With the COVID-19 pandemic looking to be nearing its end, city government in Park City is beginning to shift its focus to something that was put on the back burner one year ago: Vision 2020 and the community’s priorities over the next 10 years. KPCW’s Sean Higgins sat in on Tuesday’s virtual coffee with council and has this:
With the worst of the pandemic hopefully behind us, city hall is now looking to jumpstart the Vision 2020 program and refocus on community priorities like transportation, the environment, and social equity.
Park City first conducted a ‘visioning’ process over 30 years ago in 1989. According to Myles Rademan, who was part of that original process and now runs the Leadership Park City program, people would be surprised at how little community priorities have actually changed over the last few decades.
People have always worried about increasing traffic and rising housing costs and Rademan stressed on Tuesday that it’s important for the community to understand the limitations of what can be accomplished in a place like Park City. He said putting too many items on the city’s wishlist could actually backfire.
“I think that’s important in our visioning process is that we could be, on the one hand, realistic about what our limitations are and the framework that we have to deal within and yet, see where we can push that into the future,” Rademan said. “The truth is Park City cannot be everything for everyone. I don’t care how often we do it. If we have too many goals or aspirations or however you want to call it that compete with each other, then we’re a house divided, we can’t accomplish what we want to do, so focusing is very important is all I’m saying and knowing what some of those constraints are is very important.”
Park City Mayor Andy Beerman added that efforts to improve the city for locals and make it a better place to live could in fact make some current problems worse. The better Park City is, the more people want to live, work, and play here, increasing traffic and further driving up housing costs.
Beerman said he and his colleagues at city hall got a clear message from the public to tackle these decades-old issues while also making various quality of life improvements throughout the city. He said striking that balance will be the challenge going forward.
“So it brings us back to the conundrum a little bit, if we’re trying to stand for everything at once, what can we actually accomplish?” Said Beerman. “What we’ve been trying to do at this point is honor prior visionings, our priorities that we’ve set in place, and the current strategic pillars and boil that down into a solid message for the community both to understand, as well as something that internally we can rally with, but yet not lose all those various elements that we glean from the public and got pretty firm instruction they want us to focus on.”
It’s also no secret that Park City is a resort-focused economy that heavily relies on tourism to survive. Councilor Tim Henney echoed Beerman’s concern for balancing quality of life with economic prosperity and said unfortunately, for some people, that balance might be impossible to achieve.
“My major concern is with this draw, with this attractiveness that has evolved and is the reality of what we have today, it seems very commercial focused, it seems very free market focused,” he said. “We have powerful free market forces at work in Park City and there has to be a counterbalance to that. And again, for some people, that counterbalance is impossible, it’s not enough, and they’re gonna go somewhere else where they don’t have those same free market forces at work, the commercialization concern isn’t gonna be as great, not as high a degree, but I think that’s the reality of what we’re working with and it’s a real jumbled mess, you know? For some people it’s gonna work and for others it’s not.”
With large projects on the horizon like the arts and culture district and possible redevelopments of the base areas of both Park City Mountain Resort and Deer Valley in the works, Park City’s Vision 2020 goals will be front and center as those plans take shape.
Tuesday’s complete coffee with council discussion can be found on Park City Government’s Facebook page and the next city council meeting is scheduled for March 11th.
