Summit County

Here's what is planned for Oakley city center development

KPCW | By Connor Thomas

Published September 26, 2023 at 9:55 AM MDT

Plans for city center include increasing connectivity between state Route 32, Center Street and Weber Canyon Road. City Hall will be preserved or restored, and new buildings will go in with retail and other commercial businesses. The recently reopened Oakley Diner (top left) is the first portion of the plan to have been completed.

The development team Steve Smith hired to plan Oakley’s new city center has submitted its application to city planners. Residents can weigh in about the future in a survey.

A team hired by local businessman Steve Smith to reimagine Oakley’s city center submitted its formal application.

Planning commissioners will give the Oakley City Council a positive or negative recommendation before the council ultimately approves or denies the plans.

At the Oakley City Planning Commission’s latest meeting, development consultant Kris Longson presented the current plan, plus plans for the three homes Smith acquired across state Route 32 and the barn down Millrace Road.

The post office would move to a new building north of its current location, alongside new retail space. Oakley would get an expanded Ken’s Kash grocery store and mixed-use buildings too.

Steve Smith's development team said the project would be phased, with the grocery store, parking and other infrastructure coming first. The rest of the budlings are planned for phase two.

There would be additional road connections between Center Street and Weber Canyon Road, including pedestrian walkways.

The development team is also asking for the three homes across state Route 32 to be rezoned as commercial land so they can move Dutch’s Service Station there, with space to fuel tractors and trucks.

The barn down Millrace Road would be preserved and transformed into a restaurant with special events space.

This map from April 2023 shows land Steve Smith owns or is renting. The city's land is in yellow, and in the proposed land swap, would be swapped for the pink, where the park and town square would go. Dutch's would go on the three lots across the road, and the parcel down Millrace would feature a restaurant that incorporates the barn there into its architecture. — In this map from April, the three homes occupy the blue lots extending west of state Route 32. That's where Dutch's would go under the current plan. The blue parcel below state Route 32 is where the new restaurant would go, incorporating the historic barn.

After Longson’s presentations, planning commissioners opened the floor for public comment.

A common critique among the nearly 20 residents who spoke was the amount of parking in the updated diagrams. Some residents said they would prefer more community gathering space than paved parking space.

Residents were not uniformly opposed to or supportive of the city center project.

Kerbee Leavitt spoke against the plan, expressing heartache over expanding her grandpa’s store and moving her uncle’s gas station to the land where her grandparents lived across the street. She called the plan “clear out in left field.”

But another resident, Kaitlyn Blacksher, said she knows the Smith family and said they have the best interests of the community in mind, not money.