The People’s Health Clinic is quickly running out of space for its operations in Quinn’s Junction, and staff members are asking the Summit County government to consider an expansion into areas of the building previously reserved for the Summit County Health Department.
The People’s Health Clinic moved into the Quinn’s Junction building in 2009 as part of a three-way agreement between the facility, Summit County Health Department and Intermountain Health, who owns the land where the building sits. The clinic and the county government signed a 40-year lease allowing each entity to pay $1 annually to operate on the property.
But the number of patients the clinic sees each year has risen dramatically since 2009, with Executive Director Mairi Leining telling the Summit County Council on Wednesday that there has been a 375% increase in growth over the past 17 years. The first quarter of 2026 alone showed a 19% increase in growth compared to the first quarter of 2025.
The People’s Health Clinic predominantly serves uninsured residents, which makes it an integral piece of the Summit County community, according to Leining. More than 4,000 individual patients were treated at the clinic last year, with 97% of the patients living 200% below the federal poverty line.
“These are the people who keep our town running. If our patients went on strike tomorrow, Park City would shut down,” Leining said. “They are working one to three jobs but also living in poverty, which means that they’re also not able to afford marketplace insurance.”
The clinic offers 17 specialities, including pediatrics, psychiatry and cardiology, with nine full-time staff providers and more than 40 volunteer physicians.
“The care we provide using the dollars that are entrusted to us from our community members is really high quality care,” Leining said. “We actually beat most national healthcare benchmarks by 30 to 50 percentage points. … It’s extraordinary care, and it’s care that’s keeping our patients out of the hospital.”
Leining said the clinic had 4,500 “patient encounters,” or visits, in 2009 compared to 21,448 in 2025. But The People’s Health Clinic is still operating in the same 5,000-square-foot area as it did in 2009, which has started to restrict the number of patients the clinic can see despite a lengthy waitlist of volunteer physicians.
“We would love to put them to work,” Leining said. “We are out of space. Some of them we have just doing one shift a month or one shift every other month, but they’re ready and willing to help us.”
She described some parts of The People’s Health Clinic as working “literally body-to-body,” telling county councilors that eye exams for diabetic patients are being held in a converted storage closet. Leining said the “healthcare crisis” will only continue to worsen as the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid experience changes at the federal level, preventing low-income families who previously had insurance from acquiring coverage.
“It’s the safety-net clinic that people are going to turn to because they’re going to be uninsured,” Leining said. “It is critical that we keep our workforce healthy and able to serve us. … The People’s Health Clinic is honestly an act of love and support by the community that believes we need to take care of our neighbors and make sure that they have access (to healthcare).”
Leining said she’s been meeting with Summit County Health Director Phil Bondurant and County Manager Shayne Scott for the past year and a half to discuss a possible expansion into other areas of the building. The county so far has offered additional access to two exam rooms, a conference room and some office space.
However, Leining said the clinic still needs more room, especially for its fledgling pediatrics program. Currently, the part-time pediatrics program is run in the basement of the Quinn’s Junction building twice a week in an area also reserved for the county’s Women, Infants and Children program.
The basement space has multiple pediatric exam rooms, offices and a “child-appropriate waiting room,” Leining said.
County councilors were generally supportive of the clinic’s mission and the services it provides for residents, but they also expressed concerns that displacing Health Department employees would further strain the county’s operations. The Health Department is spread across three locations, with a soon-to-be fourth location imminent as the county prepares to move into the PEAK Center in Kimball Junction.
However, Scott told the County Council there’s a conflict of interest in offering the WIC space to The Peoples Health Clinic because Jacky’s Recovery, a nonprofit focused on behavioral health for the Latino community, has also asked for the area. Jacky’s Recovery is currently located in the Richins Building, which will be demolished after the county moves across the street.
County Councilor Chris Robinson said he would prefer Jacky’s Recovery to find another solution because The People’s Health Clinic may need to reanalyze its needs in a few years, especially if it keeps experiencing rapid growth.
County Council Vice Chair Roger Armstrong, whose wife, Beth Armstrong, was the clinic’s executive director before Leining, strongly advocated for giving the clinic the space it requested, saying it provides a valuable service to the Summit County community.
He also said Jacky’s Recovery sees “a fraction” of the patients that The People’s Health Clinic sees and that the county does not have the authority to move Jacky’s Recovery into the Quinn’s Junction building. Intermountain Health would need to give Jacky’s Recovery explicit, written permission to operate on the property, per the terms of the lease agreement signed in the late 2000s.
The County Council is not responsible for deciding whether The People’s Health Clinic receives the additional space requested. Instead, Leining will need to continue negotiating with Bondurant and Scott, but County Councilor Megan McKenna said the discussion is a good opportunity for the county to start considering long-term plans for the Health Department and People’s Health Clinic.
Related Stories