In the coming weeks, the Summit County Council will continue to discuss the Dakota Pacific proposal at Kimball Junction.
But one Council Member says the county should be clear about one thing: the existing project approved on the property is bad news.
In fact, he said, it’s very similar to a large project that bedeviled Park City Municipal for decades.
At the Summit County Council’s most recent discussion on Dakota Pacific, attendees heard some pointed comments from Council Member Doug Clyde.
The Dakota Pacific plan for a residential/commercial town center would amend the approval given in 2008 for the Boyer research/office center.
Clyde said nobody should forget there is now an entitlement on the land, and it’s a “really, really, really bad project”.
“Essentially, it is the urbanization or the ‘Los Angelesication’ of Snyderville as just one more hub off of the Salt Lake Valley,” he said. “That’s not who we want to be. That’s not our purpose in life. If you want to see what this looks like, go to Irvine, California. You can see what it looks like. And if you like that, move to Irvine, California. But don’t stay here, and don’t tell us that the existing plan is a great plan, cause it’s not. It’s horrifying.”
He said that many people are mistakenly assuming the Boyer Tech plan is so bad, it would never get built. Clyde said in that respect, the project is much like the Treasure Hill development, now known as Town Lift, which got an approval from Park City Municipal in the mid-1980s.
“We got a lot of open space,” Clyde said. “We gave them a lot of stuff. Twenty years ago, or whenever in heck that was, it seemed like the right idea, because at the time we said, beds are all that was important in Park City, right? We didn’t care where they were built, or how ugly they looked, or how much hillside they took up. We didn’t care. We just said beds are all that’s important, so we made that deal. This project at Kimball Junction is exactly the same. It was made for all the wrong reasons. It had no respect whatsoever for the consequences of those decisions. And we have an opportunity to change that. We should change it now.”
Ultimately, Park City voters approved a bond to buy out the Treasure Hill development in November of 2018.
Dakota Pacific has returned with the original iteration of their plan, which incorporated county-owned property such as the Transit Center and the Richins Building.
Clyde said that’s a good plan, but the Snyderville Planning Commission couldn’t move forward on it last year because it needed to be a joint effort with the county.
He said the current county buildings in that area are problematic.
“This is what we refer to as two inherently weak ideas butt-welded together, where we put the Richins Building up against the Transit Center and we make sure the bus has as many turns as possible before it gets into the Transit Center,” Clyde said. “And then, not to do something with the Richins Building. The Richins Building represents a nice library facility, and a nice meeting-room facility. But it is much smaller than our uses demand. And the balance of the building is a rabbit room. And that’s where we’re putting our people, is essentially in underground bunkers. I think that that is a—that is bad land planning whenever you do that to your employees. Literally, it’s an underground cave.”
He said the county will have to put in significant effort and funding for the needed changes.
“We need to ultimately dispense with the Richins Building,” Clyde said. “We need to fix the Transit Center. We need to fix the traffic flow. All of those things can only happen if we have what’s going to be an extremely complicated and robust agreement with the developer to do those things in a phased manner that we can afford. Because of course, these improvements will require a lot of capital expenditures on the county’s part, to the great benefit of all the people in the county.”
