At its meeting June 23rd, the Park City Council voted to prohibit fireworks and open flames in town, but according to City Manager Matt Dias, there was a bit of confusion after that vote, so staff is recommending that council approve a resolution Thursday that will ratify the first vote.
“We're trying to do two things," Dias said. "The state law continues to change each year with regard to fireworks. Right, wrong, or indifferent, there is a significant firework lobby at the legislature. And then there's a lot of cities and towns and counties that are activated and trying to balance just sort of the individual interest and ability to have open flames and light fireworks with the extreme amount of caution as we're approaching drought and wildfire conditions. And so unfortunately, when we adopted this before, there's a little bit of confusion if we had had open flame and fireworks adopted at the same time, while we were codifying updates to the state code. So, we're gonna come back in and just perfect this and leave nothing to fate once and for all.”
Dias says state law changes every few years and that the authority to ban fireworks and open flames was returned to a city’s legislative body by the state legislature this year. Forecasted weather data and fuel moisture content of live and dead vegetation this year has put the fire danger in the area at a high level.
Requests for an exception to the prohibition can be applied for at Park City’s building department by requesting a Fire Operational Permit.
Meanwhile in Summit County, fireworks have not been banned, yet, other than on state and federal land. Under current state law, counties cannot issue their own fireworks bans.
Utah allows class C fireworks, which don’t include most that explode in the air. For the July 24th Pioneer Day holiday, fireworks can only be discharged between July 22 and July 25th between 11 a.m. and 11 p.m.
