Planning commission work session probes Red Pine Village access amendment after fire-safety concerns

Snyderville Basin Planning Commission commissioners and developers spent a work-session hour on Sept. 9 discussing a proposed amendment to the Red Pine Village portion of the Red Pine SPA development agreement that would allow gated, limited automobile access in addition to gondola service.

The applicant told the commission the requested wording change would give the project flexibility to provide safe ingress and egress in emergencies while keeping the gondola as the SPA’s primary access. “Our primary objective is to make sure that we can actually build a development and fire safety and access is our primary goal,” the applicant said during the session.

The applicant said current SPA language contemplates the gondola as primary access (Flight of the Canyons and the Sunrise Gondola) and that the amendment would clarify the ability to provide a gated road limited to residents, guests and emergency/service vehicles. The developers said they have added a second gondola (Sunrise) but cannot rely on gondola operations for evacuation because of wind, power outages and other interruptions.

Mike Owens, fire marshal for the Park City Fire Service District, told the commission he was not there to support or oppose the project but to make sure the project meets the fire code. “When it comes to fire safety…we need to have ways that not only we can get our fire vehicles in there, but also people can get out at the same time,” Owens said. He added that a gondola cannot be guaranteed to operate during an emergency and is inadequate for mass evacuation or moving emergency vehicles concurrently with evacuees. Owens also said wildfire risk in mountain settings has grown and that fire districts now plan for worst-case scenarios.

Commissioners pressed both technical and policy points. Some commissioners questioned whether adding a road would undercut the SPA’s car-light or car-free intent, noting that if most guests and residents rely on the gondola, a road might not solve evacuation capacity unless a substantial number of vehicles were present at the top. Commissioners asked for more data on maximum occupancy, projected vehicle counts at full buildout, and modeled evacuation times. Staff clarified that because the proposal amends a development agreement, the planning commission’s role is advisory: it will hold a public hearing and forward a recommendation to the county council, which is the final land-use authority for legislative amendments.

Developers said they would pursue multiple measures—roads built to county standards, secondary dirt/gravel emergency egress routes, shuttles for hotels and expanded on-site service vehicles—to increase redundancy, but they acknowledged some elements (exact vehicle counts, shuttle fleet sizing, seasonal variations) had not been fully analyzed. Multiple commissioners asked the applicant to provide traffic and capacity analysis, seasonal (summer/winter) evacuation scenarios, and explicit thresholds tying access provisions to life-safety metrics.

No formal action was taken in the work session; staff and applicants were asked to return with more detailed information, including traffic capacity modeling and specific emergency-access design criteria to support any amendment recommendation to council.

The discussion laid out the central tradeoff: meeting fire-code and evacuation requirements while preserving the SPA’s intended primary-gondola character.