in Schools
Is Enrollment Way Up or Only a Little Bit? Depends on What They Are Selling…
We listened to School Superintendent Dr Ember Conley’s interview on KPCW and she was being questioned about the $5.7 million professional studies building they are going to vote for again tomorrow. It’s funny, though… during that interview Dr Conley repeated the idea that our school district has experienced so much growth, and therefore, facilities like these are needed.
A few minutes ago we were doing some research and saw this nugget on the footer for each school’s “About Us” Page (click image for bigger view).
“The district has only increased by 265 students over the past 5 years.”
So are we experiencing extreme growth or growth of only 265 students in 5 years? We guess it depends on what they’re selling.
The Ice Arena Portion of the Basin Rec Bond May Be Reason Enough to Vote Down the Entire Thing
Note: We are writing a series of articles on the Basin Rec Bond. We feel that that the “Pro-Bond” side is getting a lot of press and wanted to provide alternate points of view.
As part of Basin Rec’s $25 million bond, they will be using $2.5 million for construction of a second sheet of ice at the Park City Ice Arena. There are three main issues with this. The first is that it’s been 7 years since the Ice Arena was constructed and it’s lost money every year.
In 2013 losses increased to $170,000 per year up from losses of $136,000 in 2012. During conversations over the Ice Rink’s expansion in 2013, Mayor Dana Williams commented that he believed that the initial agreement was to not consider adding another sheet of ice until the Ice Arena broke even. That appears to still be years off.
The second issue with expansion of the Ice Arena is that they say they had to turn down 94 requests for ice time, equating to 417 hours and $131,000 in missed revenues. There are two issues with this. First, that’s $314 per hour. Currently they are brining in $114 per hour in revenues. This “untapped” market generates 3 times the revenue? Really? Second, the Ice Rink says there are 6,153 total hours available each year at the arena. So, they are missing out on 417 hours. Can they fill the other 5,736 hours at this second rink? More likely they would just spread out the traffic. Instead of having two ice sheets operating from 6 AM to Midnight, each making $670,000 per year. They probably have two ice sheets operating from 7AM to 10PM each making $350,000 per year.
Finally, and perhaps the biggest reason people may want to vote against the bond is that this $2.5 million that Snyderville Basin residents will be committed to for the next 21 years is for a “potential expansion of the Park City Ice Arena“. What? It’s not guaranteed? So the message is, please give us money, we’ll potentially use it to build another ice sheet, but if we don’t you don’t get the money back. Wow.
So, as part of this bond issue they want residents to contribute millions of dollars to something that loses money every year, probably won’t be 100% 90% 80% 70% utilized, and may or may not happen.
Like we have mentioned before, there are parts of this bond that many people probably like, like open space. However, we shouldn’t be forced to make bad investments just to get the things we as a community really want. Perhaps the only way to send the message that this isn’t acceptable is to vote down the entire bond and make them come back with individual bond offerings on the next ballot.
As always, the Park Rag does not officially endorse any candidates or many positions. You may think that adding another sheet of ice is vey important to our community…and that’s your right. We just want to point out potential issues we believe people should consider when voting this November.
in Film Studio
Crews working Saturday on Film Studio Construction
A quick not eon the Film Studio. We saw crews working on the Film Studio on Saturday. Dump trucks-galore were headed in and out with a front-end loader working behind the facility. We’re not sure exactly what is happening but it does seem to confirm a commitment from Sahara Construction to continue to work.
How Basin Rec’s Bond Could Lead To Requiring More Growth
Note: We are writing a series of articles on the Basin Rec Bond. We feel that that the “Pro-Bond” side is getting a lot of press and wanted to provide alternate points of view.
In November, Snyderville Basin residents will vote on a $25 million bond for Basin Rec. If passed, this bond will pay for the purchase of open space, construction of trails, an additional ice sheet, and additions to the Basin Rec field house. It is likely one of these items will appeal to most people.
The cost is estimated to be about $120 per year for a $650,000 house. Yet, that may not be the biggest cost people end up worrying about. You see, bonds like this are issued for purchasing and building things. What they don’t cover is the ongoing cost of maintaining these facilities once built. There is a difference between buying open space which can sit vacant and building something that needs constant maintenance.
So, if this bond passes and the field house is added on to, an ice rink is built, and trails are constructed, those are all things that require more ongoing maintenance than is happening today. Translated, that means more money. Where does that money come from? More property taxes on homes and commercials buildings.
At some point (or some would say already) people get tired of having property taxes raised. What option is left for the city and county? Grow baby grow. It won’t be said directly but you’ll hear things like, we need the Basin economy to expand so we can continue to enjoy all the services we have become accustomed to. It just becomes ingrained in people’s mindsets that we need to approve the next fast food restaurant, hotel, or housing development because we need the money.
Yet, if government only truly bought and built the things that people absolutely wanted, we could limit that. By voting for the bond, it is likely you are contributing to the urban sprawl that so many are really opposed to.
Why is Large Basin Rec Bond Not Divided into Smaller Bonds?
Note: We are writing a series of articles on the Basin Rec Bond. We feel that that the “Pro-Bond” side is getting a lot of press and wanted to provide alternate points of view.
In November, Snyderville Basin residents will vote on a $25 million bond for Basin Rec. Basin Rec says they will use the $15 million for open space, $5.5 million for Fieldhouse expansion, $2.5 million for the Ice Rink, and $2 million for trails. Yet, these are varied, diverse projects that appeal to different people. Just because you like open space doesn’t mean that you want over $2 million to go to the ice rink. Just because you hike on local trails doesn’t necessarily mean you want more open space. Each of these individual items is different and each represents real money.
We as citizens are being forced into an all-or-none scenario because they chose to ask for $25 million in total versus having 4 individual bond offerings. Why is that? Most likely because they want to tie other, less popular items to open space — the most popular item of all time. If they were to run multiple bond offerings, it is likely open space and trail money would pass. The others would probably be left out.
If that supposition is true, then we probably shouldn’t approve this bond. It’s as if we are being played by the powers that be. It’s reminiscent of what happens in Washington DC where they attach defense spending to a bill supporting malnourished children.
These varied items should have been broken out. Let people vote for a second sheet of ice on the ice rink. Let people decide whether they want to expand the Fieldhouse. Let people decide if they are for trails. Let people decide on open space.
This is reason enough to vote this bond down. Voting the bond down doesn’t mean you are against trails and open space. It means you are against getting taken. By voting NO it would force Basin Rec to come back next year with individual items so that the community can vote for the line items that they want.
As always, please vote based on your own personal preferences. We don’t presume to know how you should vote. We just hope to provide a slightly different perspective on issues.
in Community
Summit County Needs to Stop Using Old and Non-Scientific Surveys as Basis for Future
Allegedly sometime in 2010 there was a meeting where about 200 people showed up and some portion of those people ranked what the most important to them in the Snyderville Basin. Since then, those results are periodically trotted out during meetings and in documents like our General Plan to show what the community’s “vision” is. Case in point, in our General Plan Phase 2 document, you’ll see the following on Community Vision:
This is then used to define what the community wants. Is there a problem here? Let us point out 3 things:
- Not representative. Having 200 random people attend a meeting and vote and to use that as any sort of survey makes little sense. Valid surveys go to painstaking lengths to ensure that it is representative of the population. How many second home owners were there “voting”? What was the distribution of race? What ages were represented? What was the distribution of income in attendance at this meeting? We might as well post a poll on summitcounty.org and use that.
- 4 Years is a long time.What were you doing in 2010? Has anything changed from when you voted (did you vote in this?)? Oh, Vail is here. Kimball Junction has expanded dramatically. The movie studio is being built. 1000 homes are coming online near Home Depot. We are out of the recession and building is coming back.
- This list no longer seems accurate. If this list is accurate then we should be able to cancel all our work on traffic, transportation, and the mountain accord. The first traffic concern comes in at 9th (with mass transit).
This isn’t the only list, like this, that concerns us at the Park Rag. Right now consultants are using whiteboards where citizens that attended a meeting on transportation put green and red dots next to concepts they agreed or disagreed with in order to chart our future course. An example is below:
There were over 120 people at this meeting and it was a great turnout. Ideas were expressed by the County and citizen feedback was captured. It was a very valuable meeting. However, we envision the results of the green/red dot exercise being used to not only justify County ideas in the near future but for the next five years. Since we were at this meeting, we have a good idea of what’s wrong with this “survey”.
- While 120 people were at this meeting. The maximum number of votes for any item was about 30 votes. That would indicate that about only 30-40 people were voting.
- Even if 120 people voted, that would be far less than 1 percent of the Basin.
- Most of the people there were passionate about transportation problems. How would people who really don’t have a beef with transportation vote?
- These votes are valid as of that one night in October 2014. How valuable will they be next Summer? How about in two years.
- Some of the questions weren’t worded clearly for a Yes/No vote. People didn’t know what they were voting for.
We get why the County does exercises like these. It allows citizens to participate and share their feelings. It has value, as far as showing what a limited number of people who are concerned with an issue feel at that moment. However, extrapolating results and using it continually, many years on is a disservice to our community.
It makes us wonder in what other ways old data is being used to guide our future. With so much at stake, Summit County needs to be better than this.
New Traffic Feature at the Park Rag
We have added a new page to the Park Rag that shows traffic cameras around Park City. We personally have used this to help decide how we should plan our travels around town. It helps us decide whether we should take the front or back way as we are coming or going.
The TRAFFIC page is accessible through the top menu and can also be found by clicking here. The top half of the page shows the various cameras as if you were coming from Pinebrook on I-80 towards town using 224. The bottom half shows what traffic looks like if you were to take the back way in using I-80 to Highway 40 to 248.
And if you have really good eyesight, you could use this to monitor the progress on Park City Film Studios.
We hope you find it useful.
Question of the Day: Will Ebola Impact Park City Tourism?
We received a message from a citizen today asking whether we thought Ebola would impact Park City tourism. We don’t think Ebola will but we wouldn’t be surprised if EBOLA FEAR does. The CDC has requested an interview with 132 passengers who flew on a flight with a nurse (that hasn’t tested positive) but who treated the Dallas Ebola patient who died. This, combined with all the other media (over) coverage that sinks into people’s minds could make people be less likely to book trips right now.
Even we have some business trips planned and aren’t that excited about hopping on a plane. We wouldn’t be surprised if people postpone their early season trips and wait until Spring to see if this all blows over. It’s not too hard to imagine a family in New Jersey not wanting to get on a plane at Christmas time.
About the only comparison we have is the SARS epidemic from 2003. Air travel was down about 10 percent in the US.
So, who really knows… but if things continue down this path, it will likely at least shift when visitors come this year.
Supporters of Light Rail Up Parleys Must Be Smoking the Ganja While Watching Their Warren Miller Films
The promise of light rail is alluring. Hop on a high speed train in Salt Lake and be effortlessly transported to Park City. No traffic. No stress. Pure Bliss. There’s only one problem … Distance X’s Dollars.
First, let’s talk distances from Salt Lake to Park City. The closest TRAX station (to us) in Salt Lake is near the University of Utah. Let’s use that as a starting point and say that light rail would run from there to a new stop in Jeremy Ranch. That distance is 20.5 miles. If we go further to Canyons it is 23.7 miles. If we run it all the way to PCMR it’s 27 miles. Now they could build some sort of park and ride at the bottom of Parley’s Canyon but we’re not exactly sure where that would go or why people would drive part of the way to Park City and then ride. So, we’ll figure they’ll want to connect the Park City route to the rest of TRAX.
Now, let’s talk money. According to Wikipedia, “Over the US as a whole, excluding Seattle (which was much more expensive), new light rail construction costs average about $35 million per mile.” In Salt Lake they were able to do it for under $20 million a mile; however, we will go with the national averages since it has to be harder going over a mountain than merely around a valley.
Finally let’s multiply these together to figure out what it would cost to build the various routes:
SLC to Jeremy Ranch —-> $717,500,000
SLC to Canyons ———–> $829,500,000
SLC to PCMR————–> $945,000,000
If we are really concerned with reducing traffic in the Snyderville Basin, it won’t do much good to stop at Jeremy Ranch or the Canyons for that matter. People will want to ride into Park City. The cost to do that is almost a cool BILLION DOLLARS. That’s the entire budget of Park City and Summit County for almost 7 years. They could buy every household in the Snyderville Basin an electric car for half that.
Frankly, it’s insane. Just think what could be done with a $945 million. That’s a lot of open space. That’s a lot of education. That’s a lot of teachers. That’s a lot feeding the poor. That’s a lot of animals saved. That’s a lot of affordable housing….
Whatever your thing is… a billion dollars buys a lot of it.
There has to be a different solution. Oh, and how well does it work in 2 feet of snow at 5°F? Good luck with that.
Thoughts on Chris Robinson’s Appearance on KPCW
Last week we were pretty negative on Summit County Council candidate Craig Williams’ appearance on KPCW. We didn’t (and still don’t) agree with his stances on how he would improve relations with the east-side of Summit County, County finances, and the General Plan. This morning his opponent in the election, Chris Robinson, appeared on KPCW and we thought we would provide some random thoughts on questions he answered during the interview:
- Mr Robinson described himself as a co-owner of the Ensign Group. During previous elections, Mr Robinson’s land development and cattle business background came up. Interestingly we haven’t heard any concerns about that. Maybe his tenure on the Council have laid those fears to rest?
- Speaking of business interests, while we were looking to see if anyone was bringing up his business background, we did find that Mr Robinson appears to partly own a non-profit water company in North Salt Lake (Oquirrh Mountain Water). We don’t know exactly why this bugs us. It’s likely because Mr Robinson negotiated the Weber Basin water agreement and we weren’t aware of this connection (maybe others were). That being said, we can’t put our finger on why it would be a conflict of interest. Some might even say that the experience he has there is beneficial. It just took us aback a bit.
- Leslie Thatcher from KPCW asked Mr Robinson about his biggest successes in office. He led with the increase in open space during his tenure as one of the the biggest achievements. Most people would probably agree with that.
- Ms Thatcher then typically follows up with a question about the impact open space has on affordable housing, and she did here too. Mr Robinson said there was affordable housing added in places like the Village at Silver Creek and Liberty Peak Apartments. We understand Ms Thatcher’s line of questioning and understand how less available land drives up prices. However, it seems like the real culprit in the lack of new affordable housing is the ability to pay a fee in lieu of building. Instead of building affordable housing, you simply pay money. The County then chooses how to use this money but rarely does it build a new set of affordable houses or condos. If Mr Robinson, or anyone, really wanted affordable housing to accompany all development, they would work to get the fees-in-lieu option removed from the development code. However, we’re not sure what portion of residents here actually want that.
- Ms Thatcher asked Robinson about the interaction with the east-side. He said it was getting better. In our opinion, it appears that it has. We’re not sure if that is directly due to Mr Robinson but he is part of the team making that happen.
- Ms Thatcher asked him whether the General Plan should be advisory or binding. He said it should be advisory because otherwise there would be two sets of codes competing and that would cause problems. We agree. It took something like four years to make an advisory General Plan. We can’t fathom how long it would take to make it both regulatory in nature and bullet proof.
- We think Mr Robinson left out his most valuable contribution to the County Council when asked by Ms Thatcher. Over the past couple of decades it appears the County has got itself into bad contracts more than once. We have witnessed Mr Robinson go line by line through 50 to 60 pages of contracts during a meeting, nit-picking every detail — so much so that other council members have asked if he could do that before the meeting. Yet, this diligence has likely saved the County already and will continue to over the coming years. Even if you don’t like Mr Robinson’s politics, this may be reason enough to vote for him.
So as we always say, we don’t endorse candidates. Everyone has their own experiences and issues that matter to them. We just hope in the upcoming election you’ll rise up to make the decision for the candidate that you think will serve your needs the best — whether that’s Craig Williams or Chris Robinson.
Parkrag
We believe in citizen journalism. We believe there are stories to tell that can help to shape our community for the better. We believe tomorrow's Park City can be better than today's.