Leadership Park City Class 32 returned Sunday from a five-day tour of the Colorado resort communities of Vail and Breckenridge.
One City Tour takeaway for class member Pam Ross was that resort towns – no matter where they are – are grappling with many of the same challenges as Park City.
“They kind of clustered around housing and workforce, climate resiliency, and a really profound emphasis on community well-being and creating that sense of place and identity,” Ross said on KPCW’s “Local News Hour" June 1. “I think there was really an emphasis on cultivating a vibe throughout the entire community, kind of place agnostic, so the geographic boundaries, whether it was a county entity, a city entity, a public health entity, a nonprofit entity, those divisions evaporated with really an emphasis on the quality of life for residents and visitors.”
Class member Scott Greenberg said he was particularly impressed by Breckenridge’s long-term land banking strategy.
“For the last 10 to 15 years, they've been acquiring land for future use,” he said. “They are building communities for their workforce housing, and in those communities, they're putting amazing resources, like these bike share facilities, amazing bike trails, and bus stops all throughout their community. So, they're really focused on their workforce housing there.”
Park City High School student Alec Lebwohl was impressed by Vail’s geothermal district energy project, which is expected to become the largest snowmelt system of its kind in the world.
“They essentially are collecting the snow as it melts and then using that energy to either use ambient heating or cooling for all the buildings, and it's something that we have started to look at here as an option, because it's just a great source of renewable energy,” Lebwohl said. “It was really interesting to see that they are already on the way to doing that large project, and that they've already thought about how it's going to work in all their different buildings.”
Leadership Park City has organized City Tours to resort communities since the program’s inception in 1995. Applications for Class 33 will open July 5.
