The Park City Council meets Tuesday at 4 in a work session with the Zoom public meeting starting at 6 P.M. It’s the last meeting before a recess which will extend until the middle of September.
Park City Council, in their work session, will address the issue of existing encroachments on city property. Park City Manager Matt Dias says these are typically driveways in the historic district which have what he calls misaligned rights of way. He says they’re often old trails or roads from the mining days.
“For years or decades, we’ve had s ections of city property and it’s just become a problem where residents are sometimes fighting over those encroachments or people have encroached without permission and City Council and the Planning Commission suggested we take a step back and try to come up with a more sound, transparent policy. Create a policy position, and so we're really just trying to balance the private use of public property, where that's appropriate.”
Typically, the city monitors long term vacancies on Main Street, and they’ll consider this practice during the meeting and take into account business impacts from COVID-19.
“We have found some good progress with this new ordinance. We think we've diminished some of the kind of longer-term vacancies on Main Street.”
Mining culture icon, Rich Martinez will be memorialized with a statue in old town. The public arts advisory board wants the city to approve $5,000 for site preparation near the Treasure Mountain trail head.
The city has provided $125,000 in rent abatement to businesses in the newly designated arts and culture district and the tenants in the city owned Carl Winter School. Dias says Council will decide if they’ll continue this program through September.
“We’re trying to put our money where our mouth is. We understand that small businesses and nonprofits are hurting. We have indicated to the community that we will be very supportive of any other landlords that are willing to be, you know express some generosity for their tenants facing hardship and we're trying to walk the walk.”
The city collected nearly $400,000 in sales taxes for May which exceeded the projection of just $76,000.00. Dias says they were very conservative in their estimates and they’re hopeful that there is some kind of recovery underway.
“We don’t really understand the dynamics of it yet because it's such a small month. Overall April and May, the two smallest months, in terms of our economic impact and economic vibrancy, so we're really, really, looking forward to June July and August. We think those are going to be fairly solid indicators of things to come.”
They’re planning to deliver a revised budget for 2021 in September. At that time, they’ll have numbers for June through August.
The council will consider a $5 million amendment to the Three Kings Water treatment project. Dias says there is a tranche of work needed there.
“Dredging ponds, adding storm drains, utilities, service lines, sewer lines, water lines, and so this is kind of a significant amount of heavy infrastructure capital intensive construction that needs to happen off site to service the site. So, all of the utilities need to dredge several of the ponds, we need to add sewer lines and water lines.”
Dias says they’re asking for a $633,000 addendum to the Arts and Culture district architectural plans. He says they’re within best practices parameters to ask the architects to begin work.
“Have the architects start addressing the interior of spaces, utility alignments, putting together our masterplan development package, putting together a demolition schedule in terms of moving soils on site or off site and so we still think we're well within any industry standard of architectural services and typically it's around 8%.”
A public hearing on proposed changes to the Sundance Film Festival is on the agenda. It includes shortening the festival from 10 days to 7 days with a start date of Feb 3 instead of January 28.
“You know, Sundance is just coming in and saying you know, we’re facing a new reality and I think we're very thankful that they want to continue the festival this year despite all the challenges that are created for them. And we have every intention of being supportive safely and I think we're going to try to do everything we can to support them.”
Park City Council work session begins at 5:10 P.M. Tuesday. Public meeting starts at 6. Access to the virtual meeting can be found on parkcity.org.
