The most recent meeting of the Snyderville Planning Commission dealt with two big projects, on different sides of the Basin.
The Snyderville Commission held another work session Tuesday on the proposal from Dakota Pacific to revamp the Summit Research Park property at Kimball Junction. Developers reviewed the major sectors in their Master Plan—such as Commercial, Civic, Residential and a Hotel site—looking at densities, square footage and heights.
Among the comments, Dakota representative Hooper Knowlton said he’s been successful in Salt Lake with residential buildings that mix affordable product with market rate units.
The placement of affordable housing has been an active topic with county planners. Snyderville Commission Chairwoman Malena Stevens said she appreciated the comments from Knowlton.
“I especially appreciated with his comments in discussing apartment rentals within this because that is a huge need within our community. There really are not a lot of for-rent places and a lot of the previous rentals have been kind of consumed by the nightly-rental pool with people no longer renting them longer term to employees that work here. And so having dedicated apartment units that will be rented in perpetuity would be hugely helpful to our community. And Hooper indicated that these projects are possible and function very well with the right management for the apartment complex.”
Knowlton also said that the residences are not going to be air bnb rental-type units . Stevens said she wondered if that can be placed as a condition in Dakota’s approval.
“It gets a little tricky because of statute. But we’re going to look into adding some language, what we can add within the Development Agreement itself, to prohibit that and maintain that as part of, y’know the rental pool, there are some units that will be for sale as well, but ensuring that it’s not going to become just another neighborhood that 70 or 60 percent are nightly rentals, and there’s not the sense of community, and it’s not helping fill the need that we have, as far as the people that work here.”
Work sessions on the Dakota Pacific proposal are set to continue for two or three more months.
On a second topic, the developer for Silver Creek Village, near Highway 40, is asking for some amendments to his Development Approval for housing on a Parcel 22.1
The applicant wants to fill in the site, where old sewer ponds were located, raising the grade some 8 to 14 feet. From there he also wants to change the height limit from 32 to 45 feet.
Stevens said her group will take a field trip to the site to consider its visual impact.
“With the fill, it seems like everyone understood that, with them being former sewer ponds, that fill would be a likely need. With the increased height, though, the fill plus the increased height would produce larger buildings. And so we want, and we suggested that we take a site visit to the actual project to see what the impacts would be visually, what it would be spatially, because you can’t always get the feel for that on paper. And right now they don’t have a site plan, so it’s even more challenging for us to get a feel for what that would be like.”
Snyderville Planning Commisison Chairwoman Malena Stevens, who said they think the field trip will be set for their next meeting on November 12th.
