Park City leaders on Thursday agreed to delay a vote that would have been a key step in ensuring the City Hall-owned Treasure land remains open space, indicating the decision could be made in late March instead.
The Park City Council was slated to possibly cast a vote adopting a mechanism called a conservation easement that would outline the restrictions on the Treasure acreage, which stretches through a hillside overlooking Old Town along the route of the Town Lift.
The municipal government under a conservation easement would retain ownership of the land, but the development prospects of the acreage would be stripped. A third party would hold and enforce a conservation easement.
The Summit Land Conservancy has been tapped to enforce a Treasure conservation easement and appeared at the Marsac Building on Thursday. Cheryl Fox, the CEO of Summit Land Conservancy, requested a continuance until March 27. The elected officials agreed to the date.
Fox told the mayor and City Council the not-for-profit organization recently received new documents related to the conservation easement and requires “some time to vet them.” She said there is also continuing internal discussions at Summit Land Conservancy about the wording of a conservation easement.
The elected officials did not receive public input and did not discuss the matter.
Finalizing a conservation easement will be a landmark step in the decades of talks about Treasure. The previous owner spent years pursuing a major development on the land, drawing opposition throughout the long-running discussions, before a deal was reached for City Hall to acquire the land in a conservation purchase.
The $64 million purchase price was, by a wide margin, the most expensive in the history of the municipal open space program.
The conservation easement that is expected to be placed on the land is of special note since the acreage includes Park City Mountain terrain. The easement that was put to the City Council on Thursday anticipated the land would continue to be used as terrain at a mountain resort.
A series of clauses in the proposed conservation easement language addressed the skiing terrain, including one stating that the municipal government “may modify the existing rights related to ski resort operations or enter into new agreements to grant changes to ski resort operations, including by allowing changes to the design or size of the ski lift, changes to permit a different form of aerial ski lift, changes to the location or alignment of the ski lift, additional ski runs or the re-alignment of existing runs, and/or changes to snowmaking infrastructure.”
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