14% of Park City’s workforce lives within city limits

The Park City Chamber of Commerce held a panel discussion on Tuesday, August 30 to discuss workforce challenges facing local businesses. Photo: Parker Malatesta

PARK CITY, Utah — On Tuesday, August 30, the Park City Chamber of Commerce hosted a panel discussion about workforce challenges currently facing the community.

A variety of issues were discussed, such as affordable housing, changing workforce demographics, rising wages, and the delta variant.

Jeff Jones, Economic Development Director for Summit County, gave two statistics that symbolize the uniqueness of the local economy. He said 14 percent of the workforce in Park City live within city limits. 38 percent of employees in Summit County reside within the county.

The low numbers are almost exclusively blamed on the lack of local affordable housing.

Jones discussed the shifting demographics of the national workforce, such as the declining birth rate, baby boomers retiring, and the declining male labor participation rate.

There are currently fewer job listings today (29,825 jobs) in the county than there were in 2019 (31, 416). However, the unemployment rate in Summit County is 2.4 percent.

Jones had some advice for local business:

• Hang on to the employees you currently have, even if that means paying a little more.
• Get creative — think about implementing job shares with different businesses between the winter and summer seasons to keep employees in town
• Be open to trial and error/have an entrepreneurial spirit

Park City council member Becca Gerber talked about her experience learning what other mountain towns are doing about affordable housing.

She talked about her post-college years in Park City when Old Town was full of young people that were willing to work long hours in order to have some free time to ski or hike.

“Old Town was filled with young people, they swarmed Prospector,” Gerber said. “[Young people were] working in the resorts, working in the restaurants, working all over town. Now, as the years went on and housing got more expensive, many people moved on.”

She referred to a 2016 housing assessment the city conducted that concluded that Park City must build 80 affordable units every year, or they risk losing 15 percent of the local workforce. She said they will be conducting an updated assessment soon and she believes the updated figure will be more like 100 units per year.

Gerber talked about the possibility of businesses and property owners coming together on a master lease for employees and having the city subsidize some of those rents.

“The City has taken generally a fairly light catch on entering the free market,” said Jonathan Weidenhamer, Economic Development Director for Park City Municipal. “It’s one thing to have an affordable housing policy and build housing and put in firefighters, city hall staff, and teachers. It’s yet a completely different thing to figure out how we would subsidize or get into the market.”

Weidenhamer threw out some ideas such as a tax incentive or rebate for longer-term rentals rather than short-term. Or the City offering a low-interest or no-interest loan for a resident to build an accessory unit for employee housing (like above a garage).