I’m trying to square the lovely image of the Utah Symphony and its subtle classical tones playing out across green grass … while traffic grumbles and hisses and beeps feet away at Park City’s busy corner of Kearns and Bonanza Drive. This most definitely is not what the community has said i t wanted for the Bonanza 5-Acre Site through a couple of thousand bits of input over the past several years in surveys, open houses, community and council meetings, and finally a plan for what the majority indicated they did want. Making the parcel Park City purchased for $19.5 million another little used city park among a dozen, other than the popular Library Field, didn’t even come up until after the City Council in May concluded two years of shaping just this development and passed it to the Planning Commission for detailed scrutiny. So where were these critics all those years while the city hemmed and hawed and finally fastened on a plan based on actual feedback? This isn’t a case of some closely guarded secret sprung all at once on the community at large, surprise! Naturally, they are throwing anything and everything that might stick, including shouting over traffic during a gathering at the site about what a great outdoor concert venue this could be, what an idyllic setting for a quiet park while cars and trucks grind by, what a disruption of the mountain view this would be with buildings shorter than trees here. It’s no surprise, then, that opponents mischaracterize a mixed-use neighborhood project that with some luck will be an attractive catalyst for the rest of the 78-acre Bonanza Park due for redevelopment from the current strip malls, a tired hotel, a closed movie theater, public works, old supermarket, industrial buildings, recycling facility and an electrical substation into a new, attractive city core that has long shifted from Old Town, mecca today for overnight rentals. But go ahead and pretend this is just an affordable housing project akin to something the Soviets and maybe Chicago liked to build at some point. It’s fine rhetoric if also false. Meantime, no doubt to Councilor Ed Parigian’s dismay, the number of units devoted to affordable housing has dwindled from 156 to 88 so far. There’s something to fear, those firefighters, school teachers, bartenders moving in to live where they work, maybe even bumping that 12% who live and work in town to 15% over time. That’s a direct indictment of the notion there’s a glut of homes the working class can afford in their own town. Park City in fact fits among the lowest of the ski towns in percentage of total occupied homes that are affordable in a city where fully 70% of the residential properties are second homes. Winter Park, Colorado, may be the only ski town worse this way. You can argue what more essential workers in the town where they live means for Aspen, for Breckenridge, among others. In a city where the population has been aging into a retirement community with fewer children and what has come with all that, I’m not sure this is a winner, though. Those towns have their issues, but workers able to live in their own community is much less of one than in today’s Park City. Sure, moan about views that won’t be disturbed, lost art space that makes up 20% of the total ground floor area, lack of open green space that matches the 2-acre Library Field. Cite how traffic worsens when no one there would be driving in from somewhere else to add to the gummed-up commute, pretty much the entirety of the traffic problem. Complain about not being heard when you didn’t bother to speak up. There are problems with this development. It’s far from perfect. As mixed use, it bears the feel of the kitchen sink. Art space but not enough. Open space but not enough. Affordable housing but not enough. How many more restaurants and other eating places are needed in an area already lousy with them? All this and childcare too? And there lies a thus far unasked question: At what point is this just a development like any other? What is the point of the city giving away the land if there is little of the public good the city sought in spending almost $20 million to purchase it? City councilors complain when the project is described simplistically as just affordable housing, but why else are they committing expensive city property to this? Nearly half of the affordable units have been stripped out. How many units fewer than the 88 in there now before the public investment fully sours? The value proposition at this point already has diminished. Isn’t that a more reasonable criticism than shouting for another quiet, overwatered park at the busiest of corners? The company developing the parcel, Brinshore, will also manage it like their other projects. There is some comfort in that. But what evidence shows the art spaces will be filled, foot traffic adequate, restaurants and cafes and such with enough demand to survive and thrive? Something built to last 50 years should go on more than a crapshoot, right? The need for affordable housing is manifest in the long term if controversial like trails and open space once were. But the rest of it has to work, too, beyond the logic of if you build it they will come. Which, yes, has worked well for ski towns for the past half century, granted. Myself, I’d use the city land for a new City Hall more accessible to the bulk of the community today. The historic Marsac Building, once a school, can be transformed again, ideally into that something that holds part of the answer for the dwindling visitation on historic Main Street. Could there be a win-win in that, possibly? Better minds than mine reject the idea, and the dystopian film set across the street from my office has lingered for a decade now, lost in dithering and wussiness, frankly. Absent diluting the affordable housing component any further, it’s past time to no longer let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745. The post Journalism Matters: 5-Acre Site critics had their chance appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less