some brew pub parking lot as a gathering space?
It's likely we will need to take some of the parking in Brew Pub in order to stage for the event.
I do, without having Blake or Alfred here, but I would have, I'm concerned about impact to the transit center.
And that is going to be an important part of the day and getting the students and all the supporters.
So I would prefer to have them stage on upper main to make sure that we can operate that area.
And Jenny, that's the exact same route we're having two weeks later for the YSA Olympic celebration, right?
Correct.
Yeah, so we know that well.
Yes.
Okay, so I'm hearing from Council that they are supportive of pursuing that option.
Is Council supportive of paying the additional fees that it's going to cost for the mitigation?
Yes.
Okay.
What else do you need from us?
That's it, I think.
Thank you so much.
Well, we're going to need a motion, but Maya and to all the students here, I just want to
tell you how proud this community is of you.
And I happen to agree with Angela that you will save the world.
And I got to say, I really appreciate the fact you're not waiting to do it, that you're
getting started right now.
Thank you.
Your Honor, I'd like to move that we approve new business item number one with the modification
to the route and the amended fee waiver.
Second.
And before you vote, can I just suggest some clarity?
Please.
So incorporation amendment to finding a fact,
number one, to reflect the march on Main Street,
a new condition of approval, number 13,
to reflect a new Main Street closure plan as approved
by staff to minimize impacts to road closures
and transportation.
and number three fees not to exceed $12,000.
And I amend my motion to incorporate the comments from the city attorney.
Second.
Okay. Any discussion? All in favor?
Aye.
Any opposed?
Congrats. You have a march.
Thank you.
Okay. Jenny, let's talk about a parade down Main Street.
Yes.
Mr. Mayor and City Council, I do want to introduce Chris Finney.
Chris Finney, oh, sorry.
You guys ready?
Yeah, I'm sorry.
I wanted to introduce Chris Finney.
Chris Finney has been with us.
We actually got him to start on Halloween.
He's the Special Events Coordinator.
And tonight is his first Council presentation.
So I'm going to let him take it away.
and then we'll turn it over to Council questions.
You got to do the song first, Chris.
We have the dance.
We have hazing.
Tim will lead you in the song.
Thanks, Jenny.
I'm here tonight to get approval for the changes
for the Thin Air Innovation Festival,
level three event with some significant changes.
This year the Chamber has partnered with Youth Sports Alliance and the Snow Sports Industry
Association of America to bring an additional parade to the festival.
The parade will be held on Friday evening from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.
The parade is for returning Olympic and Paralympic athletes, so the YSA of athletes will be marching
with their Olympic heroes down Main Street will be a good community experience for us
to celebrate our local community and all the returning Olympians.
We did this four years ago and it was a huge success and we're excited to do this again.
Some of the impacts that will come around with this added parade will have some additional street closures.
We'll be closing up our main street, gathering in the brew pub parking lot, walking down Main Street to 7th Street.
some increased public security as well and some additional parking will be
removed on on Main Street as well as the east side of Park Ave between 7th and
9th. Increased city fees last year the fees were roughly $3,500 this year the
fees will grow to about $9,100, a difference of about $5,500.
The organizers have applied for a fee reduction waiver.
The economic development manager is in agreement and recommends 100% free reduction to this
because of the community benefits of this event.
Normally, this can go through the city manager, but as noted in the last piece here, they
We're over our $2,000 threshold, so we need council's approval for this.
I'm here tonight with Bob Kolar as well.
He's a representative from the city chamber.
Bob, do you have anything to add?
Jenny, do you have anything extra to add?
I do not.
I do just want to, again, make the point.
I think the partnership that the chamber has leveraged with the SIA as well as YSA
and bringing a post-Olympic parade.
I think it both celebrates our community and creates a lot of vibrancy.
It's also the last weekend at the resorts in a wonderful time to celebrate the winter season that we've had
And we are recommending that full fee reduction for this year for a one-time one-time thing
When Bob was planning a back when the fee reduction was due
We were not aware of this potential partnership. And so that that's why it wasn't done through the process before
Nice job, Chris.
Thanks, Andy.
Questions?
I do have a question.
So is there going to be a – there's going to be a concert right after this?
I mean, is it – do the two butt up against one another so everybody can see it?
So the way that it'll run is the parade will come down Main Street to 7th Street.
All the kids from the YSA will then funnel into the area of Lower Main Street.
They will also be blocked off for the concert that night.
The athletes will then be shuttled up into the town lift plaza where they'll be doing
autographs, interviews, things like that, and then up onto the stage for the concert where
they'll be doing some more interviews and announcements and celebration.
So the parade is scheduled to end around 6 p.m. and with all that other activity,
we're hoping that the concert will start roughly at 7.30 and go for an hour and
a half.
Okay.
Are we waiving any other fees for this event?
Is it just an additional $9,000 fee waiver on top of other fee waivers that we're already approving?
That's it.
The Finnair Innovation Festival has paid all of their city service fees in the past, and
so the $9,100 is all of the city services that we anticipate.
Well, I've loved the Finnair Innovation Festival, the concept, and bringing it right at the
end of the season when everyone's, you know, might be raining outside, that's been wonderful.
And then bringing this other part of who we are, which is about innovation and art and
culture and adventure, all kinds of wonderful things that the guest speakers and the different
panels and that sort of thing bring with thin air.
And then to combine it with this other thing that we are, which is sport, young athletes,
and I think it's wonderful.
So I'm really excited about it.
Okay.
We will now open the public hearing so if you'd like to make a comment on this item
Please step forward. We
will close the public hearing
Any other thoughts or emotion?
Mr. Mayor I move that we approve new business item number two
Second second all in favor. Hi. Okay. It passes. Thank you so much. Thank you one for one. Good job
Next up, new business item three, a consideration to approve ordinance 2018-10.
Hey, Bruce.
Mr. Mayor, City Council, Bruce Erickson for the Planning Department.
These are Tippi Moran's projects.
She was up taking care of two other Platt amendments last night,
so we've sent her off to study for her professional exams.
This first item is an amendment to a condominium
platt for 108 square feet to enclose the space under an existing building in
Queen Esther Village Planning Commission approved it February 14th
unanimously. Staff recommends an approval with fines of fact conclusion
the law and the ordinance as submitted.
Great.
Questions?
Yeah.
How many other of the Queen Esther condominiums have had the same?
A couple.
This is not an uncommon thing in Queen Esther.
Yeah.
Looks like it makes all kinds of sense.
The architecture lends itself to doing this.
Exactly.
Okay.
No more questions.
So we'll open this for a public hearing.
Anybody would like to speak on this matter?
please step forward okay we will close the public hearing do we have a motion
your honor I'd like to move that we approve new business item number three
second okay all in favor hi it passes on a new business item for consideration
to approve ordinance number 2018-11 Bruce welcome back thank you Mr. Mayor
this is 925 Woodside a replat of a lot and a half with an existing house on it
The lot line goes through the kitchen planning commission approve this with the unanimous recommendation no public comment on 14 February
We recommend approval
Findings of fact conclusions the law and the ordinance has written
Okay questions
Nothing, okay. We'll open the public hearing
Anybody like to comment on this?
We will close the public hearing
Do we have a motion your honor? I would like to move that we approve new business item number four
Do we have a second?
Second.
Sorry.
You can have it.
Did you get that, Michelle?
I think we'll give it to Steve.
So just a quick comment, Mr. Mayor.
Both of these plots were deemed complete in November of 2017,
and they were completely processed by March of 2018.
That's a four-month cycle for both of these plots.
So plant them around and really move these through the system and we appreciate our good work. Thank you. Nice. Yeah, well done
Okay, so all in favor. Hi. Hi any pose it passes
I think this next item is going to take a take a little while
So we're going to take a short break first five to ten minutes. We'll reconvene
They were not in conversation, so I'll join them and get them.
You're the owner of one of the bonanza lots?
Yeah, I haven't been to a meeting since she got over here.
Well, thank you. Thank you to meet you.
I was on the school board here, and it was a really good discussion at that point that she brought it out.
And then it was great that she sort of worked it out like this.
You want to encourage you, but it's so important that we don't latch on to stuff, especially first amendment stuff.
Yeah, because we don't have that much work, you know, in the school board.
Yeah, oh yeah, when they were going to be out.
You got to let people do it.
And I don't know if you're going to make it again.
It's awesome.
Well, thank you.
We will reconvene.
Welcome.
Heinrich, you want to kick us off?
Good evening, Mayor and Council.
This item is on page 101 of your packet.
I know we're running a little bit late this evening, so I just have a very brief overview
view of, A, how we got here, and B, what we're asking you this evening.
And then Wendy Fisher is here from Utah Open Lands.
And Mike Ogie is here as well if you have some technical aspects.
So not to belabor this, but obviously we acquired this property June 15th this year.
On July 13th, you basically established a planning protocol or process.
That graphic there, to your right, was the aspect of the advisory groups that the previous
council appointed and how the actual planning process will work.
The important aspect of that is you selected Utah Open Lands to be the consultant for
the land trust to hold the conservation easement, and they were tasked with creating
a resource inventory.
We have met with Council August 31st in November 9th, and at the November 9th meeting you directed staff in Utah Open Lands to continue the resource inventory through the winter.
So we haven't met for some time, but that was because we have been doing the winter inventory.
We've also had two or two advisory committee meetings in August and November.
The notes from the November meeting are in your staff report.
And then we also had an open house.
Not a lot of people attended that, but Wendy and I spoke to a few people as another aspect.
So the purpose this evening, excuse me, Utah Open Lands has closed the resource inventory
and they've created a conservation easement intention and use report.
At a very high level that identifies the environmental or conservation purposes.
You'll hear a lot about watershed this evening.
it also has some recommended permitted and prohibited uses. So we are taking
this resource inventory the scientific purpose and we're condensing it into a
document that we will adopt hopefully on May 3rd which is at the bottom. A huge
component of that is public comment. These meetings as well as the
technical and stakeholder meetings are important as well as we're asking
Council to have staff host an open house. So tentatively at your direction we will host
the stakeholder and technical resource committee meetings on March 23rd and then a public open
house likely in these chambers on April 2nd. What exactly are we discussing as Park City-owned
property and control. There is an exhibit in front of you. Yellow is the outline of
the Bonanza flat property. There are a few in holdings there that are blocked out. There's
one that looks like a little triangle and then a rectangle there on the side. So that
is property that is not owned by Park City Municipal. So we are discussing that property
that we purchased collectively, the community, for $38 million. What we are not discussing
have control over in this discussion are the Orange County roads and that's a
very important aspect because I think you'll hear a little bit about access
this evening and the discussions for permitted and prohibited uses will not
include those corridors so thanks so if it's okay with you your honor I'd like
to just kick it over to Wendy but if you have any questions for myself please
Please let me know.
Is it okay with that?
Okay, Wendy, Mike, excellent job on both your inventory and your report.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
And I want to reiterate something that Heinrich said in part so that the public knows where
we're going with this and also so they can understand why we've set it up this way.
This does not contain all of the prohibited uses and all of the permitted uses.
There's some kind of high level things that Utah Open Landers wanted to get, some
council direction on in terms of policy. If you disagree with some of the things we should
know now because we don't want to take them forward in terms of talking with the technical
and the jurisdictional stakeholders as well as some of these public meetings. But again,
the idea is to actually spark discussion and to be able to talk about some of these
different issues based on the things that we are seeing. And I just, I have to reflect
But quickly, from my perspective, I am used to coming to public hearings, especially after
this last legislative session, ready to mourn the loss of something that we love, you know,
open space, the ability to protect more open space.
And we could be here today to rally against potential development of a piece of property
against the loss of moose habitat and flammulated owl habitat and pika and a number of other
things. We could be here today to mourn the loss of memories of hiking and snowshoeing
and all sorts of other uses up there, but we're not. And I want to thank the council
for your vision back before the bond, being willing to take a risk to ensure that there
There was a chance that we would be here tonight to talk about how we move forward in the preservation
and the stewardship of Bonanza Flat.
And to me, after 27 years, recognizing that we're not making any more land, that we're
actually losing more land, this is a big and a bold step and it is not last on Utah
open lands that without the $25 million bond that was passed with Park City and
your leadership in moving forward and protecting Bonanza Flat.
We wouldn't even be here tonight talking about what I think is an exciting opportunity to ensure stewardship and preservation of this property long-term.
So thank you.
The management plan, the hope is that it will go ahead and get set the intentions down, not just of the council, but with your policy direction understanding where the public and others are coming from.
So, when we talk about conservation easements, we talk about in the report, I want you to
think about kind of these ideas, kind of the sustainability of compatibility, which is
that even conservation values can come into conflict.
And that's something that we understand really well from Utah-Villain's perspective.
You also see it from a recreational use perspective.
We've heard over and over again, hiking trails, wanting a hiking-only trail as opposed
to a hiking and a biking trail.
Well, sometimes uses can actually come into conflict, but sometimes conservation values
can
And we come into conflict. And we detailed in the report under the IRS code where the conservation
values rest. And there's scenic and there's wildlife habitat and natural systems, public
recreation and education. But even public recreation can come into conflict with, for example, wildlife
habitat. So what we're trying to do is balance those conservation values so that we can sustain
them and protect them. Another concept that we talk about this is just basically in this report is
the carrying capacity of an ecosystem and we're talking about that in terms of human and wildlife
species. And bonanza flat itself cannot sustain the carrying capacity for other properties. We
have to really look at it within itself. And so one of the things that you'll see over and over
again in the report that we've recommended, is a no net increase in use on the property.
But I caution you that that necessarily means that there are some decisions that have to
be made and there has to be some monitoring of the degrees of use as we go forward.
And then the final concept that we have is not loving the property to death.
We know that on any given day in Bonanza there are 250 to 350 people on a regular
basis that came to Bonanza.
That's a lot of people and there's just no way without doing some higher level of management
to be able to sustain that on the landscape over time.
And so that's something else that we think is important that we've kind of talked about
with respect to this report.
I also want to talk a little bit about the fact that it's important to understand
Regardless of how the property has been used to date, as the landowner, you now have the
– you're in the position of making the decision of how you will transition your new
ownership into stewardship.
Mining, for example, is a historic use on the property.
And while its remnants are a cultural reminder and a point for greater cultural understanding,
we are not recommending that mining continue on the property that we recommend as a
prohibited use.
I know that seems obvious, but I guess what I'm saying is this is an opportunity for you
to look at this in terms of its undeveloped state and moving forward from that perspective.
I think the – can you hit the next slide?
One of the things that we did is after our first brush at the resource inventory, there
were two things that the council directed us to do.
We went back to our stakeholders and we, as Heinrich said, held a public forum,
and then you asked us to continue the inventory into the winter.
And so I want to also discern that there are parts of this report that are recommendations,
and then there are parts of this report that are essentially the technical resource inventory that we completed into the winter.
And the resource inventory is really just about the data that we collected.
It is not necessarily some major study at this point.
It's the technical data that we discovered while we were out there.
So one of the things that the jurisdictional and the technical stakeholders,
and we agree with this, had discussed was this idea of creating different zones.
The map that we have is an approximate boundary.
It's really, again, we're talking about the 30,000-foot level here.
So one of the ways we started looking at the different zones
is it's hard to say that there are areas on bonanza that haven't been touched.
There are areas on bonanza that have been touched.
And we see that in some of the back country area.
Right now in the back country area there is actually a yurt that still exists on the property.
So we're trying to look at all of the different things that are occurring on the property and create these zones.
But the bottom line is that we think fundamentally the areas at the top of the watershed
should have some of that more pristine value and pristine protection.
That is not to say that there aren't some human infrastructure
or man-made structures that you may find in that particular area,
but we are proposing that we start to create these zones
that would limit certain uses in certain areas,
which actually was one of the things that came out from our technical
and our jurisdictional stakeholders.
So if you agree with this idea of having these zones,
we would want to go back to our jurisdictional and technical and the public and maybe come back and refine some of those zones.
But I think that that gives you a pretty good idea of what we would propose in those different zones.
The map might shift a little bit, but this is the general idea of what we would propose in those different zones.
I also want to talk about Utah Open Lands recommended prohibited uses.
And again, this doesn't, you know, there are things like mining, there are things like subdivision and development of the property that we are saying are going to be prohibited uses.
But we felt that there were some, quite frankly, that we have heard there may be issues in.
And so we wanted to make sure that we were clear about our recommendations that we do not think that there should be motorized use on the property in the summer and the winter.
Again, and I'll talk about this specifically with snowmobiles because we did talk about
that particular issue, but this does not include the right of ways that Heinrich put
up that you guys don't have jurisdiction on.
This is just with respect to bonanza flat.
There are details and levels of details and complexity that move on to that, but we
are suggesting that there not be motorized use of the property.
Hunting.
Hunting, we also do not see that hunting on the property is appropriate based on some
of the recreational uses.
However, we do recognize that hunting is an appropriate management tool in certain circumstances,
and we've seen that on other property, and so we don't want to forestall it completely,
but yes, we would see primarily prohibiting hunting on the property.
And we also see prohibiting overhead transportation and infrastructure.
infrastructure, and we would want to include in that even aerial rights, but basically no
trams, no ski lifts, no gondolas, or the related infrastructure, so no towers.
Utah opened lands when we acquired St. Creek Canyon, which is adjacent to Bonanza Flat
back in 1994.
We actually had language in that easement that was very specific to prohibiting these
sorts of overhead transportation ski lifts, that sort of thing.
So we are recommending that as a prohibited use as well.
So,
coming back to what we talked about with respect to the IRS and the code, it is clear
that Bonanza has the conservation values that are as follows, watershed and water quality,
natural, scenic, aesthetic, heritage, public recreation, education use and access and
wildlife habitat values of open land.
And so those would be stated as the intention unless there are others or in the event
that you won't see a greater prioritization that you want to put in there.
We recognize that any recreational use has the potential to increase threats to the property.
I did not bring with me the pictures today of waste that we found on the property that was really graphic
because I just felt it wasn't appropriate. I'm going to show you some dog waste a little later.
But it's kind of amazing to us to see that in this watershed.
There have to be some facilities.
The restrooms that were put up this summer were pumped, I think, on an almost a daily
basis every other day, and that is telling.
And it's a little scary to think that that was going on without those issues.
And so one of the uses that we think would require monitoring is definitely dog waste
removal.
We were not impressed this summer to see the lack of dog waste removal, and we have
some wonderful pictures on that later and then I just want to sorry I was
Wasatch County did reach out to me just the other day that they do also have a
concern about the dogs into the watershed so I just want to make note of
that in the public meeting and then also in terms of permitted use uses with
restrictions that there would be no camping unless there was some sort of
country permit system. And again this has to do with waste removal. Utah Open Lands has a property
that is a campground. It's free to folks and we didn't have any sort of pit toilet, but we did
provide wag bags and that didn't solve the problem. You really have to have some sort of permit
system. And again, since this is a watershed, something has to be dealt with in terms of
if that's use that you would potentially allow. And we don't think the dog use should occur
in the primitive areas. And again, because things flow downhill. And so a lot of the
dogways that we were seeing was really happening at the top of the watershed. It was being
left there. Rain events, all those sorts of things come down. It's washing into the
lakes and the streams and the wetlands.
Or, I'm sorry, or during the winter, because
that is a snowpack. And again, coming back to Wasatch County's concerns about watershed,
we just don't think that that would be appropriate.
This is an example of some of the things that we saw.
The picture on the left is a picture that we put, a sign that we put up with Park City.
You can see the poop fairy asking people to pick up after their dogs.
Within days of putting that sign up, it was vandalized and the signs were taken down.
So trying to get compliance, which we tried to do, tried to let people know we're not sure where that's going to go.
Again, that's one of the things that led to our recommendation and I think I have, yes,
some great little poop slides.
Those were all taken on one day in one particular area.
Again, I didn't want to go through a lot of poop slides today.
I think we showed you some of that.
And then I want to talk a little bit about the snowmobile use.
And first and foremost, I want to say that when you look at the resource inventory
that we conducted over the winter, we did put some different references to some
different studies in that, but fundamentally, we are not saying that snowmobiles have a
greater impact on wildlife or watershed than other recreational uses.
We're not saying that.
Utah Open Lands actually met with the Utah Snowmobile Association Board, and we talked
about these issues, and I have to say first and foremost, I was very impressed with
the Utah Snowmobile Association Board.
They did express an interest in seeing recreation uses for snowmobiling on Bonanza, but one
One of the things that they expressed wholeheartedly is that they were very, very interested in keeping
access to adjacent known and permitted snowmobiling areas open.
And we actually are in support of that recommendation that they made to us.
We would agree that keeping that access open so that snowmobiles can access those
additional recreational areas, we think is appropriate.
But we are saying to the council, and again, it's not that they necessarily have greater impact than something else, but coming back to the caring capacity and the no net increase, some things got to go.
We can't have it all. Those uses are going to come into conflict and that creates unsustainability and that's going to create issues.
So we've got to figure out a way through it based on what we saw out there.
there is a lot of use over the property and so we felt that the kind of the
middle of the road was to make sure that there was access to those additional
recreational areas for snowmobile but not recreation for snowmobiling on
bonanza flat proper.
You know some of the reasons that we had out there is
that there are some impacts that you're going to again have from any
recreational use. So right you have that one or two or three or five or
10% that don't pick up after themselves.
We have found new abandoned snowmobile machines, so at some point those are going to have to
be retrieved, I'm guessing by some sort of vehicle at some point.
And there was snowmobiling over vegetation.
I will point out that the snowpack was really, really low this year, but I think that
as we all recognize when there are changing conditions in the weather from global warming
or whatever issues we have to adjust and it can't be status quo, it can't be what we've
always done.
We also have documented and again it's just basically documenting what we saw.
This is the parking that was taking place that is in that area again where you're
looking here just for reference.
This is in that Y area where the Wasatch County roads are.
And so you can see the fence is on the Bonanza Flat property.
But yes, so that's what we saw.
We saw parking.
We saw storage.
And again, to differentiate for people and for the council, what we really are looking
at is this is what we observed.
We didn't Photoshop the photos.
These were real-time.
This is what we saw up there.
Between Park City staff and Utah Open Land staff, I think we were up on the property
a total of about 100, maybe 120 hours.
The report is a little dated, but we actually did continue to go up and look at things.
We did see, and this is, again, data that we saw.
We're not saying that snowmobiles have a greater impact on wildlife than necessarily
other recreational uses, but what we did observe is a change in the wildlife patterns.
Again, we're documenting that.
That's the data that we saw.
I'm sure that there are all sorts of studies that could go back and forth.
In fact, that was a lot of the discussion we had with the Utah Snowmobile Association,
that there are multiple studies and they argue with each other, hey, that's good science.
We're not arguing studies, we're basically saying we can't have it all and so at some
point we have to make a choice and we feel it doesn't make sense for us as an organization
to move forward in crafting a conservation easement and holding public input unless
we have some direction on where that's going to go and yes our recommendation is as it stands.
This is another area on the property kind of in the what meadow area.
Another thing that was brought forward by and we've talked about this before by the stakeholders
and that we think is really a critical issue is that the guardsman's pass area is just
not safe. We've had Wasatch County, we've had state parks who've been responding to safety issues.
We've had fire trucks that can't get through on the road for emergency purposes because that
area, it gets just clogged with parking. It's not sustainable. And so, again, you either have
to kick them all out or figure out another place for them. And so, yes, again, this is
why Utahful lands feels there needs to be a trailhead and a parking area. And to read
actually from the Park City bond that was passed.
It says that Shell Park City, Utah, be authorized to issue general obligation bonds in an amount
not to exceed 25 million and to mature no more than 16 years from the date or dates of
such bonds to acquire, improve, and forever preserve open space, park, and recreational
land located in Bonanza Flat if such land is available for purchase by the city.
In order to protect the conservation values thereof, to remove existing unneeded man-made
improvements and to make limited improvements for public access, parking, and use.
So we feel that these recommendations for parking and access are actually something that fall
within the bond language as well, and again, we think that it's kind of one of the only
ways that we can sustain it at this point.
Beyond that, I could read different parts, and Mike, I don't know if there's anything
that you wanted to add in at this point?
I think you covered it, and will there be any specific questions?
I think that the final thing that I guess I would say in looking through the report
and some of the suggestions that we have is the survey for bonanza flat was done what
in the last three weeks, and that has been particularly illuminating.
I think the surveyors said this is probably one of the most complex properties they've
ever surveyed.
We don't have all of the answers yet.
We recognize that the conservation easement will have to be subject to proven encumbrances
at the same time.
We need to understand the scope of that.
We don't want to get ourselves into a situation where if there's a clean water violation
or any of those sorts of things associated with those
encumbrances that we end up taking that on.
So as we go down this road and we get more of that information
and people bring that to us,
we want to make sure that we understand it,
but we do understand that there are some complex moving parts
to this particular piece of property.
And again, given some policy direction,
we're not asking for a major decision tonight.
We'd like to be able to come back to you after we've met
with the jurisdiction and the technical stakeholders,
others, had public input, met with some of the people of Wasatch County to further refine
some of the unknowns at this point and how they're going to fit into the conservation
easement.
Great.
Time for questions.
Lynn?
I just want to start by disclosing that my spouse owns a piece of property in Brighton
United States, no building on it. But that does not cloud my objectivity. So just wanted
to say that.
Okay. Thank you.
Other questions?
Yeah, Tim.
I'd like some clarification on the snowmobile access routes to the other allowed use areas.
I'm unclear on where those other allowed use areas are and how the access would go
across or through Bonanza Flat. Can you just help me understand that a little better?
Yeah, so Snake Creek Canyon and Pine Canyon are two areas within state parks that have
allowed snowmobile use. I think one of them has a concession, but we actually, when we
protected Snake Creek Canyon, we allowed for snowmobile use in Snake Creek Canyon.
So typically, at least when we talked to the Snowmobiling Association, what they
talked about is going down on Pine Canyon Road, they can access both what's going
on in Pine Canyon and then there are also ways to access with Snake Creek Canyon and
my understanding is that the state parks has looked at how they can better manage that
and provide greater access even on their end.
That's been one of the problems that they've had is gate closures and being able to provide
an access area in state parks apparently in terms of parking and everything else which
is why a lot of people have come over from Park Cityside in order to specifically access
pine canyon, but they typically, as we've understood it, go on that pine canyon road
to access it.
So the people were creating these access routes for, are coming from either Big Cottonwood
or Park City, driving up parking somewhere on the outside boundary of Bonanza and then
driving through Bonanza Flat on their snowmobile on these roads, which would be the access
routes into allowed use areas as opposed to going around and coming up through
Midway or Heber. That's that's what I understand.
I question why we would want
to facilitate that. That's I'm just wondering about that. I think the main
component of that is those are county roads that they're accessing through. So
understanding again that we do not control those county access roads. So
So those are legitimate access points through this conversation.
Some people had concerns from the Big Cottonwood area, et cetera, that those roads would actually
be closed off.
And it's been a little bit of, you know, fighting the unknown or mistruths that we
do not have control over those county roads.
So that access would be allowed.
We just want to point it out that we think that's appropriate.
I get that.
So we can't do anything about the roads and the access that they may or may not
create.
But my concern is when you show a picture of a parking area with storage and snowmobiles
and a lot of traffic.
And I wonder, well, gee, I wonder how many of these people are up here recreating and
using these access roads to go to allowed use areas versus Brighton estate residents
who are using it for transportation to get to and from their cabins, which I see
as a completely different issue.
And I know you've called that out in the report as a completely different issue.
So, I think from what I saw, that parking area that you showed is probably highly populated
by a lot of people who are not Brighton Estates residents using their snowmobiles to get to
and from their cabins, although there might be a few in there.
And then it's, so what are we doing there?
Are we creating a place where people can come and park and store and then access allowed
use areas?
That's a little bit problematic.
Well, and I think that that's a good question, Tim. My perspective on what we were documenting
in terms of the vehicles and whatnot is that the majority of that was residents of Brighton
estates. We did go up a couple of times and the gate to get in from the Park City
side was open and there didn't seem to be anybody there. So I don't know if there
are people that were using that area to come up and like access those other areas and parking
in there. So we did not try to go through and check license plate numbers or anything
else which is again why we've tried to define that there are these separate issues. And
I think that you are distilling a really great, finer point to this. Again, we'd
love to see some direction. If you would like us to look at that more fully, we'd
be happy to but the bottom line is yeah we do understand that that's a parking
area that's been for Brighton estates and we have identified in the report
that access to adjacent lands is different with respect to the
recreational part again we're saying we don't see that that's appropriate on
bonanza how many of those people are parking there from Davis County to go
recreate in I don't know and Tim I just want to point out today we want to
stay focused on the property we own and there there's probably a longer
discussion around the county roads and access, but that's not what we're going to address
today because that's something we need to involve our partners in.
So I think what they've made very clear is there are concerns about the management of
motorized use on bonanza flat.
As far as the road, that's something we're going to have to come back to and discuss
in a future discussion.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Lynn?
This is a question about roads, but not county roads.
these other little roads that you see like from the Y where Pine Canyon Road
goes down and then there's that you see that little dirt road going to the West
and around and I don't know what it goes to. That goes to the Girl Scout Camp
so there would still those kinds of roads and same with the other one that
looks like it's over by the kind of a gravel pit or something to the east.
You know, those roads are still, would those still be accessible by people using motorized
means to get to their Girl Scout camp, obviously, and their homes there?
So again, one of the things that we are looking at is based on what we're seeing, we're
saying that yes, the conservation easement would be subject to proven encumbrances.
We know, for example, that the Girl Scouts do have, through their lease and through other things, the ability and a road to get to their facility.
What is important in crafting and conservation easement is to understand the scope of what those are.
Does that mean those roads become impervious surfaces in the future, get widened, get rerouted?
Those are questions that we can't answer because we don't have that information.
So I'm not going to say a yes or a no here.
That's something that we hope to continue to understand,
and we think it's really valuable to understand what the scope may or may not be,
because something that is 12 feet today, 50 years from now,
if you're not dealing it with respect to the conservation easement
and there isn't something that's defined can become 500 or whatever that particular issue
is.
Again, we'd probably be recommending that there be no impervious surfaces in Bonanza
Flat even with respect to parking areas that that would never become asphalted.
Those are refinements that we would see working on right now as far as those different things.
We only have what we have to go on and so I don't have the answer to all of those
to be honest.
But it starts with encumbrances.
It starts with proven encumbrances.
Any other questions?
Okay.
We are going to now open it up for public input.
How many of you would like to speak tonight?
Okay. We've got a bunch.
A couple of requests then.
The first one is I just want to reiterate.
Tonight's discussion is about the intention and use report.
It's about the property we own
and the proposed easement item.
We're not going to, it's not fruitful
to talk about access in the county roads.
That's not something under our authority.
So we ask that you stick to the topic at hand.
Secondly, we ask that you not spend a lot of time
repeating what somebody just said.
If you go up there, you know, if the person in front of you
said something that you feel strongly about
and you agree with, get up there and say, ditto.
And, you know, hit on new points.
So with that, we will open the public hearing
and come on forward.
Hi, Alisha, nice to wonder.
And I would just like to,
I just was reading this the other day when I got it and I have a commercial guiding business
in town and I would love to use this area.
However, I think that there needs to be some kind of a monitoring system, potentially permitting
system for commercial guiding companies and I realize I'm basically asking to pay to
use it, but that's fine with me because I think it's stewardship that I deserve to give
back to that area for using it and making my living off of it and other areas in town.
But I think the risk that if we don't put something like that in place, the permitting
system or a lot of user days, amount of people that guiding companies can bring
back there, I think we really run a risk of every Tom Dick and Harry from Salt Lake
like coming up over the past, especially in the summer and just using the land that we
paid for with our tax dollars and, you know, the land that our city is protecting.
I'm not going to stand here and say they shouldn't be allowed.
I just think there needs to be some kind of a discussion on monitoring that type of
activity so it doesn't become overrun.
And it's a lot easier to start with the rain's tight and let them out a little
bit than to have it be a free-for-all and try to change the user, the demographic, and
the way that we use it and the way that we monitor it.
So that's my suggestion.
That can be a conversation down the road, but I just want to put the buzz in here about
that.
Great.
Thank you.
My name is Roger Hull.
I just want to congratulate Park City for acquiring Bonanza Flats.
I think it's a wonderful thing.
My family's had property up in Brighton Estates for over 40 years.
We love that area.
We donated to the – it was a few hundred dollars.
It wasn't 25 million.
But we put in what we could, and I know a lot of people from Brighton Estates really
dug deep and tried to help make it happen.
And we appreciate the efforts that are being taken here.
Our concern is obviously being able to access our homes and cabins.
A lot of people live there.
That's the reality.
It's also the reality that most years we get a lot of snow.
And snowmobile access is the only way to get into our properties, and that's how it's been forever.
We used to park down by Silver King Mine, you know, where Royal Road comes in to Marsac or State Road 224.
We used to park there and go all the way in. That was our staging area, and then when the montage was built and they reconfigured 224,
our parking changed so it's just above the hotel.
There was a winter gate there and that area was just too small because of the people who had property there
and then the public would come and there just wasn't room.
So about 10 years ago, and I might be off a year or two,
we got permission from UDOT and Wasatch County to plow into the Y intersection.
And all of those vehicles, those traders you saw, are Brighton State's people.
The public doesn't go there.
You have to buy a key to get through the gate, and that's several hundred dollars every year to get there.
And we stay on the county road, and we're not going to talk about county roads tonight.
I know that.
But we stay on the county road, and we park along the county road on the right-of-way.
We don't park out into Bonanza Flats.
We try to respect all of that.
There are no rules to follow.
although we just tried to be good stewards,
it would be helpful if we could have a meeting
and agree to some rules
because we wanted to protect the area too.
But those vehicles, those trailers that you asked about,
that's all Brighton estates.
That's the people who live up there
and work in Park City or come back and forth
or recreate.
I appreciate that the county roads
are not on the agenda today.
We certainly need Pine Canyon,
But there are other dirt roads that go to cabins that cross brightness states and people
need to be able to access their cabins as they always have for decades.
So maybe a permitting system where vehicles are permitted.
They have a sticker and they pay to permit and they know what the rules are and they
park in the designated spot that why intersection is ideal and maybe the snowmobiles ought
to be permitted.
so that you know who is going to their properties and who's not.
But you can't get to all the properties just from Pine Canyon Road.
You just can't get to everybody's cabin.
And Pine Canyon Road is not always available because on the shoulders of the season,
there's not enough snow on it.
And so I think what we need is an opportunity to sit down with these good people
and work out some things for the residents up there,
for the people who have property,
so that we know what the rules are,
so that we can abide by them
and come to reasonable regulations,
and perhaps a permitting thing would be very, very helpful,
so that, you know, snowmobiles or vehicles are identified,
and if there's a problem, it can be addressed.
But what we do know is that there needs to be a place to park your vehicle and stage onto a snowmobile if you're going to get to your property.
There has to be a place. We can't decrease the amount of land we're using now because the demand is just too high.
We may not increase it, but we've got to at least maintain the status quo and have a place to stage.
And I get very concerned when we can't define what roads are going to be included, what roads are not going to be included.
This thing's coming forward and it's going to, you know, it's a freight train.
And we just need to make sure that there is access to these cabins for the people who have property up there.
So, anyway, we fully support this, Brighton Estates people are not interested in development
up there.
That's why so many of them have contributed to this cause, but we definitely need to balance
in appropriate access and recreation for the people who have property up there.
And I don't think we've really had that opportunity at this point.
And again, I'm not talking about the county roads.
I'm talking about the the dirt roads that people drive in to their cabins in the summer time
It's the only way to get in there
And on in the winter time they go over the snow
Nobody's trying to hurt any vegetation or anything like that
You know snowmobiles as has been mentioned have no greater impact than other forms of recreation
But it's more than just recreation. It's where people live. Thank you. Hey, Roger. Do you mind signing in? Oh, yes
Yes.
Thank you.
Hey, Carl.
Hey, good evening.
Carl Fisher.
I'm the executive director of SAVAR Canyons.
I'm also on the technical resource or the technical committee and just had some concerns
in recent weeks that I just wanted to bring up with you guys today.
I sent you an email earlier today.
I'm going to just assume you read it so I don't have to read it back to you and be a little
bit more brief.
But I do want to say I'm disappointed a little bit in some of the accusations that just came
back to us today about some of the things that we said.
We weren't trying to be inflammatory.
We weren't trying to use fear-based tactics or, I guess, Russian hacking type tactics.
We were simply responding to some of the things that we've heard officials from Park City
say on the radio in recent weeks that have been, honestly, alarming to us, and I know
So the resource plan says one thing, but we work on resource plans all over the state,
all over the Wasatch Mountains, and we've been doing it for 40 years.
And I recognize the difference between an administrative process and kind of a political
process that you guys represent, and that's why we were reacting.
And I just wanted to come up here and explain that to you guys today.
But when somebody from Park City on on the radio says that you're entertaining the idea of
putting of allowing
Interconnect across the the bonanza flat property
It threatened a lot of our members threatened people on our board
it threatened our donors that contributed to this campaign and
as the as the comment went on the radio it said it was to
to create a conversation.
So let's have the conversation.
We're not afraid of the conversation.
We are afraid of the proposal.
And we have been afraid of that proposal for over 40 years.
Our organization has literally been playing whack-a-mole
with that project for three or four decades.
And it's exhausting and emotional at times
as you can probably imagine.
But I don't think that our comments
were out of line or and so I wanted to first address that just just some of
the responses that we got from folks from Park City and you know Utah Open Lands.
I don't think we were at all out of line on that. We are also very concerned
about some of the groomed Nordic trails that are being considered on the area.
I think I want to preface and state this very clearly, as I did in my letter, that we're
not advocating for no use of the area.
We absolutely understand that people should be able to go enjoy that.
We're very concerned with intensity of use up there.
And I think that, you know, that's something we're going to have to continue to grapple
with.
But I am, we, as we were looking through the report, we did notice that, you know,
One of the reasons, one of the values,
flammulated owl, right?
How many times have we heard about the flammulated owl,
population and habitat on that area?
Well, that flammulated owl,
the locations on the Bonanza property
that the reports show coincide with some
of the more intensive recreation areas
that you're allowing.
So why are we not, so those are the areas
where Snowmobile, or excuse me,
some of the groomed ski trails and things like that could potentially be located.
We're concerned about introducing and inducing that type of activity and displacing some of the wildlife as already has been observed.
I tried to send you some resources as well, a study that was done just last year over in the Diamond Fork area where they had camera traps
and they were observing the human wildlife interactions
and have great documentation on how use,
during certain hours of the day,
displace wildlife populations.
And those wildlife populations and the watershed values
are more important, I think,
to our membership and constituencies,
honestly, than the use.
We have so impacted the Wasatch Mountains,
And this is a very, you guys all know, everybody knows how special this place is.
It's buttressed, it's flanked by three different ski areas.
There's been no shortage of proposals that have been proposed across this property over
the years.
So we want to try, and Park City, I mean, we were excited that Park City came to the
table with this because I don't live in Park City, we have members in Park City,
but me living down in the Salt Lake Valley,
I look to you guys, you do such incredible progressive things,
and we're hoping that this can be another feather in your cap,
so to speak, of a super progressive altruistic endeavor
that really is looking out for the integrity of some of the things
that honestly don't really have a voice on that landscape.
And so that's what we were trying to bring up to you.
So we'll continue.
We look forward to working with you on the stakeholder committee.
But I felt compelled to come up here given some of the, I guess,
just to say heated exchanges perhaps today.
I felt that they were misguided and I wanted to have a conversation with you guys
and let you know we're always here to converse.
but our intention was not to malign you or any of the partners in this, but we
were threatened honestly by some of the things and weren't sure exactly what was
going on and we felt it important to notify our members, our followers, whom
have invested in our organization and our values and our mission for decades.
States. Thank you.
My name is Robbie Powell. We live in Brighton
States. It's our primary residence. We donated to the cause here. We highly support it.
We highly support elimination of motorized vehicle traffic within the conservation area.
That being said, there is considerable concern about how we are going to park and access
our homes. And I ask that we be at the table for constructing a solution to
parking and access. Thank you.
So my name is John Olson and I'm a competitive
Nordic skier. The last several years we have been having major difficulties finding
training facilities to train with the lack of snow, because the majority of the places
we can train at this point are very low elevation, and there are significant snow-like issues
with amounts of snow in those areas, and one of the solutions to that is having a high
elevation Nordic track on Bonanza's flat because of its high elevation and higher
amount of snow.
Thank you. Thank you.
Hi, Council. My name is Bridget Meinhold. For those of you
who don't know me, I am also a resident of Brighton Estates, full-time year-round resident.
And I'm so grateful that all of the work that has been done on Bonanza Flat, both from
Utah Open Lands and staff and the Council, also very grateful for the people who showed
up here tonight in support of Bonanza Flat and also to share their concerns about
how we go forward. As we're getting into the nitty-gritty of actually preserving
bonanza flat, I want to say, first of all, let's all be grateful about this
opportunity that we have. It's an incredible opportunity to save a piece of
land that otherwise would have turned into a luxury ski resort and development.
That nobody would have had access to, nobody would have ever been able to snowmobile on,
ski on, hike on, mountain bike on. So we have this incredible opportunity to guide the preservation
of this land. So as a resident though, you can imagine I'm a little biased because I
live next to it. I access my home through it. My work is on my property. And I do ask
that the council will be considerate and compassionate to the people who have
approved an encumbrance to gain their property. So I reiterate what other
residents of Brighton Estates have said and ask that we be given special
snowmobile quarters in the winter, that they're wrangled off, roped or
polled, whatever is most convenient. It's a matter of safety, it's a matter
access. My husband is a captain of the Park City Fire Department, and he knows that, you
know, it's a matter of minutes can save a life. And having access across Bonanza Flat
on that special corridor can save a life. In the summer, it's the same, but with regards
also to fire danger. And so we need those egress points across the roads to be able
to exit speedily should that need occur.
I just want to also remember that we have a really special opportunity here and that we're
doing it to create a special place.
We can be a model for stewardship for the rest of the world.
I think what we have is a pretty unique opportunity to show that we can save land in the heart
of a densely populated area.
And so as we move forward with coming up with the specific solutions, I ask that everybody be sensible, compassionate, and consider it for both the people, all the people that are involved in all of their rights and wants and needs, but also for the land.
Thank you.
Hi, Tina Smith, Old Town.
And I just want to zip code.
Too much information, sorry.
So, I would just like to voice my opinion that I feel very strongly about, and I like
the way that our Sava Kenyans guy, I don't remember his name, put it, and that we should,
I want us to be very progressive on how we handle this land, and Wendy and everybody
work so hard on this to get all the entities together to purchase it.
So we have a lot of people to think about.
I would really like to see this not be dog-free.
We don't need another dog park.
They have a 1,400-acre dog park.
And unfortunately, people are not good with their dogs.
And with Salt Lake chipping in and their main objective to chip in
was to preserve the watershed,
I would like to see a non-dog zone.
national parks do it. It's so unfortunate how people are not responsible and let
their dogs use wildlife as chew toys and leave all their vehicle matter.
And that's
pretty much my big peep. And the snowmobile issue will be, it'll
be like
Okay, it's my first time speaking in front of the council here and I got to say it's
a little intimidating and my recommendation would be to put dimmers on all these lights
and tone it down a little bit. But all kidding aside, my name is Bob Merrill. I've been
a resident of Park City for 30 years and for most of that I've been a snowmobiler.
I've used snowmobiles for probably over 25 years to access properties and homes
in Tolgate Canyon and in Brighton States and this is a tough issue, it really is.
But in the course of snowmobiling in Brighton States, I'm a point A to B snowmobiler.
And that by that I mean I go to a destination, usually for ski access, I stick to the roads,
I'm not derbying around, not high marking.
And I've come to the conclusion after the last few years being up in Brighton States
that it's recreational snowmobiling is really not appropriate in the open space zone. And
I can tell you why. A lot of snowmobile users groups would tell you, oh, we're not invasive.
We just leap tracks. We're there. We're in and out. But the noise pollution alone is
incredible up in Brighton states and in Bonanza Flats. You can hear it from red
cloud to the ski areas to Brighton states. That whole zone is just overrun with
noise pollution. I really do think it affects the wildlife and I think they disappear in
the winter. A prime example of this is I do own a snowmobile trailer that I park at the
Y. By the way, it is parked on asphalt and I keep it dug out to keep so I can move my
snowmobiles around and access other places. I was up there after this recent bout of
storms and I spent six hours digging out my snowmobile trailer. It was a lot of
work and I was most annoyed not by the fact that I was digging but by the
constant barrage of noise and wine just this incessant it's unbelievable just
drove me crazy how noisy it is up there by snowbill traffic alone and you know
I know it's a passion for some but I say to the snowbill user group do you
know what a muffler is I mean it's unbelievable so that is my recommendation
that it should be non-motorized use up there both winter and summer.
I don't know if you guys have, you know,
noticed the increase of the popularity of the side-by-side four-by-four razors.
I don't know if you've been to Moab recently.
It's out of control down there.
And that's just going to continue to happen up there, I believe.
So that would be my recommendation is to have non-motorized use.
My question and my concerns for you guys as the council is how do you, you know,
enforce this? It's going to be super difficult.
I know that's a topic for another time, but I can tell you I have a lot of experience
to this.
I work for a snowcat operation in Upper Weber Canyon, and we deal with areas that have long
been used for snowmobiling that we now have lease on for skiing, and it's a constant battle
between folks coming up there like, oh, we've been up here for years.
We own this.
We have this.
It's a very hard topic, and I hope that's one that we have a good conversation down
the road.
And I wish you luck on that.
But thank you again for the time. Appreciate it.
Thanks Bob. We'll get those dimmers.
Thanks.
Good evening. My name is Russ Mangoni and I'm with the Utah Snowmobile Association and
I'm trying to get, trying to get the feeling that we're getting snowballed here.
We did have a meeting with Utah Open Lands a month ago with Wendy.
I wasn't at the meeting, but I have listened to the – I'm the Secretary of the USA,
so I do the minutes and that, so I heard the recording.
We want to appreciate their time that they put with us.
I think we kind of came to a conclusion that we plan on working together.
We understand there's going to be some give-and-take on what's going to be done
up the bonanza flats in other places. But also, a month ago, I sent all you guys a packet
with a myth and facts book and an economic impact study that we had done last year for
the year 2016, 2017. And I kind of highlighted some of the stuff that snowmobiling brings
into Park or Summit County, it brings in over nine million dollars a year to Summit
County snowmobiling. That includes lodging, gassing, food permits and everything. Snowmobiling
does bring in income to the state of Utah. That impact study only showed the state
of Utah. That didn't show that people that come from outside of state last year alone there's
over 20,000 out of state snowmobile permits sold in Utah. That's people coming from out
of state to Utah. This year is quite less because everybody knows there's no snow.
But
for the impact of it, everybody knows this year is a bad snow year. Usually when it's
a good year. You're riding on 12 to 15 feet of snow. You're not hurting any vegetation.
You're not hurting any wildlife because you'll never find any type of wildlife in 15 feet
of snow. I've been riding for 15 years and I have never seen any wildlife in the back
countries right anywhere in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, so, you know,
everybody knows when the snow comes, the wildlife goes down to
lower ground. So but I just want to say we want to work
together. We want to work with you guys. And I would appreciate
having open snowmobiling to a point in Bonanza flats. And
also, I know you don't want to talk about the roads, but I
live in Salt Lake, I can park at Guardsman, take the road over to Snake Creek, and be
there in an hour. If I drove over that way, go up to Heber, and that, it's an hour and
a half drive, plus extra gas and that. Thank you for your time.
My name is Rick Johnson, and I am the president of the Pine Canyon Property Association.
So we are one of two that are up there.
And we have, I have worked quite a bit with Wendy.
And she's kept me in the loop as best she could.
We have regular conversations.
Most of them are very positive and respectful.
So I do appreciate that.
This last report came out that was just done.
And I do have a few disagreements with it.
But they're basics.
And it's because we haven't had a voice yet.
And we've asked from the early stages to be part of the technical committee, part of the jurisdictional committee.
We are the neighbor up there.
We have a huge impact that has affected us and where this is going to go and how we commute into our property both summer and winter.
So non motorized across the board of both summer is not that hard to deal with other than we need to get back to the county roads and have that discussion which we were said is not appropriate tonight.
So we're hoping to open that door.
What I'm asking tonight is make this part of that technical committee allow us into that other than just as a bystander and voice our opinions.
We do show up to the meetings.
We do have our concerns.
Let us have a stronger voice and help guide this towards a win-win for all of us.
We've sat back, been told to watch the process, let it unfold, and we've done that.
And I think we've been very respectful up to this point, and I don't want that to change.
But I do want more of a voice, and I do want more of an opinion on the direction of where this is going to go
and how we can help steer it to the benefit of all of us.
As Bridget mentioned, this is a gift.
We are so happy that this is not a development
and another resort and hotels up there.
This is the best solution, that we all chipped in our money
and our time to make this happen,
along with what you've done as well.
So that's what we're asking,
and hopefully we can weasel our way into these committees
and have a stronger voice.
I've begged and begged and begged
and been told no, I don't have many times.
But I'm asking again, can we be on that committee, can we have a stronger voice, and can we help guide the process? Thank you.
Hi, my name is Ann Bransford. I wasn't going to make any comments, but ditto to what Rick said. I represent the private property owners within Bonanza Flat.
that, our parcel is that rectangle, the triangle one that is another Dalto de Durco, and without
being cutesy, I mean we've been property owners up there for, I don't know, five generations,
and we're so happy to welcome you to our neighborhood. So I have asked time and time
again, to ride the property, pick up, you know, things that shouldn't be up there. Wendy
and I have met, but I would like to be part of the process, just like Rick, because I have
a history, as Wendy would agree, probably greater than most. And we want to be part
the solution. And we're up there and I'm listening. I'm here. So please let us help you figure
this out because it's a beautiful piece of property. But again, we all want to make the
best decisions for that. Thank you.
Hi, I'm Andrew Napier and I'm an old town resident, but I own property in Brighton Estates.
And I just want to say thank you first because I'm super excited about this because this is
definitely my favorite place in the world. So I'm really, really excited to see it being
preserved. The only issue that I wanted to bring up tonight is that my only objection
with the uses is the snowmobile usage because I think unlike a lot of other parts of the
Wasatch, it's much flatter. And I think that although in theory it sounds good to have
everyone touring and snowshoeing around, I spent 10 years up there and I've never
seen anyone snowshoeing or touring in the back parts of this parcel. And I do think
I think it's important to respect a lot of the people who donated to this, to this piece
of land with the assumption that we would still be allowed to snowmobile there.
And yeah, I think this has already been reiterated but I also am certainly concerned about the
access issue and I think it's important to stress that just allowing people to use
one road won't work, like allowing people to use the county road coming from Big Cottonwood
and accessing the plot is not viable, like you can't go across that road without hitting
an avalanche area. And one of the pictures that was shown previously, as someone already
mentioned, was an access in the spring when Pine Canyon Road is melted out and we have
to have another way to access our property. So I really think just making a route is
It's not really a viable option, I think you need more of an area for people to access
their property.
And I just want to stress that I'm really, really excited about this, but I also think
it's important to get people up there and get people there who are going to become
environmentalists and who are going to work to do other things like this, because this
is like the most amazing thing I've ever seen happen in Park City.
and the reason it happened was because there's people snowmobiling up there,
it was because there's people cross-country skiing up there,
it's because there's people back-country skiing up there.
And I think it's really, really important to get as many people,
you know, without destroying the landscape,
but get as many people up there using it and seeing how great it is
so that when the next time this comes around with some other development,
all those same people will go and donate money and have organizations.
like there was a really cool event that happened at rock and rallies that raised I think 15 or
$20,000 maybe more 30 and I know he uses that area for for snowmobiling so that he can ski and I mean I
think there's a misconception that people who are snowmobiling are just driving around and wrecking
everything but the reality is we're driving our skis and our camera gear up to the top of the
mountain, parking or snowmobile, and then scheme.
And I think if that axis is taken away,
a lot of people just are gonna stop using it,
which would be a shame, so.
Hi everyone, Brooke Huntz.
I live in Park City.
I'm planning on paying for the bond for the next 15 years.
Or longer, right?
Thank you, 16.
And I happen to be on COSAC.
And I happen to be the COSAC liaison
to one of the stakeholder committees, which is apparently a very envious position.
So I had no idea how good it was.
But what we do on that committee and what we will be doing as stakeholders
is thinking about the words of the bond, which include the preservation of open space
and to protect the conservation values, which are not in my mind.
And I think that I will have to go back to both of those committees and review so I can't
speak on their behalf at this moment.
But I don't believe that those conservation values include motorized use, camping, dog
waste and pumping out waste stations every other day.
But I had no idea when I read the report and I viewed the graphic photos that that's
what we were going to expect.
that we were in already enjoy this place too much.
I am shocked and disheartened by the behaviors
of what's gone on and I'm glad we monitored
because our baseline shouldn't be the baseline
of what we saw since the city purchased the property.
When the last stakeholder committee we had,
there were two trains of thought.
There was one train of thought that said,
said, we should recommend strict parameters for uses, caring capacity, dogs, motorized
vehicles, all of these things because of the conservation values and what we think we're
here to protect. Then there was another train of thought that said, we want, we think people
are good. We think dogs are great. We love to recreate on whatever thing we want to
do, whether that be skis or snowmobiles. And everyone should, is going to be great
at it? Well, that's not what we saw. We have a demonstrated lack of respect, of entitlement,
and that the city's ownership is far less than if it was private. I'm starting to think
maybe we should have left it go private. I mean, the amount of pressure on us because
it's a city ownership to allow private uses to benefit is astounding. There's respect and we
need to think about what that is in the context of our community and getting along, but there's
also the reality of what people paid for and what we think this should be. And I had no idea.
I thought for sure people were going to behave better. This was the year to do it. This
This was the year to permit your cars and say who was parking where.
This was the year to not park out in the fields.
This was the year because there was low snow to not be running over vegetation.
It didn't do that.
I'm so disappointed.
And I wish it had been different.
But I guess it goes when we go back to our stakeholder committee, sorry, any community,
it's pretty obvious which track I'm going to support.
Thank you.
Good evening,
everybody.
Hey, Charlie.
Hi, Charlie Sturges with Mountain Trails Foundation.
I had this long spiel all written out, right?
I'm skipping it.
It's late, right?
So I'm just going to skip past it.
Why are you past your bedtime?
But you know, yeah, it's past my bedtime.
I can't write anyhow, so.
But you know, I think what I was hearing tonight, and also I want to point out I'm
also part of the technical committee.
What I was hearing tonight is I think reasonable concerns on the part of the people who
live up there, and that as we go move forward in the technical committee, the plans that
we're looking at, the possible solutions, the management design, is keeping watershed
wildlife and wildlands at the top of its list and planning.
Everything is pretty much weighed against that.
I think the additional input from other people in the room is great, invited, but
But I think that it's – I think if people in the room here take the time to just wait
until some of the plans come out and we actually get to see what's really out there, it'll
be a huge help.
And I think people are going to be impressed with what we're trying to do.
Thank you.
Thanks, Charlie.
J.P.
Gendron.
I'm a resident of Brighton States.
I'll keep this real brief.
A lot of the pictures we saw and things of summer and winter are in an area that
But you're now in charge of managing that was previously private and unmanaged.
People were technically coming over, whether it was Gardens Pass or from Empire Pass in
Park City, and technically trespassing in an area that wasn't previously maintained.
So as you go forward in considering these things, the environmental integrity, primary
concern as a resident is our access, of course.
But think about inclusiveness, because this area has had a lot of different uses and a lot of different people that are all for the conservation going forward that have contributed.
But instead of burying other people from coming up and excluding uses, consider how to be inclusive and involve the Somalville community, involve the environmental protection community as well.
Well, this is obviously a very complicated area that borders a lot of different, either
a neighborhood or state forest or ski resort, so many things and so I urge you to just think
about it roundly in how we can include everybody as opposed to exclude people.
Anyone
else?
Good evening, Sarah Jo Dickens with Ecology Bridge and Environmental Consulting.
First
off, I actually am really impressed with the amount of work that has gone into
the management planning for Bonanza Flat.
A lot of times land trusts don't have the funds and the support and the ability to put
this much into any kind of a plan.
So I think kudos for having that done and for the city supporting that.
Couple of things I just want to say tonight really come around the wetlands and how important
the wetland areas are up there.
If our watershed is one of our priority conservation values, I think we need to really look hard
at where our wetlands are, and we need to define them as a wetland is defined by the
government and by environmental scientists, and that includes wet meadows.
These are landscapes that are important in filtering our water, protecting the quality,
and then also holding capacity.
And as the city has put so much effort into determining what our net zero goals for emission
are going to be, wetlands are also an important carbon sink.
It's easy to look up Bonanza Flat and see the forest, and everyone can see that that's
an amazing carbon sink.
One of the sad things about forest carbon sinks is that the carbon is in the trees,
which can burn.
So that's a carbon sink that's really sensitive to disturbance.
Wetlands, it's in the soils primarily, so it's much more protected.
And there's a lot that we can do to enhance those wetlands up there.
Snowmobiling across them is not one of them.
Snowmobiling, particularly in seasons like this where we have very low snowpack,
not only does it compact the soils, it changes the ability for the snow to melt
in a way that it can filter into our wetlands.
It also can change the way water moves across
and create erosion.
And erosion in a wetland is a really bad thing.
We start to lose our ability to sequester that carbon.
We lose our ability to maintain the vegetation.
And snowmobiling can actually destroy wetland vegetation.
Maybe not when it's 15 feet deep snow,
but snow like this year and a little bit more snow,
that's not enough to protect a wetland so I don't know if I want to say keep
snowmobiles out entirely but I definitely think that it's important that we
recognize those sensitive areas and in the areas that are defined already I
could see that there are some wetland areas that aren't defined in some of
those more sensitive and less used areas and I think it might be worth
looking into including those areas as well thank you
okay I'll
keep it
brief. I know it's late. My name is Katie Eldridge. I'm a resident of Brighton
State since 2005. I would just like to echo what our neighborhood has said
already and I think if we have a unified message it's the access and the
working together and that our doors are open. Our gate is not open but we will
And we want you to see and feel and know and experience how we live.
So if it's a field trip, you can call any person in this room,
and we'd love to have you over for tea, coffee, champagne, whatever it is,
just so you can understand how we survive.
And we lean on each other,
and we're all excited about this new chapter of preservation.
But we just want you to look at us as a room full of really smart, resourceful people who want to help.
So that's our unified message.
So thanks for what you're doing.
Thanks, Katie.
Okay.
Unless anybody else steps up, we're going to close the public hearing.
Do you guys need a break before discussion?
I want to keep going.
When I'm ready.
Okay.
I hope you're referring to Ray to talk.
Okay.
Thoughts? Feedback for these guys on the plan?
Yep. Go ahead.
So I, you know, what impressed me the most tonight out of the public comment were the speakers who talked about what we can create here and keeping the focus on the opportunity we have and the opportunity to collaborate and to create something.
And that's where I am about this land.
And I do think that you've done a great report, and I agree with the way you've laid it out.
I think watershed is first and foremost the organizing principle up there.
I think it does have significant conservation values.
I think the animal habitat is very important, and I think where we are going to get
into probably a deeper conversation where there's going to be some slight difference
of opinion is the level of intensity of possible passive uses, right? I mean, nobody's going
to really look for active use up there that, I mean, I think by and large, the majority
is going to agree we're going to go passive use, not active use, which means non-motorized,
probably means human-powered. And I am making some assumptions, but this is where I'm
going. And I think when we get down to what level of intensity those passive uses
can be like, you know, the Nordic scheme.
Should we have a Nordic track up there?
That does add some intensity.
It's a passive use, but it adds intensity
when you bring a groomer up there and you groom a track.
So those are the sort of things
that I think are going to get a little more difficult.
But I'm fully supportive of what you've laid out.
I think you're doing a great job.
It's a really nice first step.
You know, Carl, with, you know, your comments,
I appreciate you wanting to be part of the conversation.
From our perspective, you did initiate and energize your folks, and they came to us as
you feel like some of the comments back to you might have been a bit disrespectful.
You should see some of the emails we got.
So you did succeed, and you are part of the conversation, and that's terrific.
We want you to be part of the conversation, and we want you to help create what we're
all trying to achieve here.
And so, from our perspective, we got hit with a whole bunch of emails that had some, you know,
really interesting language.
And so, you want to keep that in mind as well.
Thanks.
Becca?
Well, I also was very impressed with both the Conservation Report,
or the Bonanza Flat Winter Resource Inventory and Summary.
Is that the official title?
And also the feedback tonight.
And I think the one thing that is becoming very clear is that we do have some great partners
and the people from Brighton Estates, and if their main concern is access, then I think
that that's something we need to work to protect and make sure that they have access
to and from their homes.
But it doesn't seem like it makes sense to have snowmobiling in the area.
I did think, was it, sorry, maybe Andrew and your information about, you know, having
corridors so that people can access their homes in those areas, but maybe not have to fear
for being caught in an avalanche would make sense.
So I don't know if there's ways that we could have a designated corridor for people to access
their homes or other points of access without having it be quite a specific, but it does
It does seem like there needs to be some regulation and rating in and some enforcement, and enforcement
is always the hardest part, but it does seem like maybe Brighton Estates can be a help
with some of that as well.
And yeah, I think it says you're looking for direction on the permitted and prohibited
but it uses, I'm in absolute agreement as long as the access
direct staff to meet with the jurisdictional sure
and the public open house sounds great
to hear more, to get more public feedback on it.
Thank you.
And thank you for all you guys do.
I know you guys have worked so hard this winter.
Spent a ton of time up there.
So I'm really grateful for you guys
being our eyes and ears and bonanza flats.
It was really tough back up many times.
It was very difficult for me to go up there.
Thank you.
I know.
I can see that in your tan face.
Other thoughts?
Jump in, man.
I, too, am so impressed with this report.
I mean, I loved it.
I read it twice because I kept feeling like I was missing things in it,
so I'd go back and highlight some different things.
I'm a really visual person,
and so I appreciated the maps and things in there.
It would be helpful for me on the map that we have up here now
Now, if it could also include these recreation areas that we'll refer to tonight.
So as we're thinking about how do we access, I mean, I don't have a really good picture
of exactly where they lay in relation to Nancy Flatt, in relation to Brighton State.
And so the more context we can put it in is really going to help me be able to see
it a little bit better.
But I appreciate the staff taking the time to give Stephen and me a tour up there to
allow us to actually see the snowmobiles buzzing around and hear the word noise pollution
came to mind exactly as we were up there.
So I have seen that in action up there.
And I would appreciate just being able to kind of put it all in context.
Absolutely.
Steve?
I like the proposals you guys have put in place.
One thing that would help me, and certainly it's been the big piece of interest here,
is access to the housing back in there.
I'm kind of simple-minded. I look at the picture that you have that has the management zones on it,
and it actually has kind of a different Google map, you know, aerial map,
and it shows the roads in there. And just at some simple level, you look at the roads,
and it looks like you can come off of Pine Canyon and basically get pretty much anywhere
into Brighton Estates, on Brighton Estates roads. And so, if that's the case, then I want
to understand from the Brighton folks why that's not sufficient if you have roads and
you have your own access and all that kind of stuff. And if it isn't sufficient, then
I guess I'd like to kind of understand where and why and how at some level, because
it's obviously going to become a point of contention. And, you know, here I am
looking at a little image of one thing and it just looks all interconnected and it looks
like you go down Pine Canyon Road and you turn on the right place and you go to everybody's
house. And so, and obviously it's going to be different things for different houses
and the one I heard tonight was seasonality and issues with, you know, if the snow is
not good enough. But so I just, when we get to that point, I'll kind of want more
understanding of all of that. I think the basics you guys are working towards
of the right things. One thing that I don't know if people in the room know that I heard
on our field trip up there is that when we talk about watershed that Bloodlake without
the water treatment facility of Park City, Bloodlake is the Girl Scouts water supply.
And so when we talk about it, it's not one of these kind of levels of indirection
of soaking through the ground and flowing into the Weaver River and eventually becoming
coming part of the watershed. It goes into Blood Lake. That's what the Girl Scouts drink.
And so it really is that important. And so when we talk about things like dog feces and
human waste and stuff like that up there, it's not many levels of direction removed from
human consumption. So it really is critical. And I think that's got to be at the
top of the list.
Well, this has been great to hear everyone's public input and to look over this report.
So for you three sitting in the front row there, thanks for all your work on this.
Oh, and poor Logan, who's had to spend a lot of time up there this winter.
So you know, I love Bonanza Flat.
I love riding my bike up there.
I love taking my dogs up there.
I love backcountry skiing up there.
I'm not a snowmobiler, but I have ridden my dirt bike up there, and I like that too.
But if any one of those uses, oh, and I'm a huge Nordic skier too, but it's dawning
on me that if any one of those uses is not congruent with the bond language, I got
to let it go.
And I think we all need to keep that over-arching thought about that one thing.
We do tend to get stuck on what we think we're entitled to because it's what we like to do.
And if I gave money towards the purchase of bonanza flat because I just assumed that
I could ride my mountain bike up there, well, I was mistaken.
So I just wanted to say that.
And I also, you know, this question and hearing all the public comment tonight about the neighbors,
you know, when we do a special event in town or when we start a new, you know, housing project,
we involve the neighbors in a big way. We make sure they know what's happening
And we allow them to, you know, maybe influence our direction or collaborate is maybe a better
word for that.
And so as I've heard the neighbors speak this evening, I just want to consider that
a little bit more with you all.
I think that's all.
So thank you.
Well, I think the plan is spot on.
I think it's thoughtful. It's taken into account all the feedback we've gotten from our committees.
It certainly has some refinements yet that we need to fill in some blanks,
but I think as an overlay to what we're trying to accomplish here, it's outstanding.
And in particular, I like the concept of the zones,
because I think as Tim pointed out, intensity is going to be a real challenge here
in figuring out how we're going to manage people, manage recreation, and structure all that.
I think the zones get there.
And I just want to come back to something that I think both Wendy and Bridget said, which
is talking about, that we need to be grateful we got this done.
I mean, this is probably one of the most exciting things I've ever been a part of.
And it's just amazing that we actually protected this piece of land.
And we did it because we came together as a coalition, all of our communities joined
together with the common goal of preserving this land.
And I think we were really clear when we did that that our goal was to forever preserve
it as open space and protect those conservation values.
That is something I think we let off every conversation with, and we all knew that was
going to require some sacrifices, as Lynne put it.
We have to come back to what we're trying to accomplish, and that might mean we don't
get everything we want up there.
I appreciate all the feedback today.
We want to be a good neighbor on this, and we're going to do our best to do that.
But I want to let you know that when we took ownership of this, we took the stewardship of this,
and we told everybody we were going to protect this land, and that is going to be first and foremost in what we do.
And I believe that is compatible with being a good neighbor.
So we just need to refine those details.
But I think this is a tremendous start, and I look forward to seeing us move forward with some of this.
And as Charlie stated, I think everybody's going to be really impressed with some of the
things that are going to happen up there when we start to restore trails and really consolidate
the parking to safe locations, add some bathrooms, and limit access to certain areas so they
can recover.
I think we're all going to be pleased with the results, but we have to be a little
bit patient and have some trust that all this time we're putting into this is going
to result in a great product.
So with that, I don't think this is there for any action.
Do you feel like you got the feedback you needed from us?
No, I do. I just wanted to ask a quick question because I think, Tim, you brought up a really good point.
We specifically didn't talk in the report about groomed or non-groomed or whatever Nordic skiing.
So just to clarify from that perspective, we agree in terms of intensity of use.
Would you like us to start asking that question?
We've had a lot of folks, you know, some of the young gentlemen that spoke, really feeling
like that is something they'd like to see for a lot of the Norc skiing that they do,
but it does increase a degree of intensity.
Would you like us to start asking that defined question about Groom versus NON?
Yes.
Wendy, I think as we were talking about maybe pilot programming some of that this winter,
one of the things that we – why we felt it was safe is because we were talking
about very limited access and very limited use.
And I would suggest if we are going to try some things like that, we don't go wholehearted.
We were never talking about plowing the road and opening large parking lots and replicating
round valley up there.
We were talking about letting some somewhat limited die-hard users that were willing
to either take a shuttle up there or ski up, use it and access it.
And I think if we approach it by not making it too convenient or limiting the user days
that sort of thing, we might be able to stick our toe in the water and see what those impacts
are before we create an expectation that that's going to be a free-for-all, which I don't
think is what we ever intended.
Thank you for the additional refinement on that.
I appreciate that.
Are you guys comfortable with that?
I believe that's what we talked about initially.
I just want to make sure to clarify.
Yeah, when Nan and I were up there, there was a lot of discussion.
As we were walking along, there's just a lot of discussion about how easy we
we're going to make it to access that area up there during the winter, I mean obviously
during the summer the roads open you can drive up, but what provisions we would put in place
and for what it's worth I was the one I think of the group of us that I was like don't
make it easy, you know, you can't, it's a sensitive land.
And it's one thing to talk about getting access to homes and brightness state. It's another
thing to start having companies running, you know, cross-country ski adventures where they're
going to bring up bus loads of people and unload them up there. And, you know, it's like that.
So that's got to be part of the discussion is, and especially if you start talking about
you're going to start grooming trails, that's going to be the next logical thing that's
going to come out of somebody's mouth. So I think when it comes back, I mean, that's
obviously got to be part of the equation is accessed during the winter and how it's either
limited or provided.
Okay. And the only thing I would say is, Steve, to your point, I think I wrote down
some of the questions that you would like answers to that we can go out and start to
discern what that is, talking with the neighborhood and whatnot. But certainly if there are
additional thoughts or questions that you think would help you, in terms of fully
understanding the scope of what they're looking at, feel free to email us and we'll make
sure that we go out and get those answers.
Okay, thank you.
One remaining question, Bob Merrill brought up a good point and something that I've thought
a lot about when I've been up there is the constant noise pollution.
In the summer, hate to implicate anyone here who's a Harley owner, but you know the
Harley traffic is really obvious and then in the winter the snowmobile and just
cars in general. I mean, it is so popular, it's beautiful. And I don't, is there any
way of measuring or quantifying or, I don't know, yeah. We do it on Main Street.
Certainly that is part of the aesthetic and the scenic value, obviously, that that kind
of plays into there. And we will look for ways similar to how we're monitoring the
water quality to figure out if we can get an understanding of the decibels that are
happening up there and I didn't even really realize the home muffler thing on
a snowmobile but hey once they're electric snowmobiles you know maybe maybe
that's what everyone has to have right Heinrich
a
charge let's let Wendy go home it's been a long night thank you very much
Thanks. Thanks. Good work.
Five minutes? Sure. Okay.
Thanks. Sorry. I can't go back to...
we have, and I'll never review this.
And then how far down do you think they're running a shut-em-us
for public?
Yeah, if you get to a point of having a plan to do something
like that, we can have those discussions put up.
What would be left there?
I don't think it's a lot of discussion.
Thanks.
You're fast.
The road it goes in between various areas of
States. Yes. So, I mean, can you grow it?
Oh, yeah.
It's, you know, one of the things we're using in our life.
I really, yeah.
Oh, sure.
Because I know where you're from, right?
Yeah.
And I sent you an email and it came back.
So, why?
It's not correct.
No, I got that.
Oh, that's really good.
And then she would come up and say, I mean, can I take a home?
Can I go home?
No.
You're home.
No.
And it is on the agenda, it's a legislative update and-
I've noticed Mark's out of the room.
And Senator Van Tassel, Senator Kevin Van Tassel came in unexpectedly and spent an hour
with us.
He was, I think, supposed to be on a school tour, and spent an hour with us.
And one of the things that he told us was, he really cares about the peace house.
It's near and dear to his heart, and they got a $900,000 appropriation.
$900,000?
Thanks, Diane.
Okay.
Back up, Matt.
You're up.
No, because we have to close and go into
RDA, so unless you want to do the legislative update
as an RDA.
Was that our whole legislative update?
So you're off the hook because he spoke? Okay.
You can get away with 45 days just by giving us these little sheets of paper.
that's it
okay then we need a motion to adjourn all in favor okay we will
reconvene tonight as the Park City redevelopment agency I feel good about
All of council is still present.
There is six of us, soon to be seven.
It took me a second.
If we go long enough.
Okay.
Is there anybody from the public that would like to speak tonight?
We will now open the public hearing.
We will now close the public hearing.
On a new business,
a consideration to approve the purchase of 1835 Three Kings Drive.
Jason.
I will make this brief.
I told Rota that I would cover for tonight and that was nice of me and then I forgot that bonanza park or bonanza
Yeah, right exactly and I play hockey in less in about an hour, so and
I'm already tired because I and he saw me. I was up early working out this morning, so
But anyways, I'll make this brief. This is a Silver Star unit that has become available
What we'd like to do is just go ahead and purchase the property
at the rate of
or the price of $270,000 and $70,000 and $5 and update
the deed restrictions.
This is a practice we've been going through on various
properties as they become available.
These deed restrictions definitely need to be updated.
They're fairly old and we want to take that opportunity.
So as a heads up, we will have a couple more of these
because we do know that there are a couple more properties
coming available that the owners have notified the city
that they want to update.
And these are on, so we'll be coming back with these.
In addition, staff is working on a program right now to try to get ahead of this,
where we can actually, while the owner's still there,
try to buy these to update the restrictions so we don't have to go through this,
because it is time intensive for staff to go through this every single time.
So with that, I'll open it up to you guys for any questions.
Questions?
Steve.
I was trying to make sure I understood one thing that said that
The total transactional cost in everything for this is really going to be a thousand to two thousand bucks
It's just it's not going to come in
That's correct title searches all that kind of stuff
It's just correct. I mean the out of pocket for the city
I mean with closing costs and everything like that we encourage
But we will go ahead and turn around and sell this unit for the same that we're buying it for to the next owner
So there's not that's a
No net gain or loss there. The loss is on the transactional fees that we incur and is there no desire or need or anything to
I know when we are buying the 21 units from
Yeah, that I mean there's there's good with some of the stuff we do there's cleanup
Is there is there cleanup for this do you have to rehab it or anything or no?
We're not even going to repaint it or anything, I don't know what to do.
So there's two parts to my answer here.
The first is that what we do is we require that an inspection be done and then we go
back to the owner with that inspection and say here are the things that we found and
we want to address.
You have the choice of either you doing it and to the satisfaction of the inspection
or the city can come in and take care of it but it's going to be deducted off
of your sales price.
So this owner chose to do these repairs on their own and so we will go back in
and repair, obviously, or inspect before we close.
So it really is a real, just the closing cost
is the only cost for us doing this?
Yeah, and we've really worked to close that loop
because we've gotten, I don't wanna say burned a couple
of times, but where we've had to invest a couple
of thousand dollars that we weren't expecting
to make sure that the unit was ready
because obviously we don't wanna sell to another
qualified individual and have repair issues
that need to be taken care of and put the burden
on them, so.
Okay.
When we get these, could you let us know what the market rate of something comparable to this would be?
Just I think it's interesting to know and we're going to flip over these seed restrictions and
They're showing some appreciation just to know what it would
Normally go for and so that we can show people or talk about how much it's we're keeping it affordable
Sure, I don't have that figure with me tonight in this one, but we will in the future
My only question is
So it's a lot of 3% a year appreciation,
but you said we're buying it for the same
that we're going to sell it?
That's correct.
So what we do is we calculate the increased value
that they've earned to get them the maximum sales price
that they're eligible for.
At that point, then we turn around
and sell it for the same price, so.
Gotcha.
And just as a reminder, and it was in the staff report,
but that we'll be coming back in April here
to round two of the housing plan, and we're going to actually have a discussion on qualified
buyers and what that means, and look to maybe make sure that we have the definition that
you get, or the qualifications, the criteria that you guys want.
So I don't expect that we're going to probably sell this property before that conversation
happens.
Great.
Tim?
I'm just wondering if Captain Latham is here because he's suspecting some foul
apply or it's the beard is it okay so I'm gonna open the public hearing anyway
from the public like to speak I'll close the public hearing comments motions
further questions I have one quick question which is just if this is
really gonna cost us a thousand to two thousand bucks is should we just have a
a plan that says pretty much every time these guys come up that the staff thinks that it's
a deed restriction that needs to be updated. I mean, for a grand, I just think the answer
is yes. Or do we want to look at every one of these questions?
I think that is staff's plan. But because of the transactional component, you do have
to approve each one. So the answer is yes.
Never mind.
I appreciate it. Like I said, the part two of my answer to you is that we are looking for a way to
avoid having to keep buying the property, update the dedistrictions.
We're trying to be able to update the dedistrictions while the current owner is still there,
so we don't have to go through this process.
Okay.
Motion?
Because I need practice.
Can I just say, Your Honor, I move that we approve new business item number one.
Yes, you can.
Second.
I'm going to say that.
OK.
All in favor.
Aye.
Any opposed?
It passes.
Mr. Mayor, I move we adjourn.
Second.
All in favor.
Aye.
We're done.
Good work, guys.
You did.
Does anybody want to go out for beers?
Good.
I'd screw that up every time.
I think so.
Yeah, when was that?
2016. Well, after you say that for four and a half years every time, and most of our planning
commission is too lazy to make motions, so I think I need a thousand of them.
Becca, let us know when we have the time.
I will.
Yay! Or you can just spin over there, if you want. Just spin over there.
See? Yeah, just see if that works.
Are you embarrassed?
I'm embarrassed.
We're not!
Now we get work in this column.
Blowing
rustic.
Blue thingy.