At Wednesday evening’s Park City Planning Commission meeting, the parking plan for the proposed base development project at Park City Mountain Resort was on the table. At the end of the night, members of the commission and public did not see eye to eye with the developers or the city on the best way forward.
There are currently 1,200 surface-level parking spaces at the base of Park City Mountain Resort. PEG Companies’ current proposal is to up that number to 1,721 day skier, residential, and commercial spaces, move them underground, and charge for parking.
But, Park City’s current land management code requires over 2,200 stalls be constructed for a project of that size.
PEG is requesting an exception to that requirement and argues that because the spaces cover many uses like skiers and snowboarders, hotel guests, and visitors to local businesses all busy at different times of day, a strict application of building code does not fit the project.
Additionally, the city wants to eventually reduce the number of vehicles at the resort by 20% through incentivizing public transit and carpooling. PEG argues that one of the easiest ways to do that would be to not increase the number of parking stalls at the base and charge to use them.
PEG’s VP of Development, Robert Schmidt, said the 20% reduction simply won’t be possible if more parking is built.
“There’s no way we can hit a 20% mode split if we add stalls to the site,” said Schmidt. “We just won’t get there. That’s counterproductive to trying to achieve this 20% mode split, so which way do you want to go? That’s the question -- how do you want to solve traffic issues as parking relates to the traffic.”
City staff largely agreed with PEG’s analysis and Senior Planner Alexandra Ananth added that the city’s roads also cannot handle more traffic.
“And not only do the ski areas not have the capacity, our roadway does not have the capacity to add more cars,” Ananth said. “That is the primary driver more than the number of parking stalls that PEG may or may not supply on site is our roadways cannot handle more traffic, so more parking isn’t going to help at all.”
The planning commission and public, however, were skeptical of PEG’s evaluation. Many people pointed to the already limited parking at the base area and questioned how such a large project could be built and not require an increase in parking.
Steve McComb is the owner of the Baja Cantina at the resort base and said he has a hard time believing no additional parking is needed without significant cooperation and investment not just from PEG, but also the city and PCMR’s parent company, Vail Resorts.
“You know, I appreciate all the graphs and all the smart people in the room here, but I’m sorry, I’m having a really hard time understanding how you add 650,000 square feet and not add any parking whatsoever,” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s gonna take mass transit, it’s gonna take shared parking, which Vail does not do right now. We’ve got a parking problem and there’s no carpool lot, there’s no shared parking spots or anything, so I’m skeptical on how we get there.”
The city does have plans for a future park and ride at Quinn’s Junction and a repaving and restriping of SR 248 is scheduled for this summer and will add dedicated bus lanes.
The next planning commission meeting is scheduled for May 19th and will continue PEG’s requests for building height and setback exceptions.
