This month, a group of longtime Park City Mountain passholders and I appealed the Park City Planning Commission’s approval of Vail Resorts’ applications to upgradethe Eagle and Silverlode lifts. Let’s get one thing straight: None of us opposes resort improvements. We are skiers, and hav e watched our mountain change, mostly for the worse, under an owner that has proven a careless steward. We want investment in a better experience,But we won’t accept Vail buying that experience with our quality of life and handingus the bill. The public is being told faster lifts will solve congestion. They won’t. People aren’t standing in long lift lines because chairs are small or slow. They arestanding in lines (for lifts,parking, barbecue, bathrooms, etc.) because Vail’s Epic Pass overcrowds our mountain. Faster lifts simply move more skiers onto the same terrain. Unless additional infrastructure and amenities are added alongside increased lift capacity, the result is more crowding on runs, not less. Meanwhile your cost of living keeps climbing because we are quietly subsidizing growth: higher pass prices, paid parking, bus rapid transit, wider roads, satellite park and rides, and subsidized housing all sold to locals as fixes for overcrowding the resort profits from. Had Vail respected the inherited development agreements from the start, it never would have had to push parking costs onto locals at Park City Mountain and Canyons. The governing agreements anticipated growth. They require a balanced approach where increased capacity is offset by infrastructure improvements that safely accommodate it. Those requirements exist for a reason. Yet instead of demanding the analysis that proves balance, the Planning Commission approved the applications anyway. Planning Department and legal staff told the commission to discard court rulings, ignore governing documents, and defer analysis to a future application. The commission acquiesced. If this precedent stands, Park City has no defense left against developers. Not againstVail, Alterra, Columbus Pacific, Extell, MIDA or anyone who shows up with renderings and a stack of checks for local nonprofits. That should worry everyone. The appeal, like the one before, is not about chairlifts. It’s about whether the city will enforce its own rules. Our request is simple: Follow the rules, the same governing agreements that have bound Park City Mountain for decades, and the same land use law that binds every property owner in town. Operate by those rules or leave our local ski hill to some onewho will. Our goal is not to block resort investment or progress. We’re simply asking a hearing officer to demand the analysis the law requires. If analysis shows the lift upgrades can proceed under those rules, great. Alternatively, if they put the capacity equation out of balance, the Vail can invest in other meaningful upgrades to rebalance the equation and apply for the lifts once more under a legitimate and transparent process. That is how the system is supposed to work. Additionally, Vail retains the option to apply to amend its governing agreements as part of a more transparent public process, but this of course invites scrutiny. Scrutiny is what Park City Municipal continues to allow Vail and Park City Mountain to avoid. Vail Resorts, together with Park City leadership, can take these reasonable paths or they can do what they did over the trademark fight, the patrol dispute, and the previous appeal: dig in, lawyer up and lose. If they chose to fight, please be clear about who’s blocking progress. It won’t be a fewskiers asking the resort to honor its own agreements, capacity limits, and the law. ItWill be Vail and Park City Mountain choosing profit over the people who live here and the guests who visit. Alan Theis Prospector The post We care about our mountain, too appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less