An abuse of power

Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 10/22/2005 02:36 PM

An abuse of power
PARK CITY VS. AIR FORCE Resort plan doesn't boost national defense

There are reasons why the federal government has the power to ignore local zoning laws, and none of them has anything to do with skiing.

Yet federal primacy over local land-use laws isn't being used to locate an unpopular but necessary radar installation, missile site or extraterrestrial receiving center at the eastern entrance to Park City.

No, the Air Force wants to turn 27 acres in spare federal land on State Route 248 into a vacation resort, complete with 150-room hotel. It would be owned and operated by a private developer but give preferential deals to military personnel.

It's land in a corridor that Park City has been trying to keep open as an attractive entrance to a city that lives by its natural appeal. The city went so far as to pay $875,000 for the old Imperial Hotel on Main Street, hoping to lure the Air Force into trading for that property as a retreat. But the Pentagon passed.

Park City officials can likely recoup their investment by selling the Imperial to someone else. But they, like all Americans, might well wonder why the Air Force is in the resort business, lending its legal muscle to a private partner.

Nobody begrudges our service men and women, and their families, the opportunity for some R&R on a beautiful example of the land they are fighting to defend. But it is not clear why the military has to grow its own when there are so many good resorts out there, resorts that ought to be willing to negotiate deals for favorable rates for service members.

Such a deal should have been cut with Earl Holding, the owner of the Snowbasin resort near Ogden, who benefited from the original land swap that allowed Snowbasin to expand for the 2002 Olympics, swept aside the Hill Haus ski lodge on what was then Forest Service land, and left the feds with the Park City property.

Access to Snowbasin, after all, would have been much more convenient to Hill Air Force Base than is the Park City site.

It all sounds like the controversial Supreme Court case that allowed local government to condemn private property for commercial development by declaring that development and the tax base it would supposedly build to be a "public purpose."

The Air Force's legal immunity, granted to give it the power to provide for the common defense, is in this instance being abused. Utah's members of Congress should press the Pentagon for a change in strategy.