Meredith Reed, who currently serves as president of the Park City Board of Education, is running for the District 5 council seat. Photo: Meredith Reed

SUMMIT COUNTY, Utah — Meredith Reed has spent the past several years at the center of some of Park City School District’s most turbulent moments. Now she’s asking voters in Summit County’s District 5 to trust that what she learned there has prepared her for a seat on the county council.

Reed, who serves as president of the Park City Board of Education, is running in the new district-based race that covers Jeremy Ranch, Pinebrook, and Summit Park — communities she knows firsthand. She and her husband, a retired Army colonel, first rented in Pinebrook when they arrived in Park City in 2009, eventually bought in Jeremy Ranch, and returned there permanently after years of moving with the military.

“This is where I want to be,” she said. “I love this community, and I believe deeply in public service.”

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Housing, transportation, and the question of balance

Reed said her campaign priorities — housing, transportation, and future planning — are difficult to separate because they’re deeply connected. Pressed to choose one, she landed on housing.

“In order to have a robust and vital community, we need the people that work here, and as much as possible want to live here, to have housing that’s accessible to them,” she said. “Without that, our community suffers in a lot of ways.”

She specified that need-restricted ownership housing, not just rentals, must be part of the solution—an area she said many communities are still working to figure out.

On transportation and development pressure, Reed said she hears District 5 residents grappling with the same tension she’s felt personally: the desire for more housing for people who live and work here, balanced against not losing what drew people to the community in the first place.

She also addressed the potential conflict between her real estate work and land use decisions directly. “I’m not a developer,” she said. “I’m just as mindful of it as everyone else is. I don’t want to lose the things that we love here.”

On district representation

Reed said she was not personally in favor of moving from an at-large to a district-based council structure, though she acknowledged the decision wasn’t hers to make. She expects the shift will feel subtle at first, but predicts it will produce more parochial, district-focused representation over time as election cycles accumulate.

“The people who are elected are responsible to the voters who elected them,” she said. “I think we’ll see how that evolves.”

The school board record

Reed’s path to this candidacy runs directly through the Park City School District, and voters are likely to scrutinize that record.

The board she now leads has navigated a difficult few years. Former Superintendent Jill Gildea’s tenure ended amid community controversy, followed by an interim superintendent period and, separately, the departure of Chief Operating Officer Mike Tanner — the highest-paid COO in Utah’s K-12 system at the time, who was found to have been living in Chicago for part of the year. An external investigation later cited dishonesty as a possible cause for his termination.

Reed became board president in January 2025 and said her first priority was finding the right superintendent to stabilize the district. She credits that hire — Lyndsay Huntsman — as the turning point.

“I needed somebody that could hit the ground running, that knew where the deficits were with the community, that knew where the deficits were within the district — in terms of culture, in terms of communication, in terms of leadership priorities,” Reed said. “Lindsay has far exceeded what I hoped for.”

More recently, the district’s Treasure Mountain construction project drew state scrutiny. Utah regulators cited the district for an asbestos violation after demolition proceeded in areas where asbestos-containing materials had not been properly removed. Separately, a contractor discharged contaminated groundwater containing arsenic and lead into Silver Creek, a Class 1C waterway, without proper permits. Both incidents triggered state oversight and public concern.

Reed said the lesson she takes from it is the importance of communication. “You’re never going to get every single person to understand clearly what’s going on,” she said, “but as much as you can possibly do that — over-communicate about projects, about timelines, about goals — that helps make the whole thing successful. You want to have a community on your side.”

What she says she brings

Reed frames her candidacy around what she calls positive leadership — a philosophy she said she has pursued deliberately, through tools like CliftonStrengths assessments and years of managing complex organizations in the military and elected office.

“I know, and I believe, because I’ve seen it and lived it, the immense value and impact of positive leadership and relationships in governing,” she said. She pointed to the importance of building connections not just within Summit County but with other counties and with state legislators — an arena she said local government can’t afford to cede.

“We have a legislature that has demonstrated its willingness to make laws without input,” she said. “Saying ‘I’m going to take my ball and go home’ doesn’t help us. We have to find ways to build those connections.”

Editor’s note: This story is part of TownLift’s 2026 election coverage. TownLift is interviewing candidates across local races to help voters better understand the people seeking public office, their priorities, and their approach to governing ahead of the June primary election.