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Heber Valley Business Community Hears From Heber City Mayor

Heber City

Business leaders in the Heber Valley heard from local elected officials at the state of the Heber Valley at Tuesday’s Heber Valley Chamber of Commerce luncheon, including Heber's Mayor.

Heber Mayor Kellen Potter started her address to the members of the chamber of commerce by looking back on the year. First talking about the years efforts to gather public opinion as the community shaped the general plan through Envision Heber 2050 process.

“That general plan represents the wishes of the community,” Potter continued. “Elected officials come and go, and they have different opinions, but a general plan provides a framework for a vision for what that community cares about or what that community wants to become. There are land use issues in there, affordable housing, a lot of things required. But what this general plan does, is say this is who we are, and councils as you make decisions, we want you to remember that this is who we are and who we want to be.”

A draft of the general plan can be found here. The final public hearing for the general plan update, and the Sorensen Annexation application took place on Tuesday evening. After hearing from a few members of the public, the council will meet to hash out some final details on both issues in a special meeting on Saturday, adoption of both items could happen at the March 3rd City Council meeting.

In her speech Mayor Potter also recognized the Heber Valley Parkway Bypass project, which is now in the environmental impact study stage, As well as the airport master plan update, which had a public launch in January.

Mayor Potter also introduced some new initiatives for the city starting with a master plan for the parks. Potter said the parks master plan process was spurred on in part by the success of community planning in the past year that brought improvements to the Muirfield dog park.

“What happened from that effort is a much better dog park,” Potter explained. “We have the park for the big dogs, and the small dogs. It's really cool if you haven’t been out there, it’s a fun park. So, this is what we’re going to do for all of our parks. We know that the little retention basin, tot lots are not the favorite thing of Heber residents, right? Those little parks that we have in our neighborhoods. That's how we've done parks a lot. So, what we're going to do with this master plan is to look overall at all the park space we have in Heber. What level of service are we providing for parks? What can we do better? What do we want in the future in our Main Street park? What is that going to look like?”

Another key focus for the coming year Mayor Potter announced was beautifying Main Street, a project the city has taken on along with other local organizations like the Community Alliance for Main Street

“Done a lot of things with sweeping and cleaning up the planters,” Potter said. “You will see even more improvements this year. We struggle with our trees, for some reason the way that they were planted, the kind of trees we have, sadly some of them die quickly. Our council has put that as a priority, let’s fix the trees on main street. We’re going to make the flowers in the flower boxes more uniform. Just some of those little things that really helps make a main street feel welcoming.”

Potter says they also plan to have three Main Street cleanup events per year. Mayor Potter also introduced a rebranding of the traditional Heber Farmers Market called the Heber Market on Main, as well as spoke about efforts to maintain clean air starting with an educational campaign to reduce idling in Heber.

KPCW reporter David Boyle covers all things in the Heber Valley as well as sports and breaking news.
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