A life’s page turned, free to read again for fun, travel plans unfettered at last from city schedules, Nann Worel won’t be looking back when her term as mayor of Park City ends in a couple of weeks. No more dense, dry, detailed staff reports, endless emails, excusing herself for calls that m ust be taken, eternal meetings, being on for everyone all the time. The end of 2025 concludes 15 years of civic service on the Planning Commission, as a city councilor, and as mayor. This bucket list has overflowed. Whew. Enough. But you know what? Mostly, she’s had a blast and recommends the work to anyone with a heart for such service. Just make sure you know where the council chambers are before showing up to interview for a board seat or appointment to the council, as will happen in January. She remembered one of the 17 or 18 applicants for her council seat in 2022, after she’d become mayor, who asked her upstairs for directions. This was the first time the would-be appointee had been to City Hall. Still, maybe this was a sign of what she views as her crowning success after being elected  mayor: making the city and its governance a lot more open and accessible to residents. To that end, she said applications for appointments and citizen interaction leaped during her term. Such was the enthusiasm even for people who had never entered the Marsac Building, never mind fully considered the responsibility they found themselves eager to take on. “The interest and feeling like people want to be part of the process is really encouraging to me,” she said Monday afternoon from one of two sofa chairs in a living room environment at the back of her City Hall office, well behind the traditional work desk. She ran for mayor in the wake of the pandemic shutdowns in large part because she felt the municipal government had grown disconnected from the citizens. Among those, senior citizens in particular had really soured on city leaders, she recalled. “When I was on council, the relationship between the city and the seniors was rocky for a variety of reasons, and my hat is off to the leadership and members of the senior center because when I took office as mayor, I said we need to reset,” she said. “To their credit, they said, ‘Yeah, let’s bury the hatchet and put aside our old, you know, and trust each other again and move forward.’” Nonetheless, as far as negotiations got with a new senior center on the Mawhinney Lot across Park Avenue from the Park City Library, well, count the fact there still isn’t a new center at the top of Mayor Nann’s frustrations during her term. This one is an even bigger disappointment for Worel than the Sundance Film Festival leaving, the Kimball Arts Center leaving, and the 5-Acre Site at Bonanza Park going on nine years an eyesore since the city purchased the space for $19 million. The journey toward a new senior center has outlasted all of those. She believes it will happen, though. “I’m very confident, very confident,” she said. “And this council all agrees that we need a senior center, that we need to be doing something, and that’s why we’ve been able to move the needle as far as we have. It just needs to keep going.” Park City Mayor Nann Worel takes part in a Veterans Day visit with the kids at PC Tots. Credit: Michael Ritucci/Park Record Plenty did get done, of course. The state-of-the-art 3Kings water treatment facility, nationally recognized child care support, the Treasure Hill conservation easement, the often overlooked yet essential work with budgets that today has Park City’s financial position and reserves extremely healthy in the face of the most uncertainty since COVID and more competition than ever in an economy based on visitors. Studio Crossing began during her first term on the Planning Commission, one of those force-fed deals from the state Legislature to build the film studios that eventually evolved through Worel’s involvement as a city councilor and then mayor to the single largest puzzle piece with affordable housing. It was a pinnacle for her to speak at the ribbon-cutting at last this fall for the first 104 units out of what will be over 200 when fully built out. “You know, I think that getting the ribbon cut on Friday on EngineHouse, certainly,” she added. EngineHouse in Bonanza Park is the first city partnership on city land for affordable housing, in this case 99 new units in town as the city chips away at its goal of 800 new affordable housing units by the end of next year. She thought a moment.   “Honestly, I go back to opening up City Hall, because that’s the one. It was not open and you really get to know (people) when we did our mayor and council (sessions) in the neighborhoods where I take City Hall on Saturday mornings with doughnuts and cocoa. You make a lot of friends if you’ve got doughnuts.” She said people are willing to ask questions when you are there in a neighborhood since you are, well, there. Issues that preceded Worel, Beerman, Thomas, Williams, Ochs, et al, will continue beyond their mayoral successors, too, as they do in other ski towns: traffic, development, cost of housing, affordability, erosion of a working class that lives in town, the effects of a warming climate, sprawl beyond the city limits. These were the big issues in municipal races 15 years ago and they persist today. And another recurring one, preparations for the 2034 Olympics. Worel was part of working for the bid, which came on the eve of the Paris Games in 2024, and early committee work since then. New Mayor Ryan Dickey will take that torch from here, though Worel looks forward to volunteering in some way. Utah and Park City will have their hands full, certainly, with many challenges. Worel said the largest has to do with mindset. Mayor Nann Worel works through Park City Council business. Credit: Michael Ritucci/Park Record “It’s recognizing that things aren’t going to stay the same,” she said. “We can’t just rely on our past in order to move forward in the future, and we have to thoughtfully capitalize on what makes us unique as a community.” She put up Main Street as a prime example. “Certainly our historic Main Street is one of those great things,” she said. “So how do we make sure that historic Main Street can remain competitive given the pressures that we have around us, choices people have to make?” In politics, challenges can be more personal, too. Mayors can set tones — hers was largely patience and welcoming public dialogue — but they don’t vote. Councilors, like any herd of cats, can be … frustrating. “My goal always is to get something done,” she said. “And it’s extremely frustrating to feel like a council member is putting up an unnecessary barrier to get accomplished whatever it is that we’re trying to get accomplished.” Still, she recognized that each member of this council is committed to the work and while some have gone about it differently than she would, she said they pretty much landed in the same places. The ranked-choice revote, though. That really pissed her off. Councilor Bill Ciraco had a change of conscience and switched his previous vote for ranked-choice voting back to the traditional system of the past 140 years of the city in April, joining a majority with Councilors Ed Parigian and Jeremy Rubell. “I want to apologize to the people of Park City. In all of my 15 years of sitting up here on this dais, transparency and process have been key for me. And never in my 15 years on this dais have I been as ambushed as I felt last Thursday by council member Ciraco,” she erupted then. She acknowledged a lapse of temper uncharacteristic for her in public life and said she was concerned about setting a precedent for taking back votes after casting them. And perhaps she was more used to her time as a councilor talking through issues informally over lots of coffee with fellow Councilor Steve Joyce, for example, who had much different views than hers. Did she stay angry with Ciraco? “No, I mean things resolve. You’ve got to move on. You’ve got to work together. But it was not just Bill. It was that the council was really willing to reverse themselves,” she said. “I was concerned about the precedent that was going to set. So what now? If somebody doesn’t like a vote, they can bring it back the next week and say, ‘Let’s redo it this way’?” It hasn’t happened again, and the election proceeded through a primary with eight candidates, which winnowed to four for the general election, then three when John Kenworthy dropped out. Park City Mayor Nann Worel announced she would not run for reelection during her annual State of the City address in March. Credit: Park Record file photo by Clayton Steward Worel signed a letter to the editor along with nine other women in elected office shortly before the primary election Aug. 12 that criticized Kenworthy for suggesting during a campaign gathering he was Councilor Tana Toly’s “big brother” and could help her be a stronger councilor. The signees did not attend the coffee klatch where he spoke, though several candidates, including Beth Armstrong and Toly, were present. Kenworthy made it through the primary and then quit a few week later in the run-up to the general election. Toly and Diego Zegarra went on to win handily over incumbent Councilor Jeremy Rubell.   Worel, noting she received most of the backlash afterward from the letter, said this wasn’t about Kenworthy so much as an extra layer of challenge female leaders still must endure. She seldom mentioned being Park City’s first woman mayor while running or in governing, but said that nonetheless at least a vestige of a barrier remains, and she and others had run out of patience in the moment. “It’s not OK to say the things that have been and continue to be said to female leaders,” she said. “And I think that collectively, the 10 of us felt like it needed to be called out.” For his part, Kenworthy said he has been a big supporter of Toly, Worel and other women in community leadership and that he did not intend to “mansplain” in his remarks largely touting Toly. Harder in some ways for Worel was watching two longtime friends finish seven votes apart, close enough for a recount, in the race to replace her as mayor. Worel had encouraged Councilor Ryan Dickey to run for mayor, just as she had urged him to run for the council in 2019 before he eventually was appointed to fill her seat in January 2022.   And Rubin had worked on her campaigns as a volunteer. The mayor’s race in particular was “really hard, just personally, really hard,” she said. “I bit my tongue till it bled many times with things that were said during the campaign that actually were not true.” The voter turnout at 63% was a record for Park City municipal elections, which dipped as low as 11% in the 2005 mayoral race. Mail-in voting, which began in 2013, tended to lift turnout into the 40 percentiles, and then it jumped this decade into the 50s and now 60s. Worel said she was struck most by the candidates’ energy and enthusiasm knocking on doors and holding campaign events. Her best advice for anyone thinking about running for office? It’s all Nike: Just do it. “There’s always going to be a reason why not to,” she said. “I almost didn’t run the first time because I hadn’t been here long enough or, you know, this, that or the other thing.” She and husband Mike, a still-practicing attorney, moved to Park City permanently in 2008 from Mobile, Alabama. There’s nothing to lose in trying, though. Win and you will have the adventure of a lifetime. Lose and you have gained tremendous insight from the experience, along with maybe some new friends. Park City Mayor Nann Worel and husband Mike went to Paris for the announcement on the eve of the 2024 Olympics that Utah and Park City had won the bid to host the 2034 Winter Games. The Worels endured that parent’s worst nightmare come true four days before she was sworn in as mayor. Their 32-year-old son, Christopher, died shockingly from an illness that wasn’t COVID. It didn’t change how she governed, once she decided to continue. She said she couldn’t imagine how she and Mike would have gotten through without the outpouring of support they experienced from the community then. “I think that it just reinforced the importance of compassion in everything that you’re doing,” she said. “And I know when people are angry with me and they shoot me nasty emails or yell at me in the grocery store or call me up or come in here to yell at me, … what they’re angry about isn’t about the city. It’s not about me, but about something else that’s going on in their life, and sometimes that’s really hard to remember.” So, maybe some things she won’t miss so much, but she said the bulk of her interactions with colleagues, staff, citizens energized her, and she very much enjoyed working with them. With such a community, she said, the future is bright for Park City. “I think that the possibilities are endless here. How we can continue to maintain our sense of community?” Park City is also a world-class resort town still on a big upswing. “And you know, because that’s always an edge that you’re walking, we want to make this the best place possible forever for our residents to live and thrive and be involved with and be proud of.” That work will pass to others now, however. She said she knows at least that she will live in Park City and she’ll volunteer, travel, spend more time at their second home in the Florida Panhandle, and read. “Yeah, that’s one thing I am going to do. I’ll get back in my book club,” she said. “Right now, I have time to read staff reports and all my emails that I get every day, and all of that. So I’m really looking forward to reading for fun.” For now, though, she’s focused on getting through the end of her term, hesitant to think too much about plans after that. “Well, a really good friend told me that you can’t start a new chapter until you finished the old one,” she said. “So I guess on Jan. 6 I’ll know what the new chapter is, because I’ll finish this one on Jan. 5.” It’s only coincidence that Jan. 6 is infamous for a president reluctant to let go. Worel has closed the book on elected office, she said. But she’ll always be available to help you if you decide you might want to go for it. Park City Mayor Nann Worel was the celebrity host for the 2024 Park City Spelling Bee regional contest. The winner Sasha Kenlon, left, sits with finalists Leo Dailey and Anthony Kondra. The post Fifteen years of civic service will do for outgoing Park City mayor appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less