Two long-festering building disputes in Summit County, one a major mixed-use development near Kimball Junction, the other a proposal by Utah’s richest man to build a sprawling mansion above Old Town, are approaching a crossroads this week.
And the Utah Legislature still has time to once again try and have a final say.
Matthew Prince, the founder of the tech company Cloudflare — who is the second-wealthiest Utahn behind Gail Miller, according to Forbes — is pushing for a final decision Wednesday from the Park City planning commission on whether or not to approve construction of a massive mansion above historic Old Town.
Last year, the planning commission balked at the proposal and Prince’s lobbyists tried to slip a provision into an affordable housing bill that would have usurped the local authorities and let him build the home. The plan fell apart after The Salt Lake Tribune and KPCW reported on the plan. Shortly after the legislative session, Prince purchased The Park Record, the city’s newspaper.
This year, the potential for late-session legislative intervention remains, although Prince’s team has not said they intend to pursue that strategy.
Also last year, the Legislature included a special provision in a housing bill that would have given the developer Dakota Pacific the go-ahead to build a mixed-use development with more than 700 units and significant retail space near Kimball Junction.
Residents concerned about the traffic impacts at the already congested area were outraged, Summit County sued and won in court, forcing the issue back to the negotiating table. Progress has been made, but an initial target date to resolve the issue is already slipping.
Prince of King Road
Prince is proposing tearing down two large existing homes along King Road above Park City that he characterized during a recent planning commission meeting as short-term rental “party houses.”
The previous owner, Bob Sfire, wrote into The Park Record — now Prince’s newspaper— to dispute the characterization, saying he built the homes and only ever rented one of them. He hired a property management company to handle the rentals, he said. They were sometimes rented by several families for ski vacations, he said, but they were not marketed as “party houses.”
In their place, Prince wants to build a massive structure that, according to the Park City staff report, would have an 11,300-square-foot footprint — not including a large underground parking structure, deck space and an underground accessory building — and would have four stories, with two stories of floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over Old Town and Main Street Park City.
Those huge walls of windows and the design of the building would not keep with the historic design and nature of the historic district, wrote Anne Oliver, a consultant hired to review the proposed plans.
Nor would the sheer scale of the building. Planning commission staff estimated that, if it is built, it would span more than three times the 3,500 square-foot area allowed under the existing rules and have a height that is some 20 feet taller than is currently permitted.
Attorneys for Prince dispute that. In a recent planning commission meeting, they argued that the city measures the height of a structure from the floor of the first “finished” story. Prince’s plan is to leave the bottom two stories of the home — which would be mostly underground — unfinished, so only the top two stories should count toward the height restriction.
As for the home’s footprint, Prince’s attorneys contend that none of the floors cover more than 3,500 feet and the only reason the entire footprint seems so large is because of the way they have been staggered in order to make the home seem less intrusive from below. Neighboring homeowners were given allowances to build, the attorneys argued, and Prince just wants similar latitude.
“This is a family that needs a home,” Prince’s attorney, Wade Budge, told the commission at a meeting last month.
Neighbors and long-time Park City residents are weighing in both for and against Prince’s plan, with comments to the planning commission mostly opposing the project.
“The applicant has seemingly BOUGHT preferential treatment for his request,” wrote former Park City councilman Jim Doilney,” suggesting Prince used the purchase of the newspaper and strategic charitable donations to tamp down opposition. “As an Old Town Parkite and former council member, I am extremely upset to think our town’s soul is seemingly being sold.”
The planning commission is scheduled to meet again Wednesday evening and could vote to approve, reject or, with permission from Prince’s team, postpone a decision another week.
Again, if the planning commission rejects the proposal Wednesday, with nearly two weeks in the legislative session, it remains to be seen if lawmakers will once again try to override the local officials.
Kimball Junk Show
As the Prince saga has played out in Park City, Summit County has been wrangling with its own contentious building headache — this one a push by developer Dakota Pacific to build a major mixed-use housing and commercial development near Kimball Junction just off of Interstate 80.
In 20018, the county envisioned a tech center going into the space near the current Skullcandy headquarters, but the project never got off the ground and when Dakota Pacific bought the property in 2018 they had other ideas — originally about 1,100 housing units and a significant chunk of commercial space.
Residents revolted, upset about what that kind of growth would mean along the already-traffic-choked highway and I-80 off-ramp, as well as additional police, fire and schools that would be needed.
With the project stalled, the Legislature last year added a provision into a piece of legislation to override the county’s process and give Dakota Pacific the green light to build a slimmed-down version with 727 housing units and commercial space.
The county sued, arguing when Dakota Pacific bought the property the contract was in place to build the tech park. If anything, they had the right to build that, but that is something neither Dakota Pacific nor the county wanted any longer.
The county won its lawsuit and Dakota Pacific said it would appeal, but the two sides instead agreed several months ago to pause the litigation and try to negotiate a resolution.
Over a series of public meetings, the county and Dakota Pacific still seem miles apart. Last week, the council floated a request for 500 units of housing — half of them considered affordable housing, half market rate — along with a park-and-ride lot, senior center, medical offices and phased-in construction, with most of the building not happening until the Utah Department of Transportation completes improvements on the I-80/SR-224 interchange.
On Tuesday, Dakota Pacific CEO Marc Stanworth told the commission that its wish list was “unrealistic.”
“Long story short, as expected, there’s no way we’ll ever get anywhere close to that type of program,” he said.
Such a big reduction in the total number of units, from 727 to 500, while requiring some of them to be at below-market rates, slashes the profits that would be used to pay for the other amenities, like the parking garage and open space that the county also wants.
Stanworth said there was some wiggle room “in the margins,” but when pressed to be more specific he told the council: “It’s going to be in the order of dozens, not 50 [or] 200 units. … Collectively they add up to a decent chunk, but that’s the kind of magnitude I’m talking about. I don’t see us getting down to 600, 550. I don’t see that happening.”
The council had already decided to postpone a public hearing that had been scheduled for Thursday ahead of an anticipated vote. Instead, they asked Dakota Pacific to come back next week with options that might get the two sides closer together.
Rep. Casey Snider, R-Paradise, who sponsored last year’s ill-fated attempt at legislative intervention and helped coax the parties back to the negotiating table several months ago, said his preference would be to let the talks run their course.
“I feel like the parties are finally talking, which is something I feel like they should’ve been doing a long time ago,” he said. “They’re working together in good faith and these are hard decisions, but I look forward to them continuing to work together to resolve the issue.”
Correction • Feb. 14, 4:25 p.m.: This story was updated to clarify that Dakota Pacific had said it would, but has not yet filed an appeal of the lower court’s ruling and that KPCW radio reported on Prince’s effort to convince the Legislature to let him build the home without approval from the city.
