Summit County’s workforce is up 46% since 2019, and visitors are down

Photo: Richard Burlton

Placer.ai analysis shows out-of-market visits down 5% since 2019 while employee counts jumped 46%

SUMMIT COUNTY, Utah — Summit County officials said Wednesday that anonymized cell phone location data suggests the area may be drawing slightly fewer out-of-market visitors even as its employee base grows. A shift council members said could carry implications for traffic, tourism, housing, and local planning.

The discussion came during a County Council work session introducing Placer.ai, a location analytics platform the county plans to use to better understand movement patterns, visitation trends, and demand at local sites. Staff said the platform draws on aggregated, anonymized mobile-location data and other signals to estimate how people move through geographic areas.

Local readers may recognize the platform from earlier coverage. TownLift used Placer.ai data in 2022 to estimate that Park City Mountain visitation climbed 11% during the 2021-22 ski season, while cautioning that the figures were not exact headcounts.

Council member Megan McKenna said figures presented to the council showed out-of-market visitors down about 5% from 2019 to 2025, while employee counts rose roughly 46% over the same period. She said the contrast underscored the value of better data as the county plans for growth.

McKenna also said the data could be “hugely valuable” in places like Kimball Junction, where the county is trying to pinpoint where traffic is coming from and whether out-of-county visitors are adding pressure at recreation sites and other community assets.

Jeff Jones, who presented the tool to the council, said staff have already loaded custom geographic boundaries into the system, including fire districts, school districts, and areas of unincorporated Summit County. That allows the county to examine movement patterns not just countywide but also in more targeted areas, such as neighborhoods, service districts, and specific sites, he said.

Staff said the county has also begun comparing visitation data against transient room tax and restaurant tax collections to better gauge the economic value of different kinds of visits. According to examples shared on Wednesday, an out-of-market visitor in February generated about $5 in tax revenue per person, compared with about 90 cents in August. Staff said that suggests not all visitation produces the same economic return.

The platform can also examine specific public facilities. Using the Basin Recreation Fieldhouse as an example, staff said the site logged about 374,000 visits in 2025, with an average stay of 76 minutes. Similar analyses could be run for parks, trailheads, and parking lots if the council wants more regular reporting, staff said.

Still, council members said the data should be treated as a planning tool, not a final answer in itself. Council member Roger Armstrong called the information “really interesting” but still “raw,” and said it would be more useful if staff could refine it to answer more specific questions, including where employees are coming from, how county amenities are used, and how those patterns might shape transportation and housing decisions.

Armstrong also said the county may want to distinguish between more itinerant workers, such as those in construction, and workers tied to fixed local jobs, such as health care and education, if the data will inform future policy.

Staff said the county is already sharing some of the data with the Park City Chamber and plans to coordinate more regularly with partners. Jones said the platform also allows Summit County to compare its trends with those of other ski markets, including Aspen and Blaine County.

Council members did not give formal direction on Wednesday, but the discussion suggested they see the platform as a potentially useful way to test assumptions about how people move through Summit County and how those patterns are changing.