Treasure deal, once seen as breaking logjam, now all but abandoned

Jay Hamburger THE PARK RECORD

Treasure had already confounded Park City officials by the spring of 2011, seven years after the developers submitted plans to build a project involving upward of 1 million square feet on a hillside overlooking Old Town.

City Hall, in an effort to reach a solution after an impasse in the project talks, crafted a program that would allow the Treasure partnership to shift a portion of the long-standing development rights attached to the hillside to another location. Some at the time saw the program, known as transferring development rights, or TDRs, as a logjam-breaking conservation move that could result in a Treasure deal that located much of the development off the highly visible hillside.

A deal was never reached. Many of those discussions were held in private between City Hall officials and the Treasure partnership. The issues that prevented an agreement are not known, but it is likely there could have been sticking points regarding the value of the Treasure development rights and the eventual location of the rights if they were shifted elsewhere.

It now seems almost certain that a conservation deal will not happen. The Treasure partnership earlier in June relaunched discussions with the Park City Planning Commission on a project that has been under consideration on and off since 2004. The most recent hiatus provided time for the ultimately unsuccessful conservation negotiations.

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