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Show The Park Record A-20 MEETINGS AND AGENDAS Sat/Sun/Mon/Tues, December 17-20, 2016 MORE DOGS ON MAIN By Tom Clyde TO PUBLISH YOUR PUBLIC NOTICES AND AGENDAS PLEASE EMAIL CLASSIFIEDS@PARKRECORD.COM Our new transit center: Don’t sell the car just yet SUMMIT COUNTY COUNCIL OF GOVERNMENTS (COG) SUMMIT COUNTY COUNCIL OF GOVERNMENTS (COG) will meet Tuesday, December 20, 2016 Summit County Courthouse Conference Room 2 60 N. Main Street, Coalville, UT 7:00 p.m. posal –Derrick Radke AGENDA Other items All times listed are general in nature and are subject to change by the Chair. Chair, Vice-Chair and Secretary election ITEMS *Public comment may or may not be taken* Children’s Justice Center Update –Susan Richer Small Urban Program-rules and application process pro- M Project program for propositions –Derrick Radke Eastern Summit County Water Study Presentation –Phil Bondurant Minutes: August 16, 2016 Next meeting: February 21, 2017 Individuals with questions, comments, or needing special accommodations pursuant to the Americans with Disabilities Act regarding this meeting may contact the Community Development Department, (435) 336-3126. OUNTAIN TOWN NEWS A Roundup of News from Other Western Ski Resort Communities By ALLEN BEST Record contributing writer Porkers in the parlors of Steamboat Springs? STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. -- Steamboat Springs municipal officials are taking up a proposal to loosen restrictions on animals permitted within municipal limits to allow smaller pigs. A resident made a passionate plea to the city council to allow mini-pigs in local homes, reported the Steamboat Today. Rory Clow said the pigs have the mental capacity of a 3- to 5-year-old and provide a hypoallergenic alternative to dogs and cats. The proposed revisions would allow up to two domestic pigs per house, provided the pigs weigh less than 100 pounds and are spayed and neutered by the time they’re 4-year-olds. Chickens and goats are already allowed in city limits. But the goats -- well, they get the goat of some neighbors. They smell terrible, are noisy and pollute the creeks, one resident complained. Colorado towns fiddling with cannabis regulation DURANGO, Colo. – With recreational marijuana sales soon to be legal in California, mountain towns there are looking to Colorado for ideas about how to make things work. Colorado towns, though, are still fiddling with their regulations. Steamboat Springs, for example is considering letting pot shops stay open three hours later, until 10 p.m. The city allows only three medical dispensaries and three recreational marijuana stores. Steamboat Today reports there’s some support for letting the market decide how many stores there should be. Currently, though, there are sharp restrictions about where the stores can be located. Durango had no restriction on the number of marijuana stores, but it has decided to take a two-minute breather before approving any new stores while it evaluates how well current regulations are functioning. But how well do older people function with marijuana use? Most focus has been on how marijuana affects younger people. A 2013 survey in Colorado showed that about 19 percent of people aged 18 to 25 reported using marijuana in the previous month, notes the Associated Press. That same survey found 4.8 percent of people ages 50 and older use pot. But researchers at New York University say cannabis consumption could pose health challenges to older users ranging from memory loss to risk of falling. “Historically, older people haven’t had high rates of substance use, but this is changing,” said Dr. Benjamin Han, a geriatrician at the university. Pownall didn’t jibe with the stereotypes of Vail VAIL, Colo. – For those who like to paint Vail with broad brushes, Dick Pownall was a detail who didn’t quite fit into the picture of a town without a soul. Pownall, who died last week, lived among the big, fancy McMansions next to the ski slopes. He built the original house with his own hands while working as a junior high school physical education instructor and coach in a Denver suburb. That was in 1963, the summer after Vail opened and the year of his big climb on Mount Everest. Later, after he retired, he expanded the house with help of his wife, Mary. It was like a Swiss chalet, with white plaster walls and pine trim. In summer, their garden amid the aspen trees was profuse with lavender columbines. Pownall had grown up in Iowa, but in 1944, when he was in high school, spent a summer at Grand Teton National Park, working on a trail crew. Older men were in short supply then for such work. The experience instilled in Pownall a love for mountains and gave him basic mountaineering skills. In the late ‘40s and 1950s, returning to Jackson Hole to work for Exum Guide Service, he pioneered many of the most difficult rock-climbing routes in the Teton Range. In 1963, Pownall was on the American Expedition to Everest. It consisted of top climbers of the day. In my three interviews with Pownall over the span of 15 years, he never spoke with regret about the Everest climb except for the death of his partner. Neither did he express envy that another American became first. Acquaintances said he was always as I had found him: softspoken, self-effacing, and calm. After Everest and a meeting with President John Kennedy, Pownall returned to Colorado to build a house amid the aspen trees in the new development called Vail Village. He fit in well among the town’s early assortment of 10th Mountain veterans and other mountain-adventure types. Utah review of radioactive waste plan to rev up in 2017 By MICHELLE L. PRICE Associated Press State regulators next month will rev up a stagnant review of a Utah company’s push to bury in the state’s west desert a type of radioactive waste that becomes more radioactive for 2 million years. The seven-year effort from Salt Lake City-based EnergySolutions has been stalled amid environmental reviews and questions about whether the waste, known as depleted uranium, belongs in Utah. The Utah Department of Environmental Quality has been reviewing EnergySolutions’ plan and whether the agency will allow it to move forward, but that effort went into hibernation for much of 2016, soon after the company announced it was buying a Texas firm that’s already allowed to bury the waste in that state. Helge Gabert, a project manager with the Department of Environmental Quality, said the review was put on a backburner this year as the agency focused its limited staff on other projects, but they’re planning to make it a higher priority starting Jan. 1. Gabert said the change is based on the agency’s workload, and they hope to make enough progress in 2017 to allow public comment in late summer. Depleted uranium, left over from the enrichment process used to make nuclear weapons and generate nuclear energy, grows hotter over a long period because other toxic materials it produces when it decays also emit radiation. Eventually, after billions of years, the decay process ends and what’s left is a stable form of lead. It’s currently classified as low-level radioactive waste. Waste with higher levels of radioactivity is illegal in Utah. Environmental groups argue depleted uranium should not be treated as low-level waste but instead reclassified as a hotter type of hazardous material. Critics of the plan to bury depleted uranium in Utah had hoped that if EnergySolutions was able to the Texas facility, it would send depleted uranium to that state instead. Texas regulators have already given permission for depleted uranium to be buried there. But that deal hit a snag after the U.S. Department of Justice blocked the deal in mid-November. The government argued in a lawsuit that Texas-based Waste Control Specialists is EnergySolutions’ only competition when it comes to handling and storing the nation’s low-level radioactive waste. EnergySolutions spokesman Mark Walker said the company is still seeking approval in Utah. He deferred questions about the antitrust lawsuit to a previous statement where the company vowed to fight the challenge. EnergySolutionss argued that there are other competitors in their industry and that the merger would cut costs, allowing savings to be passed on to utilities and consumers of nuclear energy. Get all the latest Park Record updates. The County was proud to open their new Kimball Junction Transit Center. It’s at the worst intersection in the county, which somehow made it a logical place to add bus traffic. Since it is extremely unlikely most of you will ever see the inside of the place, I decided to take one for the team and investigate it. As a public service to readers of this fine paper, I made a trip to the transit center. Of course, I drove there. In my car. Alone. There was a parking place right out front. It is very nice. There are about 20 parking spaces, so it’s clearly not intended as a park-and-ride location. It’s basically a large waiting room furnished with vintage-train-station- style benches. The room has barn wood paneling, nice lighting and a comfortable feel to it. There is an old piano in the corner that could make waiting for a bus either very pleasant or completely excruciating depending on who is playing it. There are nice restrooms and shelters outside for six buses. I was there for about 10 minutes. Two friendly county maintenance employees were leaving as I arrived. Otherwise, it was deserted. A couple of buses came in and stopped at their designated platforms. Nobody got on or off. A big sign in an emphatic font said, “The maximum occupancy of the building is 250 people.” We should be safe on that, perhaps even on an annual basis. I know the officials who planned this. They are visionaries who can see things that the rest of us cannot. They earnestly explain that this facility will allow shorter routes to gather people up from various Kimball Junction neighborhoods, and drop them at the transit center where they can wait, in piano-filled comfort, to transfer to buses that will take them into Park City, where they can wait to transfer to other buses. The Salt Lake commuter bus will pick up and drop off passengers at the transit center, shortening the time the round trip to Salt Lake takes. That allows for more frequent trips, except that passengers are stuck at the transit center until they transfer to another bus to get the rest of the way to their destination. There were cars in the lot suggesting people were using it. It’s a little disturbing system planners anticipate transfer times that are so long that a cozy, heated, $2.5 million waiting room is necessary. That doesn’t just It’s like dumping the bag of IKEA hardware out on the floor and trying to visualize it turning into a roll-top desk. Not all of the parts are unpacked yet. Some aren’t even shipped.” shout efficiency. At least they didn’t provide for food service. If getting from Jeremy Ranch to PCMR requires a lunch stop, we have a problem. I live in a location that is bus proof. If I draw a circle around my house, with a radius of a mile, there aren’t enough people to fill a Suburban. Literally, if every man, woman, child, dog, goat and chicken in that area all went to the corner at the same time, nobody would notice. The population density in other areas is a little greater, but not exactly Manhattan. So if the goal is to get us to quit driving single occupant cars into town, I don’t see how the new, parking-less transit center helps. It is impossible to get from my house to the ski resort on the bus. It’s not easy in the car, when 248 clogs up every day. There is no central place we can drive to, park our cars, and then bunch up on the bus for the last couple of congested miles. The city maintains a huge parking lot out on the tailings pond. They plow the snow and burn the lights all night. It’s in a location that could easily draw traffic from the Kamas area off 248. With a little work, traffic from Heber could exit US-40 directly into the parking lot. But if all of us commuting in from the hinterlands decided to do the right thing, and park in that satellite parking lot, we would be eaten by coyotes before a bus came to get us. The bus doesn’t run to the satellite parking lot. I’m not saying I would use it if it did, but it doesn’t. Officials tell me this is a work in progress, and that I need to be patient. It’s like dumping the bag of IKEA hardware out on the floor and trying to visualize it turning into a roll-top desk. Not all of the parts are unpacked yet. Some aren’t even shipped. Give it time, they say, and we will see a marvelous, efficient, new system that will revolutionize the way we travel. I hear it. I see parts. But try as I might, I just can’t see how it will work. If it takes three times as long as driving, people are never going to ride the bus. Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986. SUNDAY IN THE PARK By Teri Orr Inside the cartoon It is not visions of sugar plums dancing in my head but there are Russian men dancing in gilt costumes with Cossack boots and real fur hats. Arms not akimbo but rigidly crossed on their chests with fierce expressions. A Russian peasant woman stacking doll that as you open it a different character emerges until the tiniest, tiniest doll inside is some kind of surprise personality... or just the baby. Eating sugar cookies before bedtime has consequences. So does ignoring global interference in our government. I grew up in the Cold War era (which is also how I described my second marriage, but never mind). We practiced how to tuck ourselves under our desks when the air raid signal tests cut through the school day. Not that it would have saved us (we know now) from an atomic bomb, but it was all they could think of to have us do. At home we watched the cartoon Rocky and Bullwinkle, about a moose and squirrel with super powers who were fighting the evil Russian-ish characters of Boris and Natasha who answered to Fearless Leader. They were dumb criminals and spies and Rocky and Bullwinkle were virtuous defenders of all things patriotic. In researching the show (yes, I am still old school enough to want to fact check myself) I found this little known story from Mental Floss magazine: “Bullwinkle is originally from the state is Moosylvania, a small island in the Lake of the Woods, and is actually its governor. The ownership of the state is the subject of dispute between the United States and Canada, with each country claiming it belongs to the other. As a publicity stunt, Ward and Bill Scott, the show’s head writer and voice of Bullwinkle, bought a small island on a Minnesota lake, named it Moosylvania and started a national tour and petition drive to campaign for Moosylvania’s statehood. After visiting 50 cities and collecting signatures, they went to Washington to present President Kennedy with their petition. At the White House gate they declared, ‘We’re here to see President Kennedy. We want statehood for Moosylvania.’ They were escorted from the property at gunpoint and didn’t learn until days later that they had shown up during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis.” So we’ve been here before. By the mid-1960s we were being swept away by the majestic film by David Lean that took us inside Russia during the Revolution of the early-1920s. All teenage girls had a crush on Omar Sharif as Dr Zhivago and we all wanted to be the beautiful mysterious Julie Christie as Lara Anipova. To this day when I hear Lara’sTheme -- a haunting melody played on music boxes for decades now -- it makes me wistful. Those onionshaped domes on the brightly painted buildings were romantic in a way that belonged to a naively mostly innocent other era. In high school I learned so many things that had no applicable use in my real life. The dates and names of battles memorized I have never once had occasion to use or even recite at a cocktail party. I was a poor math student who gave birth to a math genius but we have never had a conversation about an algebraic formula. And until this very month, in my whole long life, I have never considered since high school what the function of the electoral college is and how exactly does it work and why. And somewhere along the way -- maybe that high school AP English class -- I learned the word oligarchy, which Webster defines as “a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.” Which all leads me, logically, to conclude that everything old is new again. We have shifted our focus from sword- wielding desert men wrapped in head scarves to a bare- chested, bear fighting, bald-headed oligarch and now, his cartoon-looking counterpart with orange skin and hair, our president-elect. And we are faced with high level intelligence and no less than our own President Obama this week declaring Russia did, in fact, use cyber weapons to attack us and alter the information and perhaps the actual results in the presidential election. And here’s where another word from decades past comes into play: “treason.” A word most often understood as an act to overthrow the government of one’s own country. It is a word weighted with threats and ac- tions that can result/has resulted in traitors -- even in this country -- put to death. Harvard professor Lawrence Lessing, (watch his TED talk) who has spoken for years about election reform has convinced, as of this writing, at least 20 members of the electoral college to NOT vote the way their state populations voted but rather to be “faithless electors” meaning they do not have faith in the candidate that the people did not elect overall by popular vote. There are 538 electors and Trump needs 270-he has 306 committed-but here’s where it gets interesting at 269 (meaning neither candidate would have the majority) . The race is decided by the House of Representatives. And just to make this all as surreal as it actually is. There is a group now known as the Hamilton Electors, who say they are following Alexander Hamilton’s vision, which is “members of the Electoral College should be free to vote their conscience ...for the good of the United States of America.” For those not students of history quick note, Alexander Hamilton, before he was the subject of a multiple Tony awardwinning play on Broadway, was a very real person and one of the Founding Fathers of this country who helped create the entire concept of an electoral college. True that. In my lifetime we have never been faced with so many confluences of history and government swirling together. But here’s what I’m hoping with my whole heart: The government that was created by the people can be saved to continue to lead in a fearless fashion for the people. We live in perilous times which require people of faith to shout out when they feel faithless. Because while this all feels surreal and cartoonish it is as real as the world has ever been. We all need to speak up for all the truths we might think are self-evident. No less than the future of our country depends upon it. Any day is the right day to be brave, even a Sunday in the Park.... Teri Orr is a former editor of The Park Record. She is the director of the Park City Institute, which provides programming for the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts. |