Park City Mayor Nann Worel and other city officials will continue to negotiate privately with Deer Valley Resort, in the hopes of reaching a final deal that resonates well with residents.
At its meeting last week the Park City Council voted to delay a decision on whether to give a portion of Deer Valley Drive to the resort until Nov. 2. That vote has broad implications for Deer Valley’s plans to construct a ski-in ski-out village with hotels and restaurants on the Snow Park parking lot.
Allison Keenan is a co-founder of the group Protect The Loop, which she says represents the views of over 1,000 Deer Valley area households. At the meeting last week, she called for a new traffic study analyzing the proposed Snow Park development, given Deer Valley’s recent announcement that it's expanding into Wasatch County to operate the terrain previously envisioned as the Mayflower ski resort.
“Without an accurate baseline of current traffic conditions, without future modeling that’s based on detailed parking and transportation plans covering the entire expanded resort and both its portals, we can’t even evaluate the potential impacts of any negotiated mitigations,” Keenan said.
Deer Valley leaders have not expressed any intention to produce a new study.
Deer Valley Vice President of Resort Planning Hannah Tyler said they hear Protect The Loop’s concerns and plan to implement some of its recommendations.
“I think Park City is unique in that we have a high level of public involvement, and that’s what makes Park City so great,” Tyler said. “What you’ll see when we come back with not only the public-private partnership, but also some of the technical aspects of our plan, we’re taking into consideration some of those suggestions from Protect The Loop.”
Deer Valley President and COO Tood Bennett said they anticipate up to half of its skiers moving to the new base area when it’s complete in 2025, but there aren’t yet numbers to back that up.
“You don’t know until you really have that,” Bennett said. “Obviously we have to be in play to understand the full impact.”
The traffic study analyzing the new Snow Park development, prior to the expansion announcement, estimated the project would bring an additional 3,500 cars to Deer Valley daily.
Protect The Loop has presented an alternative proposal for Deer Valley’s project, which calls for using smaller shuttles to take skiers to the base area.
