In a 3-2 vote, the Park City Council appointed Adam Strachan, Esteban Nunez, and Matthew Day to the newly formed appeal panel.
Councilmembers Ryan Dickey and Tana Toly voted against the measure, recommending Elyse Kats instead of Nunez.
Each of the five applicants were interviewed by the council in January. Strachan, who used to chair the city’s planning commission, said the Park City Mountain lift appeal in 2021 sparked his interest to return to government.
“I was just surprised, it was the first public meeting that I had attended since I went off the commission,” Strachan told the council. “I was just interested to see the tenor of the conversation… it’s more intense. The hearings now are more intense and more controversial than they used to be when I was on commission… but there’s more at stake.”
Nunez, a local real estate agent, told the council that potential development at Snow Park and the Park City Mountain parking lots are what he’s watching.
“The reason why is because that there’s a lot of public input on those, there’s a lot of public recourse for the decision on those, and I feel like as a member of the community, it’s important to get it right,” Nunez said.
Day, who also works in real estate, said the Kimball Art Center’s previous attempt to build a new headquarters in Old Town was the development application that caught his eye.
“We had some of the most influential architectural firms in the world applying to do these different builds, but they were pushing something that was really pretty extreme in a lot of different ways,” Day said. “But instead of kind of getting to the middle and having something that could be unique that pulls people into the town as another kind of alternative, I think we all got kind of got stuck around the code there near the end, and Kimball Art Center moved out there, and we ended up with another sort of pretty boring building.”
The trio will be in charge of deciding on any appeals of planning commission decisions. Members serve three-year terms.