My heart goes out to the people in Henefer and other areas affected by the Rocky Canyon fire.  A little over two years ago, the Yellow Lake fire was threatening my neighborhood, before the wind shifted and pushed the danger across the pass to Hanna. The anxiety level of being ready to evacuat e, or for Henefer, actually out of your home, is hard to describe until you’ve felt the ashes falling on your porch. You are completely powerless.  I remember being awake night after night trying to engineer a string of lawn sprinklers that might, maybe, protect some of the buildings even with our lame water pressure.  Once it’s burning, all you can do is watch, worry and appreciate the courage of the firefighters who are doing all they can. Stay safe, everybody. In what seems like a classic failure of process, UDOT has once again delayed the decision on the route of the Heber bypass road until the spring of 2027 (want to bet?).  The road has been in the planning stages since Noah got off the ark.  They scrapped the prior design because they had been dithering so long that the traffic increases had made it obsolete years before the first shovel of dirt was moved.  There were local concerns about the most recent design and so it’s back for revisions and the decision — not the construction — had been pushed off again.  Meanwhile traffic gets heavier by the day. It’s a difficult problem. The traffic on Heber’s Main Street is both terribly congested and unpleasantly noisy. What used to be a really charming downtown is now a noisy, smelly, hostile snarl of traffic. But the alternative is a desecration of the North Fields, the green expanse that has more or less defined Heber forever. No good answer, just the least worst solution.  At the intersection of River Road and U.S. 40, there is what appears to be a strip mine operation. It’s actually a luxury hotel and spa development called The Slope that will be operated as an Andaz Hotel, part of the Hyatt family that is apparently so far beyond my price range that I’ve never heard of it.  It will join a long list of high-end hotel/spas attending to the important exfoliation needs of the ultra-wealthy. Maybe not the most socially necessary land use, but it’s close to the airport.  The Eastern Summit County Planning Commission sent a unanimous negative recommendation on the Lost Creek Village re-zone request. That would have built a town of 3,000 units — about 10,000 people — in Browns Canyon.  It now goes to the Summit County Council for their consideration. Given the infrastructure costs for a development of that size — there are no existing water or sewer systems to expand on, schools or fire stations — there is no way that a home there will be within the price range of the people working at the exfoliation hotels, fire departments, schools or the Gucci store in Francis.  What’s the point if a development doesn’t solve the imbalance between the exfoliators and the exfoliated, and instead brings in more of the people who need assistance exfoliating? We just keep building the wrong stuff around here. The County Council will be looking at it and considering both their own pipe dream of building 1,500 affordable housing units and the realities of what a new population center bigger than Kamas, Francis and Oakley combined has on existing services.  Of course, lurking in the background is the constant threat that the thuggish state Legislature will approve something worse over local objections. I suppose to be polite, they have to hold a hearing before saying “no” to the proposal, but that’s the only answer to it.  The County Council is looking at streamlining their zone change process. It takes years now. It begins with the zone change proposal, then an amendment of the general plan, then under the current process, a development agreement that ties the zone change to a specific site plan and project design.  So something isn’t just re-zoned to be “commercial.” It gets rezoned to be an exact pre-approved project. That loads enormous cost on the applicant without knowing what the outcome of the process is, and if the applicant is successful, it also makes future modifications more difficult, like the factory outlet mall changes.  It’s a broken process. It needs to be streamlined so we can say “no” a lot more quickly than that. Given the tsunami of already approved development hitting us from all sides, the most junior planner covering the front counter ought to be able to say “no” and adjourn for lunch. Maybe when everything already approved is built, if there’s anything left, we could look at what happens next. We surely don’t need more. Park City’s 5-acre parcel on Bonanza Drive continues to grind through the process.  After decades of planning, that seems farther from a community consensus than it was several years ago. At this point, why don’t we put a nice bronze plaque on one of the concrete ruins of the former businesses, and declare it a “landmark historic industrial brownfield” preserved for posterity.  Meanwhile, the school district is wrapping up construction on the baseball facility. It should be done in time to host the World Series, and appears up to the task.  Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986. The post More Dogs on Main: The exfoliation balance appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less