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Show A-12 The Park Record Meetings and agendas Wed/Thurs/Fri, April 4-6, 2018 Core saMples By Jay Meehan TO PUBLISH YOUR PUBLIC NOTICES AND AGENDAS, PLEASE EMAIL CLASSIFIEDS@PARKRECORD.COM The orange non sequitur AMENDED AGENDA SUMMIT COUNTY COUNCIL Wednesday, April 4, 2018 NOTICE is hereby given that the Summit County Council will meet in session Wednesday, April 4, 2018, at the Summit County Courthouse, 60 North Main Street, Coalville, UT 84017 (All times listed are general in nature, and are subject to change by the Council Chair) 1:00 PM - Site visit and tour of South Summit County Services Building, located at 110 N. Main, Kamas, UT 84036; Mike Crystal and Brian Bellamy (45 min) 1:45 PM – Travel to Coalville 2:20 PM Closed Session – Property acquisition (30 min); Litigation (30 min) Non-Monetary Consideration Under UCA 17-50-303(4); Dave Thomas, Chief Civil Deputy (15 min) 2) Discussion and possible adoption of Proclamation No. 2018-4, a Proclamation Declaring the Month of April “County Government Month”; Krachel Greenwood 3) Council Comments 4) Manager Comments 5) Council Minutes dated March 21, 2018, and March 26, 2018 3:20 PM - Move to Council Chambers 6:00 PM Public Input 3:30 PM – Work Session 1) Pledge of Allegiance 2) 3:35 PM - Presentation regarding Short Term Rental (STR) Research Project; Brumby McLeod (90 min) 3) 5:05 PM - Update on status of 2018 Transportation Sales Tax Revenue Bonds; Matt Leavitt (15 min) 5:20 PM Consideration of Approval 1) Consideration and possible approval of Ordinance No. 876, an Ordinance Authorizing Summit County to Enter into an Agreement for Ground Lease and Acquisition of Real Property for Employee Housing at The Canyons Village, Park City, Utah, in Which LVDAM-LV6A is Transferred to The Canyons Village Management Association After the Retirement of an Assessment Bond for One or more members of the County Council may attend by electronic means, including telephonically or by Skype. Such members may fully participate in the proceedings as if physically present. The anchor location for purposes of the electronic meeting is the Council Chambers and Conference room, Summit County Courthouse, 60 N. Main, Coalville, Utah Individuals with questions, comments, or needing special accommodations pursuant to the Americans with Disabilities Act regarding this meeting may contact Annette Singleton at (435) 336-3025, (435) 615-3025 or (435) 783-4351 ext. 3025 Posted: March 29, 2018; Amended March 30, 2018 Apostle selections make history in Mormon church BRADY MCCOMBS Associated Press SALT LAKE CITY – The Mormon church made history and injected a bit of diversity into a previously all-white top leadership panel on Saturday by selecting the first-ever Latin-American apostle and the first-ever apostle of Asian ancestry. The selections of Ulisses Soares of Brazil and Gerrit W. Gong, a Chinese-American, were announced during a twice-annual conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City. The choices triggered excitement among a contingent of Mormons who for years have been hoping for the faith’s top leadership to be more representative of a religion that has more than half of the its 16 million members outside the United States. “It’s a sign that the church is for everyone,” said Guilherme De Castro, a 37-year-old Mormon from Brazil who was in attendance for the announcement. “It doesn’t matter where you are from or the way you look.” The selections come during a two-day conference happening as the faith grapples with heightened scrutiny about its handling of sexual abuse reports and one-on-one interviews between local lay leaders and youth. Mormon leaders hadn’t spoken about the topic as of Saturday afternoon, but a person in attendance yelled several times, “Stop protecting sexual predators,” as new people were announced to second-tier leadership posts. The outburst came one day after about 1,000 current and former Mormons marched to the church’s headquarters in Salt Lake City, delivering petitions demanding an end to closed door, one-on-one interviews between youth and lay leaders where sexual questions sometimes arise. The church changed policy this week to now allow children to bring a parent or adult with them to the interviews, but protesters said that doesn’t go far enough to keep children safe. The change came as part of more revisions to sexual abuse reporting guidelines following recent revelations that a former prominent missionary leader was accused of sexually assaulting two women in the 1980s. The ex-leader denied the allegations. It was the first conference presided over by new church President Russell M. Nelson. His choices for the two open leadership spots sparked hope that the 93-year-old former heart surgeon will focus on the globalization of the faith during his tenure. He is set to embark on a trip in April to visit eight cities in Europe, Africa and Asia, including Hong Kong. The last time there were openings on the quorum, in October 2015, the church chose three Utah men. Past church president Thomas S. Monson, who died in January, was leading the church at the time. The religion believes church presidents choose new Quorum members with the help of divine revelation. The choices mark the strongest statement in favor of global diversity by senior church leadership since 1978 when the church lifted a ban on black men in the lay clergy, allowing the church to spread to Brazil, Africa and elsewhere, said Mormon scholar Patrick Mason, associate professor of religion at Claremont Graduate University in California. He said most people were hoping for at best one new non-white leader, so the double selection will be welcomed with enthusiasm throughout the religion. The announcement sparked a wave of tweets and other social media posts, some by Mormons who said they never thought they would see the day. Soares and Gong join a panel called the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles that, before Saturday, was made up entirely of white men from the U.S. with the exception of one German, Dieter Uchtdorf. The all-male panel sits below President Nelson and his two counselors and helps set church policy and oversees the faith’s business interests. The new appointees start as junior members, but they could someday become church president because the group’s longest-tenured member ascends to president when the current one dies. They join a quorum undergoing a substantial turnover following a string of deaths as previous leaders succumbed to the effects of aging. Five of the 12 panel members have been appointed in the past three years. Prior to 2015, it had been six years since a new quorum member was chosen, and more than a decade since the leadership council had two openings. Like the previous 12 men chosen for the panel, Soares and Gong were serving in a lower-level leadership called Quorum of the Seventy that that has served as a farm system for the governing body. The 59-year-old Soares was an accountant and auditor for multinational corporations in Brazil before joining church leadership, according to a church biography. He was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The 64-year-old Gong worked for the U.S. State Department, the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies and Mormon-owned Brigham Young University before being selected for the lower-tier church leadership panel. He was born in Redwood City, California. His grandparents immigrated to the United States from China. The new selections reflect the “rising focus of church leadership on the world outside the United States, where the church is growing most rapidly,” said Mormon scholar Matthew Bowman, an associate professor of history at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. With 1.4 million members, Brazil has the second-most Mormon in the world along with Mexico, according to church figures. Both rank behind the United States, which has about 6.6 million members. Nelson has long had a special interest in China, Bowman said. He speaks Mandarin and spent time there during his professional career. It’s possible Nelson is hoping Gong’s selection could help establish a stronger foothold in the Asian country that currently doesn’t officially recognize the religion and only allows certain activities, Bowman said. It is estimated that there are at least 10,000 church members in mainland China, most of which are native Chinese members, though there are no official church estimates because the Chinese government does not recognize the religion, said Matt Martinich, an independent Mormon researcher. Of the 116 highest-ranking church leaders serving in several tiers, 40 percent of them were born outside the U.S, said Dallin H. Oaks, first counselor to President Nelson, on Saturday. The diversity in leadership should help broaden conversations about race and ethnicity and add new prisms through which the gospel is viewed, said Ignacio Garcia, a professor of Western and Latino history at Mormon-owned Brigham Young University. Making a sports analogy, Garcia said the religion has many great minority leaders on the “bench”(mid-tier leadership councils) and now for first time, two in the “starting lineup” (Quorum of the Twelve). It’s likely an indication of the religion’s future since indigenous members are who will help sustain the church going forward, Garcia said. “Those are the ones that are growing: black and brown and Asian,” he said. “That’s the future of the church.” “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez and it’s Easter time too, and your gravity fails, and negativity don’t pull you through. Don’t put on any airs, when you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue. They got some hungry women there, and they really make a mess outta you.” ~ Bob Dylan It would seem that somewhere between our teetering emperor’s orange rug and his “bigly” red tie there simmers a festering reservoir of knee-jerks and nonlinear thought, both in search of a vocabulary sufficient to adequately express itself. I feel his pain. I’ve been there. I know the neighborhood. Of course, that was during my often chronicled misspent youth and I more than likely had imbibed a bit much over my absorption limit of any number of “beverages” or possibly even a ‘shroom–peyote cocktail of some stripe. Long strange trips in search of one’s self will do that to you. Now I’m not by implication, through symptom analysis alone, attempting to herd his somewhat bizarre behavior patterns into a corral for the chemically imbalanced, but there is most certainly something strange afoot between the man’s protruding organs of hearing and equilibrium. And I must say, it’s gotten me a bit jittery. I’ve had to question and re-tweak my double-secret survival strategy on an almost daily basis. Being alternative-driven, it’s reached the point of employing a “box and one” zone defense where we try to contain the schizophrenic-in-chief while loosely-enveloping the waiting-in-the-wings bunch. As I’ve alluded to previously in this space, the constitutional chronology of next-in-line replacements is invertebrate-rich with the likes of Pence, Ryan, and Hatch. The hope, of course, is to somehow learn to live with this president’s deer-in-theheadlights “leadership” until the next general election in 2020. It goes without saying, however, that this would be much easier if those on the other side of the aisle could get their fecal matter together to the extent they excite the Resistance into showing up at the polls for In the time it takes to pen a column, the world upends. So it goes.” the midterms with a mission to re-deploy the Nazi collaborators on their well-rounded derrieres. If a coalition of, say, the younger demographic that has been marching in the streets of late joined the diverse assortment of grown-ups remaining in the building and were able to come together without getting distracted by petty infighting and the sure to be forthcoming Putin/Trump propaganda machine, well, then, who knows? Maybe the system could right itself. There is always Ed Abbey’s axiom that a “pessimist is an optimist in full possession of the facts” hovering about to keep me from buying too much into such drivel on the Futures Market, however. But I must say that mapping out survival strategies, while not nearly as scenic as the back roads from Bear’s Ears to Monument Valley, beats throwing in the towel. All is in flux, even more so than usual during this Age of Orange. A news cycles is spotted constantly nipping at its own tail. If I were to, say, check the daily briefing at this moment, I’d be no doubt forced to return to the beginning of this epistle to start anew. In the time it takes to pen a column, the world upends. So it goes. I have found it is best to contemplate the non-reality of orange, or of any arbitrarily designated narrow band of wavelengths along the visible spectrum. Notwithstanding the fact that my “gray” cannot be located between red and violet, I find that a particular tranquility arrives with thoughts of the spectrum being continuous. Recognizing that, in the main, specifics are the cards being shuffled, the general theory of Trump’s relativity, that the massiveness of his non-congruent reflections does indeed distort space-time, remains of grave consequence. And, of course, it matters little with his base that he allegedly fell in with a few hungry women down on Rue Morgue Avenue. Orange has proven to be non-sequential. Judge not he whose misdeeds are cast apart from those of his predecessors. Don’t put on any airs, indeed! Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and has been an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social and political scenes for more than 40 years. red Card roberts By Amy Roberts Troubled waters This coming weekend, the 2017/18 ski season will draw to a close. Most years we’re pretty sad about that, but considering this season still feels like it never really started, I’m ready to hang up the ski gear and get the bikes tuned. As of right now, I don’t think I’ll bother with the traditional closing day runs — I’ve filled my quota for skiing in a daiquiri this winter. I managed to get out of this season without a trip to the orthopedic surgeon’s office, and with the conditions only looking to worsen over the next couple of days, there’s no need to tempt fate. I’m perfectly happy not meeting my deductible this early. More than once this winter, I silently accepted the blame for the depressing lack of snow. For the first time in the two decades I’ve lived here, I hired a snow removal company. I’d never considered it prior to the 2016/17 season. But that year was a doozy, and though we’d had similar snow amounts in the past, I wasn’t over 40 for any of them. Last season, I was constantly late to work attempting to clear the driveway before driving over it. When I did arrive at the office, I often looked as if I’d just finished a marathon. My trusty snow blower had committed suicide by Christmas and it appeared there was significant price gouging when I looked into replacing it. So I shoveled last season, almost daily. By the time March rolled around, I could no longer physically heave the snow over the mounds on either side of my driveway. I even dislocated my shoulder trying to do so. As this year’s season approached, I remembered those long, dark hours with my shovel all too vividly. Every time I glanced at it hanging in the garage, mocking me, I swear my shoulder would creak. So I broke down and hired a company to plow the snow this year. Which is clearly why it didn’t snow this year. By my estimation, the guy made $1,000 an hour to dust off my porch. While I might be giving myself far too much weather controlling credit, I can’t help but Our snowpack this year is the lowest it’s been in about 30 years. While our taps aren’t dry, the low snowpack isn’t without consequence.” feel just a little at fault for the tulips and daffodils that struggled to push through the dirt several weeks too early. It’s easy to dismiss this as a first-world problem. But the fact is, water shortages are very much first, third and wholly worldwide problem. The city of Cape Town in South Africa has been flirting with a water crisis for years, and many have predicted the city will be entirely out of water later this month. Residents have been restricted to just over 13 gallons of water per person each day. That’s definitely not enough to rinse, lather and repeat. To suggest that could not happen here is eerily ignorant. Our snowpack this year is the lowest it’s been in about 30 years. While our taps aren’t dry, the low snowpack isn’t without consequence. Wildfire season is upon us, and it looks like it will begin early this year and could be especially intense as the hillsides dry out. The limited water supply is already impacting productivity for ranchers and farmers and makes forests more susceptible to uncontrollable pests. The lack of winter storms this year meant a longer and more extreme inversion season — not good news for anyone actively hoping to avoid breathing in toxic air. Polluted air, natural disasters, food shortages and insect infestations aren’t the ingredients for an ideal place to live. I hope the city and county do take the water shortage seriously and take measures to curb use. Not the feel-good “idle free” measures, but meaningful and enforceable measures go beyond regulating use and fines. The city and county need to consider progressive options like approving waterless composting toilets and requiring synthetic lawns or xeriscaping for new construction. Otherwise, we’ll all soon be in hot water. Amy Roberts is a freelance writer, longtime Park City resident and the proud owner of two rescued Dalmatians, Stanley and Willis. Follow her on Twitter @amycroberts. |