Park City hosted two open houses Tuesday where around 150 residents learned about and gave feedback on the Main Street Area Plan. The plan includes ambitious development initiatives, including expanding sidewalks, reducing parking and vehicle traffic and the potential for two new gondolas. Locals favored a more walkable Main Street, even if it meant less parking.
Park City resident Sallie Rinderknecht said the plan is a good start in the effort to make Park City more pedestrian-friendly.
“My husband would say, ‘Oh, we should take all the cars off of Main Street.’ But I think this is a good way to move in that direction, and some goals need to be accomplished in stages,” she said.
The plan also includes a new town square across from City Hall and significant redevelopment on Swede Alley, including a boutique hotel, housing and retail and office space.
Old Town resident Delphine Campes was concerned about the increased lodging in the plan.
“All of a sudden there are really tall hotels, and it's totally messing up with people's views. I don't get it. I mean, this is like, for tourists, not for locals,” she said. “I don't understand the number of hotels that need to be created for this.”
However, Councilmember Ryan Dickey said the plan does not propose any height changes to the code for Main Street and Swede Alley. While the open house did include renderings of the proposed changes, the designs are not final.
Campes did love the gondola ideas. Two new gondolas are included in the plan. One connects the Brew Pub lot at the top of Main Street to Deer Valley’s Snow Park and the other would replace the Town Lift at Park City Mountain.
The plan also considers moving the post office, which longtime Parkite and KPCW volunteer DJ Peg Bodell supports.
“I am not in favor of keeping the post office where it is. I've been going there for 50 years and don't enjoy it. It's not the same,” she said.
Bodell said she sees a lot of good ideas in the plan, and in some cases, wants to expand on them. Regardless, Bodell said Park City needs a plan for the future.
“We've been talking about a lot of these concepts for over 30 years,” she said. “Park City will never be what it used to be. We can't go back. We need to plan and do it well. We need to plan for the residents as well as our guests.”
Rinderknecht agreed the revitalization plan is necessary, but noted the community still has other needs.
“We need to be a little bit careful in that we have other things in our community that we have been talking about for a long time that are still in limbo: Recycle Utah, senior accommodation,” she said.
Dickey said the council is on an aggressive timeline to set the Main Street Area Plan in motion. The council will consider feedback from the open houses as it moves forward.
However, Dickey said, right now, the council is just trying to figure out if this is a vision the community supports.
"Can we all agree that we like this plan, that this is a future vision that we support, that we would be happy if we could achieve that? And if we like it, then we move forward into next year, pulling out the individual pieces into projects and starting to make it happen,” he said.
The city hopes to have the council’s approval on the plan by the end of the year.
Complete details of the Main Street Area Plan can be found here.
