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Show Viewpoints The A-13 Park Record. Wed/Thurs/Fri, February 28-March 2, 2018 editorial Our students are safer due to the efforts of school district I letters to the editor Newpark is rapidly changing Editor: As an owner resident of Newpark for several years I have witnessed parking lot after parking lot changed to condo and/or commercial expected uses. We have one remaining piece of open space for gatherings, music and events. I have heard many now refer to “Newpark” as “No Park” as perhaps the most important remaining piece of open space is now approved for building another condo project. How many is to many? In the past 6 years there has been almost a building per year that often now includes vacant rentals. One or more had to go bankrupt before they were completed by a second owner. With no ”Sun Shine” rules, tunnels and shade become the new normal. I applaud the written efforts in the paper recently leading to a major plan for Kimball Junction including open spaces. Unfortunately there may be only one significant park like piece of land remaining near Maxwell’s that is about to become condos. Wouldn’t it be prudent to purchase now instead of wishing you did 5 years from now? When it is gone it is gone. Purchasing this one of a kind most used center of New Park open space would support all surrounding retail as well as family play area? I have never passed this area in the summer that there is not activity. Newpark area is often sited as an icon of Kimball Junction with its trail and marsh views. We see it constantly used by residence and visitors. In fact I own my home because I first walked the trail waiting for a realtor. Taking action like Treasure Mountain for millions of dollars is a good example of how a much smaller center piece of property could be saved for an eternity at a much lower cost! Don Little Kimball Junction A thanks for official’s service Editor: Last week I ran into Adam Strachan at the PC MARC. It gave me the opportunity to thank him in person for his ten years of service on the Planning Commission. He and I met 19 years ago (was it that long ago?) when we worked together on the Walkability Committee. He has become a friend. If people are The Park Record Staff PUBLISHER ....................... Andy Bernhard Editor ................................... Bubba Brown Staff Writers ......................Jay Hamburger Scott Iwasaki Angelique McNaughton Ben Ramsey Carolyn Webber Contributing ............................. Tom Clyde Writers Jay Meehan Teri Orr Amy Roberts Tom Kelly Joe Lair Copy Editor ............................ James Hoyt Engagement Editor.........Kira Hoffelmeyer Photographer .........................Tanzi Propst Office Manager ..................... Tiffany Piper Circulation Manager ............. Lacy Brundy Accounting Manager ......... Jennifer Snow ADVERTISING Classifieds/Legals ............. Jennifer Lynch Advertising Director ........... Valerie Spung Advertising Sales ......................... Lori Gull Jodi Hecker Erin Donnelly Lisa Curley Olivia Bergmann Production Director ..................Ben Olson Production .......................... Patrick Schulz Linda Sites not familiar with the work the Planning Commission does it truly requires dedicated service listening to citizen input and reconciling the occasional disconnects between the General Plan and Land Management Code. I have spent a great amount of time in the audience at their meetings. The decisions they make can inalterably change the face of Park City and “Treasure” is only the most recent example. He guided the discussion with his insight and preparation. Adam, I know you’re done and your family deserves to have you back. Somehow it doesn’t seem enough to just say thank you for your service. Alex Butwinski Park City t used to be impossible to imagine a school shooting like the one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida happening in Park City. But as shootings have become common in schools across the country, with little action from lawmakers to help prevent them, the sad and scary truth is that there’s not a community in America where such a tragedy couldn’t happen. That includes our peaceful mountain town. The good news is that our school officials are doing their best to make sure Park City never joins the ranks of places like Parkland, Florida, and Newtown, Connecticut. The Park City School District in recent years has taken a proactive approach to safety within its school halls, working with local law enforcement officials and safety experts to implement a number of measures aimed at protecting students. Some of the most noticeable changes have come this school year. They include the reworking of school entrances to require that visitors check in with office personnel before they’re allowed to proceed into the buildings; locking all doors from the outside during school hours; and improved notification systems to inform parents of incidents. That’s on top of updating district safety protocols and training school staff. guest editorial To win gun debate, facts are paramount STEVE TASSLER Park City Trump seeks to exploit Parkland shooting Editor: Days after the murders at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Donald Trump ignorantly tweeted, “Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter. This is not acceptable. They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign — there is no collusion. Get back to the basics and make us proud!” It’s comforting to know we have a president so willing to exploit a horrible tragedy for his own personal political gain. He then brilliantly asserted that increasing the number of guns in the schools by arming teachers is the best solution to preventing such tragedies in the future. The thought of a teacher with a concealed handgun defending students from shooters armed with automatic and semi-automatic assault weapons is ludicrous. Now if the teacher had an AR-15, or an accessible arsenal of high powered weapons... Maybe simply stationing a tank in the school parking lot would act as an effective deterrent. If more guns made people safer, then the United States, with over 350,000,000 guns, would unquestionably be the safest country in the world. Jim Fleming Park City Arming teachers is not the solution Editor: While in my previous life in the security business, there was always a push from the higher ups to take working employees beyond their awareness level of security and emergency response, and put them “up close and personal” with the immediate threat. This accomplished one goal, and that was to save money on security and emergency response. My dad would have said “they’re trying to cut a fat hog in the rear end.” It didn’t make employees safer, it put them more at risk of being injured. Letters Policy The Park Record welcomes letters to the editor on any subject. We ask that the letters adhere to the following guidelines. They must include the home (street) address and telephone number of the author. No letter will be published under an assumed name. Letters must not contain libelous material. Letters should be no longer than about 300 words (about 600 words for guest editorials) and should, if possible, be typed. We reserve the right to edit letters if they are too long or if they contain statements that are unnecessarily offensive or obscene. Writers are limited to one letter every seven days. Letters thanking event sponsors can list no more than 6 individuals and/or businesses. Send your letter to: editor@parkrecord.com What’s most encouraging is that school leaders don’t seem content to stop there. In fact, the Board of Education was scheduled on Tuesday to review the results of a third-party safety assessment, and the prevailing attitude is that safety needs to be embedded in every level of the district’s culture, from the superintendent to teachers to certified staff like custodians and cafeteria workers. Importantly, the district has also been willing to learn from its mistakes. For instance, when a principal mistakenly sent some students outside to a portable classroom instead of keeping them inside when schools along the Kearns Boulevard campus went into lockdown and lockout during an incident last fall, school officials vowed to take steps to prevent the error from happening again. And they’ve since ramped up safety efforts even more. It’s tragic that the prevalence of violence in schools necessitates such efforts. It would be a better world if school officials could spend 100 percent of their time focused on educating students instead of making sure they’re safe from gun violence. At the same time, it’s hard to overstate how grateful we are for the Park City School District’s efforts to provide us with the peace of mind when we drop them off each day that they are. While I agree with the anger and frustration expressed in Jay Meehan’s opinion piece (published Feb. 21), I feel compelled to correct some glaring inaccuracies and misstatements contained in this column. Rather than enter a debate on guns or the second amendment... sadly I don’t think many of us are apt to change whatever opinions we hold on those at this point, I want to take a minute to help readers understand Net Neutrality and Google’s advertising platform. First, Net Neutrality has nothing to do with the sort order of the ads placed on a search engine like Google. Net Neutrality, or the lack thereof is more likely to make those ads take forever to load in the event that your Internet Service Provider doesn’t approve of them. In reality, this could actually help your cause because if Comcast were anti-gun, they could reduce bandwidth and effectively slow down Google’s ability to serve up ads for stores that sell bullets. Of course in that event Google would buy Comcast with the loose change from the sofa cushions on their private jets and serve up the ads that generate the most revenue as fast as humanly possible but I digress... You may also want to note that Net Neutrality is actually still in effect and will be until April 23rd. Teachers are teachers, they are our children’s guide through their growth of intelligence. They are mentors, they are support, their training is continuous, but, they are not armed security. Armed security are trained and certified to carry a weapon at a much higher level. Their training, like any other profession, is also continuous. Although I celebrate a teacher’s right to their 2nd amendment, they are teachers, and teachers should be trained to an awareness and operations level of security that would include, communications, when to lockdown, and shelter in place, and when to exit a building; along with training to calm and assure their students during a crisis, to name just a few. These are extremely vital roles during an incident. The NRA’s answer of “a good guy with a gun” is not a teacher with a gun, the answers are many, producing more questions along the way, but believing we can arm teachers, and make the threat of violence dissipate is an ephemeral illusion, and a very a dangerous one at that, but it does sell more guns. Stephen Leonard Jordanelle Calling all interested in running for office Editor: We have a deadline quickly approaching! All Summit County candidates for Utah state legislative offices must declare their candidacies with the County Clerk in Coalville between March 9 and March 15. If you think that the UT state legislature isn’t responsive or effective when dealing with issues affecting us, I agree. It’s hard to be representative of Summit County residents and businesses, This brings me to my second correction; The ads that you see on Google are paid for in an auction-type system where advertisers bid what they would pay “per click” in the event that you or I click the ad. The higher the bid, the higher the ad is placed on the page. Facebook has a similar system which allows advertisers to target users based on what they “like” and post themselves. These systems are considerably more complicated than this but I am attempting to be succinct here. My point in writing this letter is not to insult Mr. Meehan, whose columns I enjoy very much but to articulate a point about the gun debate that has been hampering efforts for change since day one. The gun reform side appears to have no interest in facts but rather argue from emotion which never works. In most cases, the inaccuracies demonstrate a complete lack of understanding about guns and how they function. In this case the foundation of the argument was laid in the first several paragraphs about how the internet works that were all inaccurate. Either way, that’s how you lose a debate. When you start weak, you finish weak. If you want to take down the NRA and the politicians they own, you’re going to have to come ready for a fight; prepared, trained, and rehearsed. I assure you that your opponents are. Jay is correct. This is going to get ugly and one side is vastly better equipped for that than the other. when you don’t live and work here. Our beautiful County is split up into 5 Utah state legislative districts, and right now, not one of our 5 legislators actually lives in Summit County. They are from Salt Lake, Ogden, Morgan, Heber and Vernal. But we can change that. Four of these five seats are up for election in 2018, including House Districts 28, 53 & 54 as well as Senate District 26. Please consider running for one of these offices. If you’ve ever thought — “I could do better than them” or “Why aren’t they doing anything?” then run for office. Think you’re not qualified? If you are a US citizen, qualified to vote, 25 yrs or older, a Utah resident for 3 years and have 6 months residency in the district you’re running to represent, then you are qualified. If you care about your community and want to help move legislation forward that will benefit our fellow citizens — Run for Office. If you wish that our legislators were a more diverse group — then Run for Office. If you’ve marched and shouted, sent emails, faxes and postcards, phoned your representatives and still haven’t seen the action you desire, maybe it’s time to be a legislator yourself. Step Up and Run for Office! Cheryl Butler Summit County Democratic Party chair Farm is our agricultural heritage Editor: For more than 15 years our community — from the peaks of Upper Deer Valley to Park Meadows, Ranch Place, Kimball Junction, Jeremy Ranch and Pinebrook — has identified the preservation of the Osguthorpe Farm on Old Ranch Road as an important value for western Summit County. The Farm represents the ag- ricultural heritage of this area and is believed to be the land upon which grain was grown to feed the horses that worked in the silver mines of Park City. Our community now has the opportunity to preserve in perpetuity this 160-acre iconic farm property. As a result of the efforts of the Summit Land Conservancy in obtaining an $8.8 million grant from the Federal government, the contribution by the Osguthorpe family of $3.4 million against the appraised value of the property, our community needs to raise only $5.5 million to get the deal done. However, at this moment the family is facing the requirement to immediately fund a bequest made by the late Doc Osguthorpe to Colorado State University of $3.5 million. The family has committed to borrow $3.3 million and is looking to the Summit Land Conservancy to immediately advance the $200,000 to fund up the $3.5 million needed for the bequest to Colorado State. Summit Land Conservancy has worked tirelessly to raise the $200,000 needed to fund this part of the transaction. However, there is a shortfall, and the timing for payment of the bequest requires that the balance of the $200,000 be raised immediately. Regardless of whether you are a walker, a bicycle rider, a Nordic skier, an equestrian, Park City heritage buff or just a lover of the few remaining open vistas in this area, the Farm and the Old Ranch recreation corridor provides something of irreplaceable value to all of us. Opportunity knocks only once. We need the community to step forward to fund both the balance of the $200,000 and the additional $3,000,000 to finalize the transaction. Please make your contribution big or small today to Summit Land Conservancy. Jill and Richard Sheinberg Park City |