When Salt Lake-based Dakota Pacific Real Estate purchased the land around Skullcandy in 2019, CEO Marc Stanworth says they weren’t just taking a chance on well-located property.
“At that point in time, we had been really encouraged to take a look at the property by members within Summit County because of the Kimball Junction neighborhood plan,” he said on KPCW’s “Local News Hour” Nov. 11.
The Kimball Junction neighborhood plan is a set of guidelines the Summit County Council adopted the same year the developer bought the land. It envisions expanding a mix of housing, commercial and civic offerings in the area.
“My vision, personally, for this from day one — when [Councilmember] Chris Robinson sat in my office and said, ‘Come up and build this, according to the Kimball Junction plan. We need it.’ — was to provide something that we can all be proud of,” Dakota Pacific founder John Miller said at a council meeting in February.
So the company is now proposing a neighborhood of 500 market rate and 250 affordable housing units to help finance a public private partnership along state Route 224. The partnership would build new civic spaces, a mixed-use plaza and expanded transit center.
Read more about what the developer is proposing, and what the public-private partnership is
In addition to Robinson, Councilmember Roger Armstrong was on the council that adopted the Kimball Junction neighborhood plan. So was Glenn Wright, who continues to speak in favor of Dakota Pacific’s project.
Councilmembers Canice Harte and Malena Stevens were on the Snyderville Basin Planning Commission at the time.
Their neighborhood plan identifies a litany of problems: “a marginal sense of arrival, poor neighborhood interconnectivity, a hostile pedestrian environment and a weak public realm.”
Critics say those problems — particularly traffic — should be solved before bringing more people into the area with new development. About 100 people attended a public hearing last week to say as much. But Stanworth responds that he can’t fix past development patterns.
“If we were sitting here 25 years ago and looking out ahead and saying, ‘Well, if we develop in this location, it might eventually clog up our arterials’ — the case today is they're already clogged up. And so our focus is how can we help that?” Stanworth said.
Dakota Pacific believes its development will get the attention of state transit officials and force them to fund traffic fixes.
And to help finance an improved transit center and affordable units, the developer has said so far it must build no less than 500 homes for sale or rent at full price.
The county council has tried to lower that number since it began processing the development application in 2021.
“They're hard on us, and it's been a long process, much longer than I think any of us expected and hoped,” Stanworth said. “They're taking their stewardship very seriously.”
The next discussion is at the Summit County Council meeting Wednesday. Councilmembers hope to vote on the proposal by the end of this year.
