Park City Unto Itself
Art: Miles Parnell
For starters, think of life’s two certainties — death and taxes. While nearly every Utah town our size has a stately, well-tended funeral home on the main drag, Park City does not. When I first moved to town, the Olpin family had a nice new one on Kearns Boulevard, but it quickly closed. It appears that in Park City, we simply do not die.
This is strictly a function of our relative youth. Other Utah towns are home to multi-generational families. But almost all of Park City’s old-timers moved out when the skiers arrived, thinking any damn fool willing to pay them $5,000 for an old shack was someone they didn’t want to live near. They were replaced by young ski bums with dreams who eventually rebuilt the town in their own images. Even the new old-timers are still just in their 50s and 60s, and thus not quite candidates for the mortuary. When we Parkites die, it’s generally in an interesting, adventurous way, like skiing out of bounds in avalanche country or flying ass-over-teakettle from a mountain bike.
As for taxes, the rest of Utah hates them. Any politician who votes to raise taxes faces certain defeat. Utah legislators, no matter what calamity or social need confronts them, refuse to throw a dime more than the rock bottom minimum at it. They must be in a race with Mississippi to see who can spend less on each child in public school. If the budget surplus runs over, say, a buck twenty nine, they call a special session to divide it up and mail it back to taxpayers so they can brag about it at election time. But Park City? We’ve never met a tax increase we didn’t like. The School Board wants more money to upgrade our schools? We hold an election to raise our taxes. Not enough? We hold another and raise taxes again. Want to buy up some vacant land so it will continue to remain vacant? We hold an election to raise $10 million to buy open space. Not enough? We vote to raise taxes another $10 million to buy more land. As of Park City Magazine press time, we’re thinking of a third tax increase to buy still more land that we can leave alone.
The way we look at the land around us is another quirky thing about Parkites. While other Utah communities grovel for economic development, we’ve “been there, done that” and now actively discourage it. The fact that growth happens anyway is a testament to the tenacity of developers and their lawyers. Want to build a new commercial building — one that will create jobs and retail taxes? It would take about ten minutes to get the building permit anywhere else in the Beehive State. But here our leaders stay up nights thinking of more obstacles to throw into the path toward approval. Thinking about changing zoning, building density, maybe tearing down something deemed “historic”? Here’s my advice: Get your paperwork in, then join the Army. About the time you make Colonel, your application should be most of the way through the process, and you’ll have a retirement project to work on.
Even our thoughts about proper personal behavior vary from the Utah norm. If you say “the church” elsewhere in Utah, everyone will know you’re referring to the Mormon Church. Say “the church” up here and residents will think of St. Mary’s — Utah’s oldest Catholic Church. Consequently, we don’t tend to get worked up about things like liquor stores. When the state tries to put one into a neighborhood elsewhere in Utah, mothers hide their children, and elected officials worry about attracting “that element” and put up a fight to keep their borders pure. Here in Park City, we complain about liquor stores, too … that there aren’t enough of them, that their hours are too short, that they’re too hard to find, and why, oh why, do they close on Arbor Day? Park City wanted a liquor store on Main Street so much it practically gave away space to the state store in the basement of — horrors! —a city-owned building. And let’s not forget that another city property, the Watts house across from Kimball Art Center, is being leased to an on-premises whiskey distiller because our leaders think distillery tours would be a “neat” tourist attraction.
As for our political leadership, we’ve elected earring-adorned rocker Dana Williams, who sings Grateful Dead covers and original tunes for the Motherlode Canyon Band. He’s also spending time this winter trying to figure out how to hook up a windmill to the battery charger on the ice groomer at our new ice rink so we can claim the world’s first wind-powered Zamboni. He’s already switched city vehicles’ fuel sources to diesel-made-from-corn and is buying wind power to keep our town’s lights on.
Here in Park City, we’re a tribe of people who came from all over the United States and the world to reinvent an old town in our image. It is a continuing process that’s a gas to be part of.
Larry Warren first dropped into town in 1970, and made the move permanent a decade later. He's a news reporter for ABC4 News in Salt Lake City and a freelance writer and photographer.
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