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Show A-18 Sat/Sun/Mon/Tues, August 10-13, 2019 The Park Record Meetings and agendas More dogs on Main By Tom Clyde TO PUBLISH YOUR PUBLIC NOTICES AND AGENDAS, PLEASE EMAIL CLASSIFIEDS@PARKRECORD.COM The election matters, kind of Notice is hereby given that the Snyderville Basin Planning Commission will meet in regular session Tuesday, August 13, 2019 Location: Sheldon Richins Building – Auditorium, 1885 West Ute Boulevard, Park City, UT 84098 AGENDA Agenda items may or may not be discussed in the order listed. 4:30 p.m. Regular Session 1. Public input for items not on the agenda or pending applications. 2. Public hearing and possible action regarding a Plat Amendment to increase the size of Lot 69 from 6.99 acres to 9.00 acres. Additionally, the applicant is requesting to amend existing driveway and ski easements to accommodate for more up to date Canyons Resort operation needs; Colony at White Pine Canyon Phase 2 Subdivision Plat;74 White Pine Canyon Road; Parcels CWPC-II-69 and PP-3; John O’Connell, applicant. – Amir Caus, AICP, County Planner 3. Public hearing and possible action regarding a Conditional Use Permit for a 345 sq. ft. Mountain Regional Water pressure relief valve station; 2154 Canyons Resort Drive; Parcel PP-74; Scott Morrison, applicant. – Tiffanie Northrup-Robinson, Senior Planner 4. Public hearing and possible action regarding a Plat Amendment to the Amenity Parcel of the Silver Creek Center Condominiums to accommodate a change in ownership of the Amenity Parcel. No changes to the boundaries of the Condominium units are proposed; 6413 N Business Park Loop Road; Parcel SLVCC-(Amenity); South Summit School District, applicant. – Sean Lewis, AICP, County Planner 5. Approval of minutes: March 26, 2019, April 9, 2019 Work Session 1. Discussion regarding amendments to Section 11-4 of the Snyderville Basin Development Code for Accessory Buildings. - Ray Milliner, Principal Planner 2. Discussion regarding amendments to the RR, HS and MR zone districts contained in the Snyderville Basin Development Code. – Jennifer Strader, Senior Planner, Ray Milliner, Principal Planner DRC Updates Commission Comments Director Items Adjourn A majority of Snyderville Basin Planning Commission members may meet socially after the meeting. If so, the location will be announced by the Chair or Vice-Chair. County business will not be conducted. To view staff reports available after Friday, August 9, 2019 please visit: www.summitcounty.org Individuals needing special accommodations pursuant to the Americans with Disabilities Act regarding this meeting may contact Vicki Geary, Summit County Community Development Department, at (435) 336-3123. Posted: August 9, 2019 Published: August 10, 2019 – The Park Record Continued from A-16 Mountain Town dence Pass, the Continental Divide crossing between Aspen and Leadville. They found that past epidemics to of spruce beetles resulted in mortality of only 20% or so. Based on parallel research in the San Juans, Aspen could be in for a greater loss. Those San Juan spruce forests lost nearly 90% of trees, a result of climate change, Sibold says. “The beetles love the warm temperatures. The trees are extra stressed, so it’s a double whammy.” Sibold warns that an outbreak somewhere around Aspen will happen in the next 10 years, perhaps just in the next 2 or 3 years. Can something be done? Not really, Sibold and other experts tell the Daily News. Nature will just have to run its course, much as it has with lodgepole pine. One reference point is the Flat Tops of northwestern Colorado. There, a giant wind storm blew down many spruce trees in the 1930s, leading to a broad spruce beetle infestation that killed many more spruce. Many of the dead, gray trees remained standing into the 1980s and 1990s, when this reporter used to go backpacking, skiing, and hiking in what is now a designated wilderness area. Front Range water utility plans forest work in the headwaters ASPEN, Colo. – Colorado Springs and others plan to spend $15 million during the next five years to thin forests, conduct prescribed fires, and otherwise manipulate headwaters areas of 11,000 acres from which its draws water. Some of that water comes from the headwaters of the Roaring Fork River, east of Aspen, and the Fryingpan River. It also gets water from the Blue River drainage above Breckenridge and in Homestake Creek, in the headwaters above several Vail Valley towns. Colorado Springs is kicking in $7.5 million, to be matched by the U.S. Forest Service and the Colorado State Forest Service. The city of 470,000 people at the foot of Pikes Peak also delivers water to three adjoining municipalities. Denver Water has been involved in a similar project, called Forests to Faucet, in its two primary Western Slope collection areas, Summit County and the Fraser Valley. The Waldo Canyon Fire in 2002 impacted the watersheds of both Denver and Colorado Springs, burning 138,000 acres west of Colorado Springs and southwest of Denver. The fire caused erosion, plugging up Denver’s several reservoirs along the South Platte River. Colorado Springs also had to repair damaged water infrastructure and restore severely burned watersheds. Both Colorado Springs and Denver have found its more cost effective to spend money at the front end, to reduce the risk of major wildfires, than deal with the consequences. Presidential hopefuls pass their hats in Aspen ASPEN, Colo. – The presidential wannabes continue to parachute into Aspen to pass the hat. Kamala Harris, the senator from California, was there last Friday, while former Vice President Joe Biden and former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke are also scheduled to stop by this week. The Aspen Daily News reports that the invitations for both the Harris and O’Rourke events noted minimum $500 donations for entry. Biden is also scheduled to press the flesh and pass the hat in Park City during September. No word out of Jackson Hole, which may have even more silver heels than Aspen, about fundraising events. But then, it’s the more favored hide-out of wealthy Republicans. But Aspen has enough wealthy Republicans that Vice President Mike Pence stopped by in July to ask for help to put the self-described billionaire Donald Trump back into the White House for another four years. He also spoke to the Republican Governors Association. A-Basin switches sides after 22 years with Vail Resorts DILLON, Colo. – Arapahoe Basin last week announced it was partnering with Alterra Mountain Resorts after ending its affiliation with Vail Resorts after 22 years. The company in February announced it was not renewing its partnership in Vail’s Epic Pass program. It suggested that Vail was producing more skiers than its infrastructure could accommodate. “While the mountain still has plenty of room for skiers and riders, the ski area is feeling a pinch on parking and facility space,” the company said. “Due to these constraints, Arapahoe Basin believes its staff can take better care of its guests by separating from Vail Resorts.” No room exists for a new parking lots along U.S. Highway 6 at the base of Loveland Pass. Alan Henceroth, the chief executive, told the Summit Daily News that a multi-million-dollar parking garage wasn’t a viable option. He declined to say exactly how many people were visiting A-Basin’s slopes on Vail Resorts passes, but he conceded it’s a big number. It’s not great skiing, mostly. So why ski at all during summer? CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. – And on through the heat of summer, skiing continues in isolated gullies in Colorado and beyond. The Crested Butte News tells of Ian Hatchett, who has continued skiing through summer since 1987. “The skiing itself is often pretty marginal,” he explains. So why do it? Well, he suggests, because it’s there. “For me a lot of it was just going out solo and climbing and skiing lines that still exist. Another, younger summer skier is Drew Kelley, who says that a pointless job across the Elk Range in Carbondale, near Aspen, seems to jibe with summer skiing. To make it through the job, he and a friend relished in irreverence. “Summer skiing seemed just as pointless.” Why continue doing it? “I walked 20 miles roundtrip through clouds of mosquitoes only to find a particular ski line wasn’t in,” he told the Crested Butte News. “Bu, when stuff starts to melt out, you see lines that don’t really see in the winter. You see things more creatively and things start to look more fun.” Summer skiing, if mostly devoid of avalanche danger, has its own dangers: scree fields, rock fall, and raging water crossings. “You’re dealing with wicked sun cups and rock debris, and if you fall in some places, you’re going to slice and dice yourself on the slide down,” Hatchett says. “And then there’s the late afternoon lightning strikes.” Melted clothing was best evidence of the affliction BANFF, Alberta – When rescuers arrived on a mountain slope in Banff National Park to attend to the 28-year-old woman, she wasn’t sure why she had summoned them by cell phone. She had said she was disoriented and had some memory loss, but she wasn’t sure why. What the rescue team quickly discerned from talking with her and seeing her melted clothing was that she had been struck by lightning. Whether it was by ground currents or by direct strike isn’t clear. She was hospitalized. Any time you get struck by lightning or get struck by ground currents that are strong, you are lucky to survive. “It was an extremely close call, and it could have turned out a lot worse,” said Banff spokesman Brian Webster. I saw an article this week that said Springdale is Utah’s least affordable housing market. Second was Rockville, right next door. Down the road, Kanarraville was third. Park City is only the fourth least affordable housing in Utah. Fourth? That’s the best we can do? The rankings are a combination of median housing prices compared to median household wages, and apparently Park City has enough high incomes to support the high housing prices. The only employment in Springdale, just outside of Zion National Park, is in the service industry, and there’s little housing inventory of any kind. Housing affordability is one of the important issues facing Park City that they can actually do something about. The City has set some ambitious goals for affordable housing in town. It’s not clear where there is land to put it on, and they are wrestling with whether building units for sale with deed restrictions on re-sale is better than going into the landlord business on a grand scale. Either way, they are serious about it. The demand will always exceed the supply, but a few hundred cityowned units might be enough to skew the rental market in the right direction (or drive everybody into Airbnb). Tuesday is the primary election. Park City residents will winnow the field of 7 candidates to 6 for the general election in November. You can feel the excitement in the air. Well, maybe not. It’s a pretty low-key affair. There’s absolutely no excuse for not voting. The ballots were mailed to registered voters, and are sitting there on the kitchen counter. The effort involved in filling it out and sending it back isn’t much. As civic duties go, you should be up to the task. What’s interesting is to hear people who think they live in Park City complaining that they didn’t get their ballots. If you live in the condominia at the Browns Canyon junction (there are probably 1,000 people living there, and the neighborhood is so raw that it doesn’t even have a name), you don’t get to vote. That’s unincorporated Wasatch County. And then there is Hideout Town, where there are 3 people running for 3 seats; not a lot of suspense in that one. The issues that are crushing Park City are all external.” The City Council elections in Park City used to be a big deal. They are still a big deal in terms of the amount of cash they burn through every year. Decisions at the City are important in terms of the overall visitor experience. No matter what the owners of the ski resorts do, if basic City services fall apart, it will mess up a vacation. But the biggest factors in that have moved beyond the City’s control. The issues that are crushing Park City are all external. The traffic load gets worse by the week. It’s traffic originating outside the City limits, delivering workers, inventory, and visitors into town. Nobody really cares if Prospector residents take the bus to the MARC. The traffic problems are 15,000 workers a day driving into town from Salt Lake, Heber, Kamas and beyond. That traffic is on state highways that are managed by UDOT, beyond the control of the City Council. The sense that suburbanization has overrun the place is real, and also beyond the control of the City Council. That growth is happening in Summit County, Wasatch County, and other municipalities that are absorbing a lot of Park City workers with somewhat lower-cost housing. If any of that was in the City’s jurisdiction, there might be transit options built into the neighborhoods. But it’s not, so there aren’t transit hubs. The development in Wasatch County doesn’t contribute much of anything to the cost of operating the bus system, so it’s hard to see how Park City can provide service — other than if they don’t, the traffic will back up to Duchesne on a snowy morning. But that’s UDOT’s problem, or Wasatch County’s, or Hideout’s, or MIDA’s. There’s almost nothing Park City can do about it, though in the end, gridlock will ruin the visitor experience. So the City Council can provide amenities in town, keep local services up to a high standard, and provide our guests and residents with a nice experience. The Council can take on the housing issue, and do flower baskets on the light posts, and subsidize the Arts District (because this is such a cultural wasteland), and so on. The big stuff, however, is beyond their control. Park City is just one tasty morsel in a messy jurisdictional stew. There are lots of other pieces in there, and the reality is that there is nobody in charge any more. Each jurisdiction is going in its own direction, making decisions based on their internal considerations without looking at the whole picture. Two hundred units here, a thousand units there, and pretty soon, it begins to add up to real development pressure on every public service out there. 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 The arrogance of apathy I had lunch with old friends last Saturday and then came home to enjoy the rainstorm. I propped all the doors and windows wide open and then ... took a nap. When I woke and checked my computer I saw headlines about a shooting of 20 people in El Paso, Texas, at a Walmart. Breaking news was piecing together the story. I told myself this time I just couldn’t get engaged. There have been too many of these. I get too emotional — this time I was going to tune it all out and read a book on the cozy afternoon. The world would keep on spinning sideways but I didn’t need to get sucked into raw emotional unfolding drama. Another news cycle extended with special coverage. These just happen all the time now and there is so little I can do to help those people affected by these mass shootings. The towns are far away from my home. And the situation is so different from my town. It had been less than a week since the shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival — an event I had attended ages ago. A goofy community gathering in the garlic capital of the world. I remember all the beautiful garlic braids woven together with colorful wildflowers. The pasta sampling with all the sauces. The odd garlic ice cream. It was an event in a field with a dirt parking lot. When my mother still lived about 30 miles from Gilroy. It was a rare thing we had done together where politics were suspended between us — for a few hours — and we shared some simple country-fairmeets-food festival moments. All week long I had been churning about the children killed in Gilroy by basically another child. The horror — the terror — the panic there must have been at that festival. And the confusion that a place so safe and benign had gone from being a growing field to a killing field. I had been carrying Gilroy with me all week. The first images and information from El Paso showed a Walmart on the Saturday before school started — filled with families shopping for clothes and supplies. We didn’t know much at first — a lone gunman — an expression so familiar now — had entered the building — heavily armed — and started shooting. He was immediately taken into custody. I shut my computer. I am so old school I cracked the spine of a new book. I put the tea kettle on. I was not joining the news cycle spinning exercise. Detachment was the only sanity saving measure. But the words on the page of the novel wouldn’t stay on the page. I kept rereading sentences and then paragraphs. I kept wondering about the targets of the shooter — random? Domestic violence related? Returned military? And I started to feel the ripples of any tragedy ... the loved ones who were learning about the unimaginable horror of a normal Saturday shopping chore turned into a mass-murder scene. When did we become a country at war with itself? What exactly are we fighting for or against?” I put down the fat new novel. Who was I to ignore the suffering and want to stay inured to it? Comfortable and safe and thousands of miles distanced, I could only imagine a vague sense of loss. Twenty dead meant hundreds of friends and loved ones affected. This wasn’t someone else’s family — this was errand-running, back-to-schoolshopping, just-like-us folks. Looking away, I decided, would not erase the crime — it would add to it. I turned on CNN. And I stayed there for hours. When I finally fell asleep it was fitful. I woke up before dawn and flipped open the computer. Dayton, Ohio. Nine shot dead in a trendy neighborhood with a vibrant bar scene on a summer night. By one male shooter. I slammed the computer shut. I had left all the doors and windows open. I woke up cold under the summer covers. Cold. And so sad. Sure, mad and confused and curious and no longer disconnected. The manifesto from the El Paso shooter was surfacing and so was the realization he had driven 10 hours from his home to target this place in Texas because it is on the border and he wanted to kill brown-skinned people. The guy in Dayton was a bit fuzzier — an angry young man — with a military-style assault weapon. When did we become a country at war with itself? What exactly are we fighting for or against? Why are killing machines so easy to buy and end up in the hands of disconnected young men? How have these young men been radicalized like any soldiers in any war in the world? Last month I was in northern Europe for two weeks — mostly attending a conference. Every cab driver asked the same question of me straight away — are you with The Trump or against it? No one there called our president by his title or showed any respect for the office. And more than one driver asked if I was afraid. I had no reason to be personally afraid, I remember saying to my cabbie — though I do fear for our political system. It was the quick intimate conversation you have with someone you have never met that you are now entrusting your life with — assuming he will take you halfway across the major city to the destination you need to arrive at safely. “God bless your great country,” said one driver for whom English was not his first language — as he dropped me at my hotel. “I hope you have a new president soon.” Recently, Amnesty International issued an alert for global travelers about the threats in a country I don’t ever remember seeing on the alert list — ours. The random shootings in churches, at concerts, country festivals, shopping centers and trendy neighborhood bars have made this country unsafe for travelers. And ourselves. We are in an unmarked war zone. We are becoming battle fatigued and want to turn away. The enemy — the evil — waits for the unsuspecting and attacks. We cannot turn away right now from our neighbors in another city or town who are grieving. We cannot become inured to their sadness. And we must grieve together — however painful — every Sunday in all the Parks... 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. |