The Park City Council held a work session on what a future development moratorium in Park City could look like on Thursday.
The talks were inspired by feedback indicating that the community is feeling overwhelmed with how much development has been happening over the past year.
Both of Park City’s resorts, Deer Valley and Park City Mountain Resort, have large development projects in the works for their respective base areas. Both projects have attracted significant community pushback in recent months as the proposals make their way through the planning process.
State laws concerning property rights make enacting a moratorium a challenge. The city would have to show a “compelling and countervailing public interest” to put one in place, and the longest it could run for without getting renewed is six months.
Other Wasatch Back communities like Oakley have enacted moratoriums in the past, citing an emergency water shortage. Midway also put in place a moratorium on large-scale buildings last summer in order to update its general plan and development code.
City staff also said a moratorium on planning applications won’t stop growth. Applications that have already been submitted will still move through the planning process.
Park City Planning Director Gretchen Milliken told the council that the department did consider requesting a moratorium eight months ago, but planning staff has since worked through its backlog of applications.
She said she fears pausing applications for six months would only cause another backlog to accumulate, which she said is not what planning staff wants.
“While planning staff potentially is very busy right now, having a backlog is very stressful for a planning department to have and to feel that they can’t really get ahead of anything,” she said.
Milliken added that 2021 was an unusually heavy year for applications and feels that things have begun to slow down to a manageable level, even with large developments like PCMR and Deer Valley still on the table.
Councilor Max Doilney told KPCW that although six months is a short amount of time to get much done in government, the council still wants the option of a moratorium available if it becomes necessary – particularly as the city begins the lengthy process to update its general plan.
“Six months is just not enough time to solve a whole lot of problems, so it could actually present a bigger problem versus a solution," said Doilney. "But what we did say is a moratorium is absolutely a tool that this council would be willing to use if the situation merited it.”
Councilor Ryan Dickey served on the Snyderville Planning Commission before taking office and said the city should decide what its goals are before pursuing a moratorium. He added that the city also has more permanent ways to slow growth down.
“We can do a general plan amendment that says, ‘hey, no new entitlements in Park City until we exhaust all these entitlements that are out there today,’" Dickey said. "That sort of handcuffs ourselves from approving a bunch of new stuff. We could do that through a general plan amendment and it goes a lot longer than six months. If that’s the objective of what we’re trying to do with a moratorium, we can accomplish it maybe in a better way.”
Although a development moratorium was not seen as an immediate need in Park City, the council indicated that discussions and research on the issue would continue.
