John Greenfield has worked as a glassblower, waiter, grocery delivery business owner and attorney.
Now he wants to add Park City Council member to that eclectic list. Greenfield is among eight candidates running for one of three open seats on the council.
His priority issues include traffic, park-and-ride lots, transportation and affordable housing.
Greenfield, 45, lives in a Park City Heights home bought through an affordable housing program. He was born and raised in Boise, Idaho, and studied at Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire for a few years before moving to Eugene, Oregon. He studied music at Lane Community College there for a year, moved to Santa Cruz, California, briefly, then returned to Eugene and became a glassblower.
After a few years, Greenfield moved to Flagstaff, Arizona, and blew glass and worked as a waiter for a year. Then he started classes at Northern Arizona University, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and a master’s degree in applied sociology. He completed his master thesis while living in Vail, and later attended Seattle University, earning a law degree there.
Greenfield has lived in Park City since 2015. He started a grocery delivery business in 2017 and began a law practice recently.
“Not only do I bring a legal background and a sociological background but I also bring a boots-on-the-ground perspective,” Greenfield said. “I think that what you’re trying to do with the City Council is put together a group of people who can have the best conversation possible, the most well-rounded conversation, and I think I can contribute to that environment.”
To help address traffic problems, Greenfield proposes building park-and-ride lots farther out of town and even outside Park City limits.
The key to incentivizing drivers to park outside town is to make the lots easy to use by putting them right off the highway and having buses take the motorists straight to their destination, he said.
“You don’t want to direct the traffic this way and that way and then have them park,” Greenfield said. “You want to have them just get out of their cars and get on the bus and head straight to where they need to go. They don’t have to drive into town and wait in traffic.”
Having a dedicated bus system from those lots for out-of-towners and supplementing fixed route service with micro transit for people in town also will help take vehicles off the road, he said. Other ways are to eliminate free parking at the Park City High School lot, which would encourage drivers to park at a park-and-ride, and to decrease the number of parking spots required at housing developments, he said.
To increase the amount of affordable housing, Greenfield said he would like to see the city be more flexible with its ideas.
“I think we’ve got a lot of opportunity to have really interesting, creative neighborhoods and communities that we can build and we don’t have to spend $600,000 on a studio unit,” he said. “I think it can happen a lot faster, too. I want to get stuff done.”
Park City should create policies that encourage responsible development and offer more options, such as retrofitting and renovating older housing into duplexes and allowing homeowners to put accessory dwelling units on their property, Greenfield said. In addition, a public-public partnership where, for example, Summit County provides land and the city builds tiny houses, could work, he said.
Greenfield said Park City should keep a focus on the town’s mining legacy and the natural environment when moving forward with housing and transportation projects.
“It’s important to have that in mind when you’re building, when you’re looking at different codes for different areas of town and when you’re thinking about putting resources toward different projects,” he said.
Another concern for Greenfield is finding affordable child care, which he said is a national problem and not one that Park City can fix by itself. He said the city could put in a stopgap to make the situation better for a while.
“Instead of letting the local system fail, if you can keep that in a survival mode for a little bit while the federal government figures out what to do, I think that makes sense,” Greenfield said. “It makes sense for the government to be involved.”
Stipends make sense as a starter because they allow people to get child care right away, he said.
“If you go the other way around, you’ve got to train people, get the schools on board,” he said. “It’s much more of a process. Here, you can have people sign up, they get the stipend, we just get through the school year and figure out what to do next. We’ve got the money to do it and nobody has to raise property taxes to make it happen this time. But we need to come back and have a full-fledged conversation about what this looks like in the long term.”
Greenfield said he would be excited to see the Olympics return to Park City and thinks the majority of residents would be, too. He added the town could get monies for infrastructure.
“Part of our identify, along with our mining heritage, is athletics,” he said. “Winter sports are just uniquely important to this town.”
He also supports a proposed general obligation bond that would pay for pickleball courts, an outdoor ice sheet and expanded fitness space, among other projects. Pickleball is the fasting growing sport in the country and ice expansion has been put on hold for many years, Greenfield said.
“From ice skating to speed skating to hockey, this is a big ice town,” he said. “Everybody is crammed and competing for space at the ice rink.”
Greenfield, noting the City Council seats are nonpartisan, said he can’t label himself politically.
“When you’re talking about removing cars off the roads and fixing traffic congestion issues, I don’t understand what progressive is versus conservative,” he said. “I want to make sure Park City is building community together and that we hear all voices. If that’s progressive, I guess I’m progressive. If that’s conservative, I guess I’m conservative. I think the labels break down when you get to local government, local politics and local government services.”
The other candidates running for a council seat are Bill Ciraco, incumbent Ryan Dickey, David Dobkin, Matthew Nagie, Ed Parigian, Bob Sertner and Jody Whitesides.
Betsy Wallace, who was in the race, suspended her campaign on Aug. 2, saying her life had become “significantly more unbalanced” than she had anticipated. Incumbents Max Doilney and Becca Gerber are not seeking reelection.
A Sept. 5 primary will narrow the field of eight council hopefuls to the six top vote-getters, who will advance to a Nov. 21 general election. The three candidates who get the most votes in that election will take office in January and serve a four-year term.
Voters will get to vote for three candidates in both the primary and the general election because there are three open seats. State law requires that a primary be held if more than twice the number of candidates file to run than are to be elected. The election is nonpartisan.