Residents are expected to weigh in on a proposal to bring thousands of homes to the mostly rural and industrial Browns Canyon Aug. 6.
Ivory Homes is spearheading development on behalf of members of the Garff and Rogers families, but Summit County doesn’t have zoning that would allow it.
Most of Browns Canyon is zoned for one home per 80 acres. Ivory’s development would include 2,300 to 3,000 homes on 400 acres.
Despite the project’s potential scope, Summit County Community Development Director Peter Barnes indicated the question right now is actually quite narrow.
Should Summit County change its code to make more housing possible? Even if the answer is yes, the county could still deny Ivory’s application later on.
“They're trying to create a zone. Having created the zone, they will then have to go through the application to apply for the zone,” Barnes said on KPCW’s “Local News Hour” Aug. 4.
The Eastern Summit County Planning Commission is accepting public comment before it possibly forwards the proposed zone to the Summit County Council for a vote. The Aug. 6 meeting starts at 6 p.m., and Ivory Homes is last on the agenda.
Traffic, water top-of-mind
In the run-up to the hearing, Commissioner David Darcey has said residents have been more concerned about issues than process. And the two biggest issues are traffic and water.
“I'd love to talk water. I could talk water and go through the math and everything else on water,” Darcey said at a June meeting with Ivory Homes. “I think the more important part is: did we put everything in there — the verbiage that we really would want to see — in order to get comfortable with what this new code says for this new zone.”
Even though it’s not what the planning commission is voting on, he said water is the “elephant in the room.” That’s almost inevitable in rural Summit County, according to Barnes.
“The issue in any development on the east side is infrastructure, water and wastewater provision being the two critical ones,” he said. “And should we, for example, be approving a zone on the promise that: well, we have paper water rights, but we haven't drilled any wells yet.”
Ivory Homes has commissioned a well-siting study and the drilling of a test well. It estimates three or four wells would be needed to support up to 3,000 homes.
By comparison, three wells in the Park Meadows area account for roughly half of all Park City’s water.
Ivory Development President Chris Gamvroulas said in June that it's in his company’s interest to conserve water once it’s flowing.
“Water is super expensive to drill for and store and buy the rights for, so our intent is to drive down use — per door, on the average, on the overall — to about 0.3 acre-feet per home, which is a very low water use,” Gamvroulas told the planning commission.
He said the development agreement governing another Ivory project, Park City Heights, mandates less water-intensive landscaping.
Ivory representatives have expressed a willingness to mandate drip irrigation instead of sprinklers in Browns Canyon and to explicitly ban golf courses.
The proposed development is named “Lost Creek.”
