On Thursday afternoon, the Park City Council will hold two work sessions to discuss community priorities for 2022 and kick off this year’s budgeting process.
The city completed an extensive visioning process just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, resulting in a plan called Vision 2020. It identified community priorities like housing, transportation, the environment, and social equity as things to focus on over the next 10 years.
Park City’s future direction was also a central theme of last year’s elections, and the city might be in a different place than it was two years ago.
City Manager Matt Dias said while he doesn’t expect any drastic changes to city priorities like transportation, housing, and sustainability, he said he does expect the council to revisit some finer details as the city charts its path forward.
“I think any responsible organization has to make sure that they’re listening to their community, that they’re creating an inclusive and transparent process," said Dias. "I think we did that. We spent the better part of a full year, had over 1,500 surveys, all sorts of focus groups. Believe it or not, the next item on the agenda is we’re kicking off our budget process and we need these definitions and we need to finalize this document so we can begin preparing the budget for this new council and mayor.”
Park City will also begin its annual budgeting process Thursday. The process is state-mandated and will wrap up in June.
Park City Budget Operations and Strategic Planning Manager Jed Briggs said the city’s operating budget is usually somewhere around $60 million, but can fluctuate by millions of dollars from year to year depending on various projects or land purchases.
Briggs said with three new councilors coming to city hall since last November’s election, staff is looking to get into every detail of the budget in the coming weeks.
“We want to have a lot of really deliberate and focused conversations over the next month or so, and that is probably the biggest difference between what we typically do and what we’re doing this year," Briggs said. "We have a lot of new voices on council and we really want to understand better what they want so that we can make sure the budget reflects that.”
After the two work sessions, the council will also consider approving the Youth Sports Alliance’s Olympic and Paralympic celebration parade on April 1st and discuss the interlocal agreement with the Snyderville Basin Special Recreation District for the Park City Ice Arena.
Thursday’s meeting begins at 3pm. A link to the full agenda can be found here.
