The Hideout Town Council voted to try again at annexing land in Summit County at their meeting on Thursday night. Park City Mayor Andy Beerman told KPCW the city has concerns over what the future holds for Richardson Flat.
Park City Municipal sent a strongly-worded memo to the town of Hideout on September 8th detailing the city’s claim to parcels of land originally in Hideout’s annexation plans for Richardson Flat.
Park City’s memo details agreements made in 1999 and 2007, known as the Flagstaff Development Agreement, that allowed development in the Empire Pass area of Park City in exchange for restricting use of the land in Richardson Flat owned by the United Park City Mines Company. The memo says Park City has contractual agreements and unconditional consent to annex that land into Park City with the landowners.
Developer Nate Brockbank presented a revised version of his plans for Richardson Flat this week that excluded the land Park City has a claim to. The new plans are for about 350 acres of annexation as opposed to the original plans for over 650 acres of land. Park City Mayor And Beerman said the new plans excluding Park City’s claims are a positive development but he is still worried about the effects of developing the eastern entrance to Park City.
“We are very concerned about the impacts, how the traffic will be handled here, how the services will be provided,” said Beerman. “There’s a lot of talk that they want us to provide the services, they want to use our school systems, those sort of things.”
Brockbank has said at Hideout Town Council meetings in the past he would work to make a deal with Park City to develop in Richardson Flat.
Brockbank’s $9 million purchase of several parcels of land in the area are currently being challenged in Utah’s 3rd District Court by Summit County. The county was granted a temporary restraining order on September 9th, preventing Brockbank from moving forward with any annexation or development plans for those parcels until at least September 22nd.
Beerman said Brockbank’s words simply don’t match his actions.
“Park City will stay involved and we’re also very concerned that the developer continues to want to find a way to annex Richardson Flat and remove that development agreement,” he said. “They told everybody last night that they were just going to use that land for parks and maybe ball fields. The very same stuff that’s right across the corner in Quinn’s Junction. Frankly, we don’t believe them. They’re paying nine million dollars for that land. I don’t see them leaving that as open space, otherwise they wouldn’t purchase it.”
The Hideout Town Council voted to move forward with a new annexation resolution and pre-annexation agreement with Brockbank at their Thursday meeting. Hideout is empowered to annex into Summit County by a now repealed piece of state legislation that allowed for cross-county annexation of land without the county’s consent. The law was repealed on August 20th but there is a 60 day period before the repeal officially becomes law on October 19th.
Beerman said rushing any annexation before the deadline is the wrong decision.
“They are using a repealed law by the legislature, which allowed them to slip in the door, essentially, on this and skip all the traditional annexation processes,” Beerman said. “Where annexation is usually a very deliberate process that takes several years, you must work with all your partners, you need to analyze how you’re going to provide all the services, you need to look at tax ramifications. There’s a whole long list of things that need to be checked off and Hideout is saying ‘we’re going to annex now because we have a very short window and we’re going to figure all that out later’ and that gives a lot of concern to its neighbors.”
Hideout Town Councilor Chris Baier told KPCW this week that the town stands by their general plan, which was adopted in 2019 and includes plans to eventually annex into the Richardson Flat area.
Hideout and the other communities around the Jordanelle Reservoir are expected to grow exponentially in the coming years. Baier said the town must grow in order to meet that eventual need.
Summit County has repeatedly expressed their desire to keep current county land under their jurisdiction by any means necessary. With Hideout voting to continue their annexation effort, Summit County is likely to respond with more legal action as the window for Hideout’s plan to succeed grows smaller.
