THINC Park City

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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Jay Hamburger, THE PARK RECORD

The Treasure partnership on Wednesday night restarted its talks with the Park City Planning Commission, drawing a large crowd of opponents who seized on long-held concerns during the first hearing about the project since 2010.

The Planning Commission meeting on Wednesday — shifted from the Park City Council chambers at the Marsac Building to the more spacious Santy Auditorium at the Park City Library to accommodate a larger crowd — drew a little more than 100 people. The crowd appeared to be jammed with Treasure critics, and testimony was heavily weighted against the project.

It was an important meeting for the Planning Commission, the Treasure side and the crowd as it marked the beginning of what is likely the final round of talks between the developers and the Planning Commission in a discussion that has stretched on and off since 2004. The Planning Commission was not prepared on Wednesday to delve into the details of the Treasure proposal, which involves approximately 1 million square feet on a hillside overlooking Old Town along the route of the Town Lift.

“The same basic monstrosity,” Brian Van Hecke, the leader of a Treasure opposition group called Treasure Hill Impact Neighborhood Coalition, said during the hearing as he compared the project to other iterations considered in the past.

Van Hecke said he earlier had faith a compromise would be reached, but none was negotiated and the project remains as it was. He said a new study of Treasure-related traffic is needed, contended that the project would be a sprawling complex and said there would be “massive scarring” of the hillside.

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