After two days of discussions on everything from affordable housing to water conservation, the Park City Council will now drill down on each of those issues individually.
It was decided on Thursday that after this week’s surface-level discussions, the council will schedule deep-diving work sessions on a number of topics over the next four months.
Starting March 3rd, the council will hold a two-hour work session on its vision and priorities for 2022. Vision 2020 was the guiding document used by the last council, but the majority of that work was done before the COVID-19 pandemic. Three councilors are also brand new to their roles.
City Manager Matt Dias was asked if what he’s heard from the council this week will take the city in a radically different direction. He said although it’s clear this council wants to take a look at things from a fresh perspective, he also heard a strong desire to continue working on what he called “legacy issues” – like housing and transportation.
“You want to take a step back, you want to understand the history, you want to understand the context, you want to evaluate the decisions," Dias said. "You’re not coming in with the pretext that anything was done wrong or they weren’t evaluated, but you want to look at it with new eyes and fresh eyes, but there is some expediency to the work that you want to get done here, and we are at an inflection point with some of our challenges in the community.”
After work sessions on housing and transportation, the council will also revisit one of the city’s more controversial projects over the past few years: the arts and culture district.
The city owns the five-acre parcel of land at the corner of Kearns Boulevard and Bonanza Drive and had planned to build an ambitious art and culture center at the site, complete with transit infrastructure and a sizable number of affordable housing units.
After initial estimates pegged the project at around $45 million, ballooning construction costs amid the pandemic saw projections up to $100 million, not counting the $19.5 million the city paid for the land in 2017.
Plans were eventually scaled back to around $65 million last summer, but community outrage over a now-abandoned project for a place to store the mining-tinged soil from the construction site eventually shelved the arts and culture district.
Councilor Becca Gerber encouraged her fellow councilors to see the upside of the land, especially since a funding mechanism was set up through the city’s transient room tax in 2017 to help pay for the costs.
“I would ask that rather than focusing on this as an issue, we make sure that we acknowledge the opportunity that we have before us to do something really wonderful and excellent for our community and not nickel and dime every aspect of it when we have a funding source dedicated to it," she said. "I hope that we can move on in future discussions and talk about opportunities.”
Plans for the arts and culture district included housing and transportation, but the council indicated it would be taking another look at those aspects of the project as well.
The Kimball Arts Center and Sundance Institute also had plans to construct new headquarters at the arts and culture site, signing letters of intent with the city in 2017. But the pandemic threw the arts industry into turmoil and both organizations also underwent leadership changes, casting doubt on those intentions.
Mayor Nann Worel told the council that she wants to see where those organizations stand before taking another shot at the arts and culture district.
“We’re hoping that those conversations can get started in March because we need to go back with our partners and say, ‘where are you on this? Is this the vision that you signed a letter of intent to in 2017? Your organization is very different today, so is this still a direction that you want to be part of?’" said Worel. "If they’re still all in, we’ve made a commitment to them that we’re gonna sell them the land and let them build their homes there.”
A work session on the arts and culture district is scheduled for April 7th.
