Every 10 years or so, Park City considers its encroachment rules and on Tuesday, the city council had a lengthy discussion about how best to handle residents’ requests.
The Park City Planning Department has asked the council to tweak definitions of how best to handle encroachments into city-owned rights of way. Park City Councilor Steve Joyce gave an example of one relatively common situation.
“There’s different categories of encroachments that range from just something simple like, you know, we have a road, you're building your driveway and you want to build a heated driveway all the way down to the street and it goes through our right-of-way,” he said. “And the encroachment agreement there is as simple as, hey you need to understand you can build your heated driveway here but if we have to come tear up for utilities or road maintenance or whatever in our right-of-way, it's your responsibility to fix your heated driveway because we're basically allowing you to build your snowmelt system into our right-of-way.”
He says there are other more complex cases to consider when dealing with city-owned property. Joyce says the goal is to protect the city’s assets.
“We see a lot of the staircases in Old Town where there was actually a platted road that was going to go up and we've decided we never want to build the road, but the city has had uses for it, whether it's trails or stairs or even just tiny little bits of open space,” he said.
Property owners can ask the city to relinquish pieces of land for a variety of reasons.
“And in some cases, that’s almost necessity,” Joyce said. There's all these funky little Old Town lots and things like that. In another case, it's just somebody coming forward with a proposal that says look if you're not going to use the land, I could use this little piece of it over here, and it would be beneficial.”
Staff will return to the council with changes to the land management code that will address six different encroachment conditions. They’ll make recommendations on how encroachments should be done and who approves them.
Every 10 years or so, Park City considers its encroachment rules and on Tuesday, the city council had a lengthy discussion about how best to handle residents’ requests.
The Park City Planning Department has asked the council to tweak definitions of how best to handle encroachments into city-owned rights of way. Park City Councilor Steve Joyce gave an example of one relatively common situation.
“There’s different categories of encroachments that range from just something simple like, you know, we have a road, you're building your driveway and you want to build a heated driveway all the way down to the street and it goes through our right-of-way,” he said. “And the encroachment agreement there is as simple as, hey you need to understand you can build your heated driveway here but if we have to come tear up for utilities or road maintenance or whatever in our right-of-way, it's your responsibility to fix your heated driveway because we're basically allowing you to build your snowmelt system into our right-of-way.”
He says there are other more complex cases to consider when dealing with city-owned property. Joyce says the goal is to protect the city’s assets.
“We see a lot of the staircases in Old Town where there was actually a platted road that was going to go up and we've decided we never want to build the road, but the city has had uses for it, whether it's trails or stairs or even just tiny little bits of open space,” he said.
Property owners can ask the city to relinquish pieces of land for a variety of reasons.
“And in some cases, that’s almost necessity,” Joyce said. There's all these funky little Old Town lots and things like that. In another case, it's just somebody coming forward with a proposal that says look if you're not going to use the land, I could use this little piece of it over here, and it would be beneficial.”
Staff will return to the council with changes to the land management code that will address six different encroachment conditions. They’ll make recommendations on how encroachments should be done and who approves them.
