First on the city council’s agenda is a study session focused on the growing amount of waste Park City produces.
The city’s primary waste management facility, Three Mile Landfill, is filling up rapidly. Park City Environmental Sustainability Manager Luke Cartin warns that the problem carries a great financial cost too.
“Every single time they fill a cell, which they're about to do in the next two to three years,” Cartin said, “is another $3 to $5 million cost that comes out of the county's general fund to say, ‘Hey, we have to go build a new bucket to put the trash in.’”
But the city estimates as much as 80% of the waste could be diverted to recycling or food waste-specific facilities. The council plans to look at a third-party study it commissioned on Park City’s waste and the nuts and bolts of diverting some of that waste.
Then, council will hear an update on the Homestake Affordable Housing Project: an overview of the site, construction and costs.
The project could create 99 affordable and 24 market rate units in the Homestake parking lot behind Fresh Market. It’s a public-private partnership with the developer J. Fisher Companies.
The current plan has about one parking spot per unit, which City Manager Matt Dias says is part of the city’s changing philosophy around transportation. As the volume of cars in town grows, he said the city needs to take steps to mitigate problems that creates.
“And so there's a coupling here. We have a public-private partnership, trying to shed some of our risk,” Dias said. “And then the city is going to have to overlay a comprehensive transit and on-street parking program like we do in the Old Town area.”
The council will not take action on either of these projects yet. It could approve a few agreements with contractors for different projects around the city, and a variety of new and old zoning discussions are on the agenda too.
Just before the council adjourns Thursday, it will debrief the 2023 General Session of the Utah Legislature.
Dias said the session had its wins and losses; maybe more losses than the city had hoped for on the fractional home ownership front. But he also commented on the strangeness of Utah’s 45-day legislative session.
“I think there's probably going to be a reflective moment. Where, it's nice to have an interim session once a month throughout the year,” Dias said. “And then force everything into this compressed time period? I'm not sure, long-term, that we're going to be able to sustain this.”
State lawmakers passed a record 575 bills in those 45 days.
Click here for the full agenda. Click here to attend the meeting via Zoom.
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