Scott Loomis returned to the Mountainlands Community Housing Trust he led for two decades to help the affordable housing nonprofit through a rough patch when a successor left after six months. He returned again Friday to Park City’s Rotary Park from retirement in Tucson, Arizona, to accept the Bob Wells Award for his work and in no small part for his help in righting a ship in the long quest for housing that workers can afford in an increasingly expensive place to live. Old friends and housing advocates greeted him and wife Carol after unsuccessfully trying to make the event a surprise, which the close-knit group joked is not really possible in classic Park City. A longtime Friday-lunch clique circled portable lawn chairs in a shady spot while Mountainlands board members, staff and community leaders present and past caught up with each other nearer the pavilion. Current board President Peter Tomai started the acknowledgements with his own story. “One of my big passions of for affordable housing is what attracted me to Park City more than half my life ago, so we’re talking 36 years ago, was the fact that this was a town at the time that I could live, work and play in, and it was tough on a ski patrolman’s salary at $5.56 an hour,” he said. “And yes, I slung a few drinks on Main Street in addition to that.” He and five other guys on the ski patrol rented a decrepit house next to the park before it was rebuilt into the nice one he pointed out from the pavilion. “It really created for me an unbelievable sense of community here in Park City, and from that it gave me a stepping stone,” he said. He bought his first house in Park Meadows for $155,000. “Then you fast forward to today, where we’ve all heard very publicly, unfortunately, about the ski patrol getting a minimum of $21 an hour,” he said. “OK, a ski patrolman’s expectation of income has gone up four times since I was a ski patrolman in 1990. However, what’s happened to that house in Park Meadows that I bought for $150,000? That hasn’t gone up four times. It’s gone up 16 times.” Peter Tomai, the president of the board for Mountainlands Community Housing Trust, spoke about his own path to home ownership in Park City before the group presented former Executive Director Scott Loomis with the Bob Wells Award on Friday at Rotary Park. Credit: David Jackson/Park Record The feverish rise in housing costs afflicts communities well beyond ski towns, he said. At root, workers unable to live in their community unravel the tapestry that makes a community, a point Tomai credited to longtime planner and Leadership Park City founder Myles Rademan, attending with the Friday lunch group, and the idea of community as “common unity.” “You know, I did all sorts of things,” Tomai said, listing some of his public service activities with civic organizations, including Mountainlands. “All of that was enabled by the fact that I lived, worked and played here, and I had the time to become a member of a community.” Loomis began with Mountainlands as executive director in 2001, hired in part by Bob Wells, president of the nonprofit’s board as well as vice president of real estate and development at Deer Valley Resort from before it opened in 1981 to 2015, when he died of cancer. “When I first started, Park City was talking about affordable housing, maybe Moab a little bit, maybe St. George area a little bit, but it wasn’t a topic that anybody was too interested in around the state and the country,” Loomis said during his acceptance speech. “And now look where we are 25 years later. The state is talking about it. The whole country is talking about it. So we did it at a time when it was extremely difficult to do, and there wasn’t much support for it. But I think we proved that not only is it keeping this community alive, but it’s something that every community in the country needs now.” Staff and board members said Mountainlands has provided between 900 and 1,000 affordable units over the years since it began in 1993. Owners help build their own homes in a variety of housing types in Summit and Wasatch counties. Loomis spoke about Bob Wells at length, his role in helping start Mountainlands, coming to all the meetings, working the volunteer days, attending the ground-breakings, in the early days helping figure out the finances and low-income housing tax credit intricacies. Loomis helped come up with the Bob Wells Award and presented the first one to … Bob Wells in 2013, the 20th anniversary of the Mountainlands Community Housing Trust. Scott Loomis spoke more about Bob Wells, for whom the Mountainlands Community Housing Trust award is named, than himself after receiving the award this year. Credit: David Jackson/Park Record “He always showed up and did a great job,” Loomis said. “And as (Wells’ wife) Patti said, just as humble and quiet as can be doing it.” Former Park City Mayor Andy Beerman said after the speeches that Loomis did a great job himself with a difficult concept, developing affordable housing. “Nonprofits for open space or trails or dogs, yeah, everybody loves them. Everything he does is controversial, and so important,” Beerman said. And then Loomis came back when a successor didn’t work out. Recovering from the pandemic’s economic disruptions and supply chain shortages do doubt was part of it. But the organization appeared to find its feet again in the yearlong interim Loomis guided Mountainlands until they hired their current executive director, Jason Gliddon, in 2024. Glidden was out of town Friday, but praised Loomis from afar. “His commitment to affordable housing has not only provided homes, but has strengthened neighborhoods, supported local workers, and improved the quality of life for countless residents,” Glidden said. Bob Richer, who also has won the Bob Wells Award and was president of the Mountainlands board before Tomai, credited Loomis as the “foremost advocate and builder of affordable housing in Summit and Wasatch counties for 20 years.” “Thanks to Scott’s efforts, many families can live where they work, enriching our community’s diversity,” Richer said. Mountainlands staffer Meredith Mortimer was excited about working with people who find the path to being able to live and own homes in the Wasatch Back through her organization. “Literally in the last open house we had, I was introducing people in the next group to people in the current group,” she said, launching into anecdotes about how singles had found a home, how couples had met, one while both were in the BYU band, how the program was working for them. “I have some people like the couple that I think most about,” she said. “They came to the last open house. They’re so excited.” Today’s version of Tomai’s story, in other words, only in an environment in which the cost of housing has soared four times more than wages since his time on the ski patrol. Bob Richer, Patti Wells, Scott Loomis and Peter Tomai share in the moment Friday after Mountainlands Community Housing Trust awarded Loomis the Bob Wells Award service at Rotary Park. 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