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No vote on residential pickleball until city adopts new land management code

Val Olson (from left), Rick Kamm, Steve David and Dee Haskins play up to the net during a pickleball game at Monument Valley Park in Colorado Springs, Colo., in 2011.
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MCT via Getty Images
Park City will be looking at how pickleball fits into its land management code later this year.

The Park City Planning Commission chose to delay a vote on two residential pickleball courts until the city revises its land management code later this year.

There were two conditional use permits for residential pickleball courts in the Park Meadows area in front of the Park City Planning Commission Wednesday night. Instead of approving or denying the requests, the commission delayed action until after the city decides how pickleball fits into its land management code.

Park City Planning Director Gretchen Milliken said pickleball has exploded in popularity in recent years, and now has over 4 million players nationwide. She said there has also been increased interest in building pickleball courts at private residences, and an increase in pickleball-related noise complaints.

“As planning staff, we are looking at mitigation and how we can both support this fast growing sport that a lot of people are really interested in, but also mitigate for the negative impacts," she said. "We are making some recommendations for changes in our land management code to spell out, specifically, mitigations for pickleball courts.”

Some of the changes include adding things like minimum lot size requirements and the use of noise-reducing equipment.

The two courts in question on Wednesday are already built. One on Venus Court is a concrete patio that the homeowner wants to convert into a pickleball court, and the project on Equestrian Court is part of a sports court that is also lined for other sports like basketball and volleyball.

The main concern expressed by neighbors is how much noise pickleball produces. The game is played on a hard surface with hard balls and hard paddles, and some neighbors worried that the courts would be too close to surrounding properties to not be a nuisance.

Frode Jensen is a Park Meadows resident and spoke in opposition to the Venus Court project. He said he supports revising the city’s code, but was weary of residents still violating the new rules.

“I’m encouraged that the staff will propose amendments to the code to deal with backyard pickleball courts," Jensen said. "I don’t think this can come soon enough. I believe the Venus court will fail, should fail, does fail under our existing code provisions, but I am mindful of the extraordinary resourcefulness of some of our neighbors in finding ways to avoid our land use laws.” 

Some of the planning staff’s suggestions to mitigate noise included requiring courts to be at least 50 feet from neighboring properties and installing a 12-foot tall noise-reducing fence around the courts.

The planning commission will review the planning department’s code changes on February 23rd before sending a positive or negative recommendation to the city council.

Commissioner Doug Thimm said he would prefer the commission not vote on the two courts until further analysis of the properties and city code can be done.

“Continuing this is the correct course," said Thimm. "I don’t think there’s enough information available. I don’t think that prescriptive requirements, i.e. some number of feet away and some number of feet high are necessarily the right path. I think the right path is to have an acoustical analysis done by an acoustic engineer that can show that whatever noise, which is kind of the real hotbutton here, so whatever noise that is produced by playing pickleball is mitigated to be within the noise ordinances that the city has.”

The commissioners voted unanimously to hold off on the two permit requests until later this year. The Equestrian Court permit, however, was approved for the other uses besides pickleball.

Sean Higgins covers all things Park City and is the Saturday Weekend Edition host at KPCW. Sean spent the first five years of his journalism career covering World Cup skiing for Ski Racing Media here in Utah and served as Senior Editor until January 2020. As Senior Editor, he managed the day-to-day news section of skiracing.com, as well as produced and hosted Ski Racing’s weekly podcast. During his tenure with Ski Racing Media, he was also a field reporter for NBC Sports, covering events in Europe.