Since 2008 czb has been working in the mountain resort community of Park City, UT. In 2008 and 2009 czb worked to help clarify the community’s core values in a community engagement process that received input from 4% of the citizens. This is the first signal that Park City is different: most communities struggle in planning processes to achieve a .75% participation rate. Together with the City’s planning department, czb evaluated thousands of data points and determined in Park City there are four “levers” that measure the extent to which Park City would remain a community in balance: Equity, Environment, Economic Prosperity, and Quality of Life. Led by czb expert Joanna Schull, these levers eventually became key means for planning efforts in Park City to evaluate projects.
Behind Park City Mountain Resort
Beginning in mid 2011 czb has begun two more initiatives with Park City. Following exemplary market analysis by Design Workshop, czb and DW began to work with the Planning Commission and the City Council to find ways for the community to adopt an appropriate redevelopment posture, one characterized by redevelopment being grounded in the community’s core values identified by czb in 2009, and by market exigencies articulated by DW in 2011.
During the summer of 2011 czb has continued this work, digging into the combination of market and values issues that provide context to looming redevelopment decisions regarding open space, view corridor preservation, utilities and infrastructure placement and cost, historic preservation, and social equity.
Park Bonanza Redevelopment Challenges
In this continuation of work, Park City is demonstrating important skills every community can learn. It is demonstrating a commitment to genuine transparency of process. In Park City, everything that’s done is public, and the public is deeply involved in setting the agenda for the community. Will Park City be a mountain resort community or a suburban satellite of Salt Lake? In Park City the community decides. Will resort tourism be developed by the private sector in a vacuum or in partnership with citizens? In Park City, partnership drives change.
As Park City moves to the next stage of setting its course for the next 50 years, it is a community focused on balance, especially the work of keeping prosperity in balance with the environment and social equity. Greater prosperity in Park City is inseparable from affordable housing development and environment protections. Achieving this balance is continual hard work.
This fall czb begins a new phase of work with The Planning Center to assist Park City in developing long range redevelopment strategies based on carrying capacity and growth pressures, illustrating yet another reason Park City stays great: it does not rest.
