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The Park City Council Prepare For Their Mid-Year Retreat At Tuesday's Meeting

The Park City Council had their annual retreat in March, but due to the many changes that include a new council and a new critical priority, they decided to have a mid-year retreat in July. Melissa Allison has more:

The mid-year retreat is scheduled for July 18 but City Manager Diane Foster said staff wanted to give council a chance to better flush out the direction they want the retreat to go.

“The reason we’re having this as a meeting is we want to give them an opportunity to talk about it," Foster said. "To have a chance to discuss what do the want to talk about. We obviously think the critical priorities will be on the agenda.”

One of those critical priorities is social equity. It was added to the critical list in March and will be discussed at Tuesday’s council meeting as well.

"What will be happening at this particular study session is, Nann and Andy will be hosting a series of meetings with community stake holders to talk about the city’s role and get input on that," Foster said. "They’ve also done a survey with stakeholders and there are multiple meetings happening so Mayor andy and council member Nann Worel will be giving a summary of that.”

University of Utah Professor Kilo Zamora is scheduled to help council better understand, “implicit bias.”

“At the last meeting Kilo asked, ‘Well, what part of social equity do you want to talk about next?’ This is really an education process for city council and they wanted to talk about implicit bias," Foster said. "With Starbucks, that’s an area where a lot of folks have been talking about implicit bias and he’s going to actually do more of a mini lecture on, titled “the science of implicit bias.” Where does it come from, how does it work in our brains and why does it exist?”

Each community defines social equity differently. Foster said Park City is looking at equality versus equity.

“What the city council has come up with is looking at those who are underserved in our community. Instead of all things being equal, how do we make them equitable? Which might be giving somebody a hand up, right? It’s the idea that, I think one of the examples that they give is, equality is giving everyone an extra-large jacket. Equity is giving you and me different size jackets that are smaller than an extra-large.”

Foster said council is looking at what role the city needs to play in answering these and other questions..

“There are lots of folks, in particularly nonprofits, who have been working in this space a lot longer than we have," Foster said. "And remember that this does include the Latino community in Park City. It also includes, we’ve got seniors at the table, LGTBQ issues, issues of poverty which crosses races. Its people with disabilities - lots of different audiences for this discussion.”

Because of the upcoming Fourth July weekend, this week’s council meeting is on Tuesday. The study session to discuss the retreat starts at 3 p.m. 

I’m Melissa Allison, KPCW News.