The Summit County Council is in the trenches trying to find a solution to the Dakota Pacific mess at Kimball Junction. There isn’t a good solution. The best we can hope for is that they are able to pull the “least-worst” option from a steaming pile of bad choices.
Kimball Junction is broken. The traffic flow through there doesn’t work, with dangerous back-ups on the off-ramp coming from Salt Lake in the morning, and terrible back-ups in the evening on the way out. That’s what happens when you import 15,000 workers a day.
Economically, housing 15,000 workers here is impossible. There isn’t enough vacant land left in the area to accomplish that, even if it were affordable. And it’s not. Trying to imagine the community with an additional 15,000 full-time residents, with the accompanying demand on schools, increased demand for grocery stores, medical facilities, and everything else — well, it doesn’t work. So our workforce commutes.
We’ve built a successful economy that relies on those commuters. If our lodging inventory skewed toward the Motel 6 end of the market, we could get by with fewer employees. But it’s not. We’ve deliberately gone to high-end properties that need a huge number of employees to pamper their guests, who pay more per night than most Americans pay on their monthly mortgages. And we all grab a piece of the action through a variety of taxes that subsidize our habit of living well beyond the means of a community this size outside of the resort framework.
That’s the devil’s bargain that haunts every resort town.
The trade-off is traffic. Housing is too expensive, too much of the housing stock is the wrong kind and sits vacant, and our commuter-based model has pushed the road network to failure.
UDOT is talking about a major and hideously expensive remodel of Kimball Junction. I think it’s the fourth complete rebuild in my life. At best, it might catch up to existing demand. It won’t get ahead of it. And it won’t happen for 10 years. There’s still a lot left to build at Canyons Village, so it will continue to get worse before it gets any better.
In the thick of it we have 50 acres of vacant land owned by Dakota Pacific with its zombie approval. It was supposed to be an office park for the booming technology industry. It may have been a good idea at the time, but it didn’t pan out.
Tech boomed in Lehi. The workers who would fill the imagined offices would commute from somewhere else because tech workers aren’t able to afford Summit County housing any more than lift operators.
It’s hard to feel sorry for Dakota Pacific, a sophisticated company that knew exactly what they were buying. But “build what you bought” doesn’t solve anything for anybody. If by some chance the tech park worked, the resulting traffic mess would be a quantum leap worse than what we have now. If they build it, and they don’t come, the entry to town is a derelict office park. Nobody wins with that.
While most of us prefer it as jack rabbit habitat, that’s not a realistic solution, either. Zoning regulations that remove any plausible economic use of the property lead to nasty and expensive litigation.
Worse, Dakota Pacific has the ear of our thuggish Legislature. Though nobody will say it out loud, it’s pretty clear that members of the Legislature have told Summit County to cut a deal by the end of this session or they will impose one on us, as in: “Nice little town you got here. Shame if something bad was to happen to it.”
Last year there was a shameful backroom deal in the Legislature to force the county’s hand. We dodged that on a technicality in court. This year, the Legislature has gone completely nuts — passing bills requiring power plants to burn more coal, making it illegal to use the toilet at the Salt Lake Airport, and giving the five craziest charter schools the right to ban books statewide. Compared to the other malfeasance they are up to, overriding Summit County’s land use plans is a footnote.
Where do we go with it? No matter what is built there, it will make the mess at Kimball worse, add to our noticeable air pollution problem, and incrementally chip away at the quality of life here.
The county could buy it at some astronomical price — and then do what with it that doesn’t generate its own traffic? I have my doubts that a bond would pass. Residential development will generate a lot of traffic. It’s maybe going in a slightly different direction than the imagined office workers — though if they work locally they will still be on 224. We can pretend that they will all ride the bus, and some certainly will. Most certainly won’t.
Proposing commercial space there just worsens the workforce imbalance problem and traffic, so commercial ought to be eliminated. The right mix of housing addresses our problems despite the inevitable traffic.
The council members have been chewing on this for years. They know it. They also know the threat level from the Legislature, and maybe can leverage all of it in a way that moves the Kimball rebuild higher up the list. At this point, all we can hope for is the least-worst option. It’s high stakes poker and we are holding a pair of twos.
But we have solid poker-faced people at the table working for us. We need to trust them on this one.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.