At a forum July 22, the candidates were asked: what is a recent Park City Council vote you disagreed with and why?
Half of the candidates — Diego Zegarra, Beth Armstrong, Ian Hartley and Molly Miller — criticized the council’s reversal on ranked choice voting in the 2025 election.
In April the Park City Council voted 3-2 to return to conventional plurality voting, weeks after adopting a resolution to use ranked choice voting.
The move drew criticism from residents, former city council members and Park City Mayor Nann Worel.
“I fully believe that folks should be able to change their mind, of course, and the bar for our electeds should be really high,” Diego Zegarra said. “We should be really selective as to when we do that.”
Beth Armstrong called the ranked choice voting reversal a “horrible decision.”
“Just based on from what I understand, it was because seniors couldn’t understand how to do [ranked choice voting],” Armstrong said. “I can tell you, I know how to ranked choice vote.”
Ian Hartley echoed those comments.
“It was a decision that wasn’t based on open facts,” Hartley said. “Although the community spoke out on their opinion, they were ignored in that. And that really isn’t the way forward, and we hope to move away from that.”
Molly Miller said the council’s decision was “the worst we’ve seen.”
“It was disrespectful to the community and our community deserves better,” Miller said. “Our community deserves a council that listens to facts and experts and respects what they have to say.”
Incumbent council member Jeremy Rubell, who voted rescind ranked choice voting, pushed back on those accusations.
Rubell said a separate but similar method, called proportional ranked choice voting, would have worked better for Park City.
In 2018 Utah legislators passed a bill allowing cities to try ranked choice voting through a pilot program. It’s set to expire after the 2025 election, which Rubell cited as a reason to stick with conventional voting.
As for past council votes he opposed, Rubell said he was against hiring a consultant to survey residents about the future of Bonanza Park.
“We went with the consultant study and wasted another two-and-a-half years asking the same questions to the community,” Rubell said. “We’re no further than when we started that.”
He also cited the council’s decision on July 10 to move forward with a $725,000 contract to design a new frontage road to the proposed Clark Ranch housing project south of Park City Heights.
Danny Glasser and John Kenworthy also cited the Clark Ranch decision as a recent vote they disagreed with.
Glasser said the city should explore property on the east side of U.S. Highway 40 for the project, which involves over 200 housing units.
“I think the goal is to build affordable housing and as much as you can in that area,” Glasser said. “To build up a hillside where you’ve got retaining walls, that may be the right choice. But I’d want to go through and check and see whether the environmental impact on the other side [of Highway 40] is making it more costly, or if there’s some other reason why we can’t build over there.”
Kenworthy said Park City is spending too much on consultant contracts.
“We’ve spent tens of millions of dollars and we just continued for $725,000, for that road study — crazy,” Kenworthy said.
Incumbent council member Tana Toly, who along with Rubell is seeking a second term, said she was disappointed when the council backed out of creating a regional housing authority with Summit County last year.
“Our council didn’t move forward with that after a year of us working really hard on plans to work in conjunction with [Summit] County,” Toly said. “We missed an opportunity and that set us back in housing in the last two years.”
A recording of the full forum, where candidates answered a variety of questions for over two hours, can be found below:
