The City Hall swearing-in ceremony on Wednesday featured words of inspiration as three members of the Park City Council took the oath of office.
It was a joyous occasion on Swede Alley at the bottom of the Marsac Building steps as the crowd gathered to watch Ryan Dickey, Ed Parigian and Bill Ciraco begin their four-year terms. Each of them delivered remarks conveying their hopes for the community six weeks after the end of a mild-mannered campaign.
Dickey was the first-place finisher on Election Day and secured a full first term as a member of the City Council after a midterm appointment in early 2022. His remarks at the swearing-in ceremony included a statement about the fall campaign being positive and focused on Park City’s future, and he said he is proud and happy for Parigian and Ciraco.
He also made a brief comment about the state of the coronavirus nearly four years after the pandemic-forced shutdowns in the spring of 2020.
“We’re together. COVID’s over. We have things we want to do. We have a lot of unanimity of purpose and things we want to achieve. And I was just really proud to see that over this entire campaign. And was proud to see it to the end,” Dickey told the crowd.
His comment about the coronavirus came amid what is usually one of the busiest stretches of the year in Park City’s tourism industry. Any increases in coronavirus numbers as a result of the busy holiday period likely would just be starting, while any spread of the sickness during the upcoming Sundance Film Festival would not be apparent until after the event starts.
In a subsequent interview, Dickey qualified his assertion during the swearing-in ceremony.
“Largely, we’ve returned to normal,” he said. “I think the pandemic is over. … We’re no longer in a pandemic. COVID’s definitely not over.”
Dickey also said society has entered a new normal and is “living with COVID.”
He said people are “living life in a very similar way to how we were living in 2019,” prior to the pandemic. The “forward-looking, positive” nature of the City Hall campaign in 2023 and reduced anxieties about the municipal government were examples of a return to a pre-pandemic era, he said.
The pandemic “exacerbated political tensions as we spent more time isolated, at home, online,” Dickey said. “COVID era and the pandemic, we’re passed it.”
The Summit County Health Department tracking of coronavirus late in the workweek showed cases in December declining from the same period the year before and trending significantly below the numbers recorded in 2020 and 2021.
City Hall itself did not lead the efforts to combat the pandemic since public health is not one of the municipality’s functions, and the city largely deferred to Summit County, state and federal health officials. Park City officials, though, played a key role in the work to buttress the economy amid the pandemic convulsions that started in spring 2020.