A member of the Park City Council is saying it will step back from a proposal for a soil repository in Park City along SR 248. An overwhelming amount of negative feedback at Thursday night’s public hearing is putting the brakes on the project.
Thursday’s work session and public hearing was a chance for the council to officially take the public’s temperature on the controversial proposal to build a soil repository along SR 248. The site is intended for the storage of dirt containing chemicals like lead and arsenic left over from Park City’s mining town history.
After an hour and a half of input, the response from the public was unified in opposition to the proposal -- not one person spoke up in support of the project.
Councilor Max Doilney told KPCW he and his colleagues have considered the public’s concerns and will begin looking at other options going forward.
“Well, we’re definitely taking a step back,” said Doilney. “We’ve heard the community loud and clear. We’re gonna look at all of our options.”
Mining waste excavated in Park City is currently transported to a facility in the west desert of Tooele County at a significant cost. In an effort to be more fiscally and environmentally responsible, the city wants to build a local site to store soil excavated for city development projects. City documents estimate such a change could save over $17 million over the next 10 years.
With the public showing no appetite for a facility in Park City, options are limited to exploring alternate sites closer than Tooele County.
The hearing was widely attended with 17 speakers sharing their thoughts, including several candidates for city council.
Donnie Novelle said she’s lived in Park City for 50 years and went as far to say she has not seen a worse idea proposed by the city.
“I have voted for all of you, some of you several times,” she said. “In the years I have been here, I have seen amazing things coming out of City Hall that have benefited our entire town, just like Bonanza Flat was, to downright corruption in the 70s that benefitted a few. I feel the repository is the absolute worst idea I have ever heard coming from leadership at city hall.”
The city wrapped up a 60-day project outreach period with the public this week and held several in-person and virtual events presenting the facts and figures of the proposal.
Doinley said the process has been thought-provoking. Experts brought in by city staff to explain the safety of the proposed site have said the project would be relatively low risk and a responsible way for Park City to take care of the problem soil on its own. But the community wasn’t convinced.
“It’s really interesting,” said Doilney. “Coming in here and trying to represent the community, right? We get a lot of information from a lot of experts, and normally in my regular daily life, I take the expert opinion and I go, ‘God, that makes a lot of sense, that person knows a lot more about this than I do,’ and I usually go with that regardless of my opinion on it. Opinions seem to have driven this into a different direction, and so we’re gonna have to go with what the community said. That’s what we’re elected to do and I’m happy to do that.”
No binding decisions were made by the council on the future of the project Thursday night, but Doilney indicated it is unlikely the project will move forward in its current form.
