The Park City Planning Commission approved a conditional-use permit for the Park City School District’s proposed athletic complex on Wednesday despite opposition from a nearby homeowners association.“The lack of consideration of Lucky John Drive and the entire planning process of this has been f airly stunning,” said Gina Rossi, the vice president of the Holiday Ranch Homeowners Association. “I’ve heard discussions of pickleball sounds disrupting neighbors and potentially birds, yet I have heard nothing about commercial lights, a 13,200-square-foot recreational banquet facility, a parking lot, concession stands … impacting Lucky John Drive.”The school district needed to obtain a conditional-use permit from the city to operate the athletic complex as a public recreational facility, according to planning technician Jaron Ehlers. It passed in a 3-1 vote with an additional provision banning pickleball on the complex’s outdoor tennis courts because of noise concerns.However, Ehlers said the school district is welcome to approach the commission about allowing pickleball in the future as long as the proposal includes mitigation efforts.Rossi appeared at the school board meeting last week to bemoan the district’s decision to place a banquet hall on the northern edge of Dozier Field, and also expressed her disappointment with the proposal, district and city during the Planning Commission meeting the next night.She vocalized anxieties regarding increased noise and traffic, as well as obstructed views for residential homes.“When you look through the plans that people provide, there’s barely any reference to Lucky John Drive,” Rossi said. “It’s all about 1750 Kearns [Boulevard]. Now, Kearns Boulevard, while it may have traffic, is a commercial thoroughfare for the town. Lucky John Drive is a residential street with full-time homeowners and residents.”Rossi worried that the proposal would damage property values in the neighborhood and detract from residents’ quality of life.“Why would we not be locating all of these traffic-causing, light-impacting, noise-impacting, quality-of-life-impacting structures closer to Kearns Boulevard?” she questioned.She also said she and other members of the Holiday Ranch Homeowners Association had attempted to contact the school district with their concerns multiple times but received no response, an issue she reiterated to the Planning Commission.“Back in November, I went to a school board meeting. I talked to Mike Tanner. … Since then, I’ve called Mike Tanner multiple times. I emailed Mike Tanner multiple times. I emailed the architecture firm. I never got a response from anybody,” added Jonathan Wilson, president of the homeowners association. “This whole process for this building feels inappropriate to me. I tried really hard to be involved and get ahead of this, and we were just ignored. Phone calls were not returned, and then Mike Tanner was let go.”Tanner, the district’s COO who oversaw construction projects among his responsibilities, was placed on administrative leave in February and his position removed March 31 in what the district reported as a reduction in force. District representatives said they were conducting a traffic study about a proposed road for emergency vehicles and buses from the high school’s parking lot to Lucky John Drive, but the study has not been finished. Wilson said he was concerned about how much of the complex has been approved without a study analyzing how the fields would potentially affect traffic patterns and congestion, especially for residential homes across the street.“It just feels like this whole thing is being pushed through without any consideration of the neighborhood,” Wilson said.Three other nearby homeowners also spoke against the proposed design. They said they support the high school and its athletic programs, but they were in favor of drafting new plans that would place facilities farther away from Lucky John Drive.Planning commissioners were hesitant about proceeding with the permitting process without more information regarding whether the school district properly notified residents in the area about the proposal.But City Attorney Mark Harrington said it would be “inappropriate” to not vote on the issue because the Planning Commission only needs to take into account whether the city properly noticed its own public hearing.“That’d be an awful precedent, quite frankly, because we just never know, and it’s subject to a different jurisdictional requirement,” Harrington said. “It’s simply not within this board’s power to delay action based on what a different jurisdiction did or didn’t do because it’s not germane to your decision. It’s a separate approval process.”Harrington said the Planning Commission could pass along its concerns after the meeting by contacting the school board and Superintendent Lyndsay Huntsman.“I think that we’ve mitigated to the best of our ability as a commission within our rules and regulations that we have,” said Planning Commissioner Bill Johnson.Johnson then made a motion to approve the conditional-use permit, which was seconded by Planning Commissioner John Frontero.The motion passed in a 3-1 vote with Planning Commissioner Laura Suesser in opposition.“I found the 13,200 square-foot north building (providing locker rooms to accommodate 300 athletes at one time and four banquet halls) incompatible with the surrounding area in terms of use, scale and mass, and the differences in use and scale were not mitigated through careful planning (i.e., the use and scale of the building is unjustifiably excessive),” Suesser said in an emailed statement on Tuesday morning. “In addition, I found that the location of the tennis courts were not carefully planned, as they could have been located closer to Kearns Boulevard to accommodate pickleball.”The school district does not need to receive building permits from the city to begin construction, but it will need to submit stormwater plans to the city engineer. School board members in March said construction is expected to begin this summer.The post Park City schools obtain permit for athletic complex despite HOA opposition appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less