Park Record | 2018-09-15 | Page 18

A-18 The Park Record Meetings anD agenDas Sat/Sun/Mon/Tues, September 15-18, 2018 More Dogs on Main By Tom Clyde TO PUBLISH YOUR PUBLIC NOTICES AND AGENDAS, PLEASE EMAIL [e-mail] More first world problems AGENDA Summit County Board of Health Meeting September 17, 2018 4:00 – 5:30 PM Summit County Health Department 650 Round Valley Drive Park City, Utah 84060 CLOSED SESSION – Personnel - 4:00 – 4:30 4. Early Intervention Report (Jackie, 4:50 – 5:05) PUBLIC MEETING 4:30 – 5:30 1. Welcome and Approval of Minutes (All, 4:30 - 4:35) 5. Non-Accreditation Workgroup Report (Rich, 5:05 – 5:15) 2. Public Comment (4:35 - 4:40) 6. 3. Director’s Report (Rich, 4:40 – 4:50) Adjourn Other Board items (All, 5:15 – 5:30) SNYDERVILLE BASIN WATER RECLAMATION DISTRICT THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES FIELD TRIP AND THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES MEETING FOR SEPTEMBER 17, 2018, HAS BEEN CANCELLED Continued from A-16 Mountain Town News expensive,” writes Mark Reaman, the editor of the Crested Butte News. “These days, a house selling for $190,000 is cheap (okay, almost impossible) and will be sold within minutes.” Vail hasn’t had a $190,000 for a very long time. The town’s new short-term rental regulations seem be working, although property managers recently told the town council that tweaks will be needed. They said the regulations fail to acknowledge the “agency” relationship between property owners and management companies. In that relationship, explains the Vail Daily, management companies can act on behalf of owners. Current regulations, owners have to do their own paperwork. One example, foreign owners of Vail homes have to get notarized affidavits from the U.S. embassies in their countries. “We shouldn’t have to ask someone in Mexico City, London or Hong Kong to get a document notarized to attest to physical conditions,” said Michael Connolly, of Triumph Mountain Properties. “We knew there’d be unintended consequences,” Councilwoman Jenn Bruno said. “But we had to start somewhere.” Student’s mid-day routine includes drops of cannabis EAGLE, Colo. – The Eagle County School Board has become one of the nation’s first to allow school employees to administer prescribed medical marijuana to students. The new regulation has one student in particular mind, Quintin Lovato. The boy, explains the Vail Daily, has suffered from epilepsy and Tourette’s syndrome since March 2014, when he fell to the ground in his first grand mal seizure. By 2017, he had full-blown Tourette’s syndrome, complete with head-bobbing and vocal tics. The boy’s condition improved within a week after his family added Haleigh’s Hope CBD Oil to his daily meds. The boy needs three daily doses, one of them mid-day, when his parents are both working. With the new regulation, school personnel can administer the dose, administered with an eye-dropper to put the oil under the boy’s tongue. The CBD oil contains little to no psychoactive compounds of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. In the cannabis plant, as The Washington Post explained in a 2016 article, CBD and THC generally have an inverse relationship: the more THC there is, the less CBD, and vice versa. In recent years, growers have bred some plants to contain high levels of CBD. What makes CBD especially appealing is that it doesn’t get the user high. “It wouldn’t get a mouse high,” one exasperated mother told Hampton Sides for a National Geographic article. She and her family had moved with their child, who suffered from epilepsy, to Colorado Springs to have access to CBD oil. Cannabis, with or without THC, remains a schedule 1 narcotic at the federal level. Colorado in 2016 adopted a law, named after a student named Jack Splitt, that requires schools to allow parents to administer cannabidiol, or CBD, oil. The 15-year-old boy later died of effects of cerebral palsy, the condition that had inspired his parents to seek to use the CBD oil. The law adopted this year, called Quintin’s Amendment, allows designees to administer the doses. Heather Lovato, the mother of the 9-year-old-boy, told the Colorado Springs Independent in June that with only two-aday administration, her son’s condition regressed. The Colorado Association of School Nurses opposed requiring nurses to administer the doses. Representatives testified nurses feared losing licenses for violating federal law. Legislators resolved the conflict by letting school nurses opt out of the action, but allows teachers and other personnel to take the responsibility. Local food possible even in high mountain valleys JACKSON, Wyo. – Tables assembled long enough to seat 500 people were end-to-end in the hay meadow of a ranch in Jackson Hole. Nobody was in a hurry to get in and out. The farm-to-table dinner was sponsored by the Slow Food in the Tetons. The Jackson Hole News&Guide explains that the local chapter is among 150 in the United States that encourages local agricultural practices and traditional cuisines to support communities and ecosystems. Small local farms operate in entirely different ways from the industrial chemical food industry that’s so ingrained in our sociopolitical environment—and even our taste buds, says the newspaper. “While buying food from your local farmers’ market is seen as more expensive, from a nutrition standpoint you get what you pay for,” said Scott Steen, who directs the local chapter. Jackson Hole’s climate tends toward hot but short summers. The growing season is barely long enough to grow tomatoes. But local farmers and gardeners insist the climate is not prohibitive. “We have a harsh growing climate, but we can do a lot more,” said Steen. “I think the growing season argument seems like a crutch to lean on.” Too, lettuce, carrots, and some other vegetables thrive in colder climates. Despite the challenges, there are many small farms in Jackson Hole, including a halfacre spread on a ranch where two young men in 2016 began farming vegetables organically. One of those farmers, Alex Feher, said their vegetables are not certified organically, but they are grown organically. It all comes down to soil, he says. Healthy, nutrient-rich soil means healthy, nutritious plants. And mono-cropping—planting all strawberries, for example—is not healthy, he insists. It degrades soil quality and makes the plants more susceptible to diseases that can destroy an entire harvest. Verdict for pond-skimming incident is no joke FRISCO, Colo. – A 27-yearold skier has pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment because of an accident that occurred at the pond-skimming event at Copper Mountain Resort in April. The individual flew off the pond-skim course and into the crowd, breaking a woman’s collarbone and injuring several others. The Summit Daily News reports that it’s unclear whether the man tried to jump across the crowd. Witnesses said he had declared that intent earlier that morning while holding a drink. However, one witness identified as the man’s girlfriend said he was joking. Aspen residents cut water use as dry times continue ASPEN, Colo. – Told they needed to cut back on water use, Aspen residents complied. The Aspen Daily News reports that customers cut overall use by 12 percent in August. “I think the community really did respond to the mandatory restrictions,” said Margaret Medellin, utilities portfolio manager. In mid-August, the city council approved water restrictions in response to continued dry conditions. Through August, the town has received 30 percent less precipitation for the year than is average. Wolf not wary of humans at campgrounds in Banff BANFF, Alberta – Don’t wolves know they’re supposed to be afraid of people? That’s the question that came up after a collared female wolf walked into a campground and looked for food. “She walked between two people sleeping out in the open, coming within one metre of them, and then she left the campground,” Jesse Whittington, a wildlife ecologist with Banff National Park. “She was not interested in people. She was clearly investigating the site for food, but she did not get any food rewards,” he told the Rocky Mountain Outlook. What concerned Banff officials more was that she continued to visit several sites looking for food even as people followed her with flashlights. This story might not turn out well for this wolf. Both the wolf’s mother and sister were killed by wildlife managers after they food-conditioned, meaning they made a habit of wandering into campgrounds. Her father, more wary of humans, was not. He remained alive. “Hopefully they get a chance to condition her if she comes anywhere near people and put that little bit of fear back into her,” wildlife photographer John Marriott said. I was away when the controversy over the cattle on the McPolin Farm broke out. After many years of being livestock-free, the City leased the property for grazing. Even in a dry year like this, the grass grows pretty deep on that land, and tall, dry grass is a terrible fire hazard next to a bunch of houses. So in the past, they have arranged to have a neighbor cut the hay from the property. The neighbor apparently no longer wanted it, and the grass grew along with the fire danger. Grazing it off removes or at least greatly reduces the fire exposure, and in the long run, is good for the land. Farms were meant to be farmed. Nothing happens around here without controversy, and I assumed putting cattle back on the land where cattle have been since it was stolen from the American Indians would stir the pot. There aren’t a lot of us left who remember the active dairy operation, with cows walking across the highway, and the aroma of a winter’s worth of manure thawing in the spring. I thought the controversy would be the rotational grazing method. Rotational grazing is the current trend in pasture management. It involves putting a very high concentration of animals on a small portion of the field for a short time. The idea is that they will, by necessity, eat everything, including weeds and plants they don’t really like to eat. They poop all over it, tromp it in, and then move on, leaving the soil fertilized, aerated, and the weeds whacked. It really works. Not many ranchers do it because it requires a lot of labor and temporary fencing, which quickly gets expensive. When the cattle are through with that intensive grazing, the patch they have been on can look pretty seriously demolished for a while until the grass comes back. So I thought the issue would be that the entry corridor would look like a chewed up pasture, which surely would lead to the collapse of the local economy, if not the apocalypse. But I was wrong. The controversy is more fundamental than that. Putting cattle on Cityowned land, right on the front doorstep of the town, and caused our vegan population to swoon. We might as well be waving a plate of rare prime rib in their faces. It was seen as official government endorsement of eating meat, rather than reasonable management of property that, left alone, was a fire hazard. This is exactly the kind of decision that gets made when the position of Social Equity Convener remains unfilled. If we had the Social Equity Convener on the job, the City surely would not have entered into a grazing lease without first consulting with all affected people. For at least a year. For example, the arts community was not involved in the cattle selection. This is Park City, and one would expect some kind of designer cows. There are many possible choices in the bovine palette: red, white, Oreo banded cattle, longhorns, those Rastafarian-looking cattle from Scotland. There are also the historically correct Holsteins. Black angus is such a predictable choice. But the artists were completely ignored in the decision, and that’s what we get, a breed that has been developed, over a century, to thrive in our climate of extremes of hot and cold. Boring. Bad enough to blow off the artists and offend the vegans, now the environmental community is alarmed that grazing cattle sends the wrong message about Park City’s all important green agenda. If you missed it, the green agenda is the belief that if we recycle our imported wine bottles, eliminate plastic bags, and ride electric bikes, we are a sustainable community. We are sustained by many thousands of gallons of jet fuel bringing in vacationers, who rely on 15,000 people commuting more than 40 miles in exhaust-choked traffic to take care of them. It’s a perfect model of sustainability, and then, right in the entry corridor, we have cow farts undoing all the good we have achieved with our fleet of coal-fired electric buses. There is a concern that the cow farts will produce a localized warming that will adversely affect the snowpack next winter. Nobody has raised it, but the winter plans have not been made clear. Will the cattle be pooping on the cross-country ski track? It’s terribly hard to wax for those conditions. If this decision had gone through the normal City process of forming a committee to hire a consultant to engage the stakeholders in an open and inclusive public process to make recommendations on the appropriate agricultural use of the farm, the result might be quite different. We could be growing mangos there, or have Utah’s first herd of free-range quinoa. Instead, we have to put up with iconic Western cattle ranching on an iconic Western ranch. 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 Mysterious ways... The clean lines and soothing monochromatic colors are no mistake. All the large windows filling each room with natural light are intentional. The spacious gathering room faces the mountains and offers an ever-changing landscape of nature showing off. There is an aura of serenity — both organic and deliberate. If you enter the space in a time of need you will be met with a bounty of services to help you make your way in a world that can make the formerly strong weak, the formerly employed in search. Here the hungry can find food and the homeless help to find a way to shelter. There are all kinds of sheep and many shepherds. The gift of the new space is a reflection of the good works of many people — longtime Utah names like Sorenson and Eccles — newer names like Zehner and Dreyfous. But at the core the Christian Center of Park City has been the vision of two humble humans who are first generation in their ability to be givers. Jim and Susan Swartz — whose names appear sometimes and more often not at all — on hospitals and art centers and shelters and quiet places from Palo Alto to Martha’s Vineyard and beyond — this project has been their dream and a work in progress for 20 years. When Susan Swartz spoke at the ceremony this week, she said her family had come skiing in Park City in the mid ’80s. They had picked up this paper and read a story about a little boy with leukemia the whole town was trying to help. And Susan said at the opening, “I wanted to have a home in a town that cares that much.” The boy’s name was Brett Mathews and he was 8 I think that year. He was the youngest brother of my daughter’s best friend. Through a series of unfortunate incidents the family had no insurance. So we did what Park City always does best — we set out to help. It was old school then — not 2,000 people lived here full time. So we had spaghetti dinners and car washes and coin jars at the 7-11 and Cole Sport. I don’t remember the exact number needed but it was enormous — maybe $60,000 to send Brett to the Pacific Northwest for a very exper- imental bone marrow transplant. The match was his half brother Ron — an all-sport star athlete. Scholarship folks all had their eyes on the tall, handsome young man. It was his senior year after all. But Ron took himself out of consideration and went to spend weeks with Brett to try and save his life. And he did, save his life. Brett returned to town months later and we had a fire engine arrive at Parley’s Park with a lifesize teddy bear riding shotgun to welcome him back home to the community. Nine months after his surgery, Brett died. His family asked me to speak for his funeral and it was the hardest thing I had ever done. Hundreds of people showed up at Treasure Mountain We were all so close then and we understood — in an unspoken way — what family and community looked like — even if many of us had not grown up with those emotional comforts.” school — it had a space larger than all the churches. It felt like the whole town turned out. It was the saddest day. We were all so close then and we understood — in an unspoken way — what family and community looked like — even if many of us had not grown up with those emotional comforts. The handful of churches did it all — baptized, married and buried, and acted as the social hub of the community. Hell, the Seder suppers were held for years in the parish hall of the tiny St. Mary’s church in Old Town. Jim and Susan kept coming and skiing with their children. They would hike in the summers and their daughter was married right on the slope next to their home in Deer Valley. They quietly supported many causes. They helped fund the Eccles Center — believing the community needed a gathering place and the students needed a functioning high school auditorium. About the same time they discovered in the late ’90s with the growth of town there was a gap forming, and though no one wanted to talk about it or address the issues — there were a growing number of people who needed assistance — a food pantry — counseling — a place to live in the winter. And so they funded a little storefront kind of ministry to meet people at their place of need — on Ironhorse Drive. And over the years the pantry grew and the counseling needs grew and the young people who came to town from other countries to work at the ski resorts found a place — once a week — where a great free meal was served and they met other kids — just like them — trying to find their way. They outgrew the space and took over a building about a block away that had been a real estate office and formerly a bank. Gradually they grew their programs — especially the food bank and the counseling center and then — they just didn’t fit there anymore. There was too much need and not enough space. So they undertook renovating the building. They asked other known philanthropists to help them create a space with lines simply elegant and clean and bright with many rooms to listen and a giant room for gatherings and a thrift shop you could mistake for a boutique on Main Street — filled with designer labels — until you look at the modest price tags. The food pantry is especially thoughtful. It has been designed to look like a small market — with shopping carts and refrigerated cases of perishable goods — all donated to the center. If you are not a faith-based person they don’t care. They love the stranger. The pilgrim. The other. It is an extraordinary gift to our community and it is open now to serve — to make any day feel like a welcoming 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.