Vail wants the Utah Court of Appeals to overturn a 2022 Park City Planning Commission’s decision to revoke a permit to upgrade the Silverlode and Eagle chair lifts after four residents filed an appeal.
The decision was upheld in 2023, when a district court judge said there were reasonable doubts about the project’s parking plan.
Attorney Ryan Cooke, representing Park City Mountain, said the commission’s assessment of the resort’s parking plan went beyond the scope of their role.
Lift upgrades, he said, would not have added to parking demand.
That’s where Judge Amy Oliver said she saw a “disconnect.”
“You submitted a plan, and it was modified to add additional requirements,” Oliver said. “So it seems that there’s a big disconnect to say, ‘well there was no parking impact.’”
Cooke said the resort was trying to be good partners with the city.
“I think it’s a matter of no good deed goes unpunished,” he said. “The planning director and its staff asked Park City Mountain to submit a parking mitigation plan. Park City Mountain wants to improve these lifts. It wants to continually improve the mountain, and so it did. And it did so voluntarily.”
Oliver’s focus on parking came near the end of an hour-long hearing before a panel of three judges. It wasn’t immediately clear Tuesday when the court would issue a decision.
Attorney Lara Swenson represented Park City Municipal at Tuesday’s hearing.
Since the commission’s decision, Swenson said Park City Mountain has had several years to ask the city for a conditional use permit to upgrade its lifts, rather than seek an expedited administrative process.
Swenson pointed judges to the 1998 agreement governing future resort development that City Hall struck with POWDR, the former owner of Park City Mountain.
In that agreement is a “Mountain Upgrade Plan” that establishes an expedited review process for essentially pre-approved lift projects, in which the resort could sidestep the planning commission and get administrative approval from the planning director. However, Park City Mountain is required to meet several standards to win approval under that process.
Residents appealed former Park City Planning Director Gretchen Milliken’s initial approval of the lift project, claiming it did not comply with the standards set out in the 1998 agreement.
In their review of the resident appeal, the planning commission determined that the project failed to meet two standards, including an adequate parking plan.
In a statement to KPCW after the hearing, Park City Mountain Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Deirdra Walsh said: "We believe the Planning Commission’s decision to revoke our permit was wrong. These investments in state-of-the-art lifts were intended to improve the guest experience by allowing skiers and riders to get up the hill faster while reducing congestion in the Mountain Village base area. These improvements were requested by guests and the community alike."
