The Park City Council today will consider whether it wants about 20 acres of open space near Quinn’s Junction to be used as a permanent location for contaminated soil and the location for a new Park City Recycling Center.
The 22 acres at Quinn’s Junction is a collection of several parcels and is known as the Gordo property. According to a staff report, the bulk of the site is zoned residential development. Some of it was purchased using open space bond funds and is zoned recreation open space. The triangular parcel is located on the northwest corner of Quinn’s junction – across from the Park City Heights development.
Currently a portion of the property has been used as an interim stockpile of contaminated mining soil from various city projects. The city will also need additional soil storage as it begins to prepare the 5 acres for the new Arts and Culture district.
Park City Manager Matt Dias says they want to find out from council if they should proceed with the proposed plans...
“Obviously getting rid of contaminated soil is a very expensive endeavor,” Dais said. “And to the extent that we can have a legally permitted soils repository close to town that isn't disruptive in terms of viewsheds and isn't into a sensitive lands area - that would be a great benefit to the taxpayers of Park City.”
The city has received what Dias calls a comfort letter from state Division of Waste Management and Radioactive Control that a contaminated soils storage site would be an appropriate use for the property.
Whether it will be used for affordable housing he says hasn’t been determined.
“That's the reason that we're testing this with council,” he said. “In the past we have been looking at municipal uses there. As you have alluded to, we already have some temporary soil stored on site and our public works facility uses it for some lay down purposes but it's absolutely a piece of the community property, it’s a city owned property and it could be repurposed. I 'm not sure if the zoning would support that out right but it's something that we need to test council on and see what their inclinations are.”
The city may need to apply for a master planned development permit and will prepare a cost estimate for any site improvements. For the future, the property has also been looked at as a permanent recyclable materials processing facility.
Recycle Utah Director Carolyn Wawra says they’ve been working with council for a while on the Gordo parcel as a location for a new recycling center.
“It does fit Recycle Utah’s needs and it will work really well for us and we want to continue conversations there, as we do think that is a good solution for the community and the good solution for us to continue what we do really well,” Wawra said.
She believes the Gordo location – at more than twice the size of the current center, will work really well.
“Right now, we sit on a .4 of an acre and we're looking to at least double if not a little bit more than that in size,” Wawra said. Two acres would be ideal for us. Given more size, I think we could at least make an entrance and an exit to our parking lot at the bare minimum. I think that has always been a headache with our current setup you know this is dead end lot. I think that would make the flow a lot easier for public coming in using our lot and then more space for us to store materials. Right now, when our lots are essentially full of materials, we need to send them out. And in the future we could work the commodity market little bit more by working full truckloads of one item and that would allow us to be a more competitive with the materials we send the market and operate bit more efficiently.”
Once they get direction from council, Recycle Utah could apply for a conditional use permit to begin planning the new center.
