Park City Mayor Andy Beerman spoke with KPCW about the challenges of 2020 and what might be in store for the city in 2021.
Mayor Beerman said Park City entered 2020 bright-eyed and hopeful in the middle of another successful ski season, about to kick off the Sundance Film Festival, and having just completed the Vision 2020 process, which will help guide the city for the next 10 years.
As we all know too well by now, the COVID-19 pandemic turned plans for the rest of the year on their head, but Beerman said the city was still able to move towards addressing some of their prime long-term objectives.
“I’ve been referring to 2020, it feels like a gap year in terms of moving forward on things,” Beerman said. “But the reality is, despite the fact we had to do an awful lot of retooling to adjust for health and safety issues and a lot of rebudgeting to adjust for the economic impacts and offer a lot of support on a social front, we did continue to make progress on a lot of our goals and our community priorities.”
In particular, tackling issues concerning housing in Park City were taken on, with city council adopting a new housing resolution in November.
The resolution provided protections for seniors and members of the community with disabilities, as well as increasing the percentage of affordable housing units required in new development projects to 20%. The resolution was lauded by City Manager Matt Dias as a ‘major step forward’ for the city.
Despite the progress, Beerman said there’s still a lot of work to be done to tackle housing affordability in Park City.
“Going right to housing, that is certainly the area where it seems like COVID has made the most acute effects in that it continues to drive prices up,” said Beerman.
According to quarterly statistics from the Park City Board of Realtors, the median price of a single-family home in the city rose 15% to a whopping $2.32 million last year. While good news for realtors and property owners, for many younger families looking to join the community, not so much.
“That’s really into the realm of the absurd for anybody that wants to live and work here unless you’re coming in with quite a few assets,” he said.
Beerman is also slated to give the annual State of the City address in late February and says he will be looking to tie together the community priorities identified in the Vision 2020 process in an easy to understand way. He says there’s already a lot of overlap in the areas of transportation, equity, sustainability, the environment, and the local economy.
“I think that what we’re hoping to have ready for the state of the city is we’re trying to consolidate, we’re trying to merge sort of our past, our present, and our future in terms of how do we approach those strategic pillars the community brought to us through the Vision 2020 and combine those with our long standing community core values and the community critical priorities and sort of merge that all,” he said. “There’s huge overlap in all those areas and we’re going to sort of merge those into hopefully, one simplified message.”
Although identified as priorities over the next 10 years through Vision 2020, Beerman says he sees those issues as generational projects and something the city will be constantly improving on for years to come.
The State of the City is normally a celebratory event in Park City, but, like so many things over the past 10 months, will take place virtually this year.
Beerman’s first term as Mayor ends in January 2022 and while he says he intends to run for reelection this fall, he will not be making an official campaign announcement until early summer.
