August 28, 2025
Utah Court of Appeals
2025 UT App 130 (click for full text of opinion)
The Utah Court of Appeals upheld the denial of an administrative conditional use permit by finding that public comments rebutting applicant’s expert reports and calculations regarding parking established reasonable doubts that the application did not comply with required criteria.
Park City’s Land Management Code requires conditional use permits to be approved by the Planning Commission after a public hearing. Alternatively, the code also provides for an administrative conditional use permit (ACUP), which is an expedited administrative process under certain circumstances decided by the Planning Director, but whose decision is still subject to review by the Commission. Park City Mountain Resort attempted to use the ACUP process to obtain conditional approval to replace/upgrade some of its ski lifts. While initially approved by the Director, a group of citizens appealed the decision to the Commission, which denied the application concluding that the application had not met requirements, including one criterion dealing with parking mitigation.
Specifically, a parking mitigation plan was required as part of the application. The plan provided by the Resort consisted of a report outlining a new paid parking system that Resort’s experts asserted would decrease parking needs, which included a spreadsheet with calculations to support the Report’s conclusions. As part of the public hearing process before the Commission, several citizens challenged the calculations and numbers in the Resort’s reports. The Commission concluded that the Planning Commission erred in concluding that the application complied with applicable criteria as it found that some of the numbers in the report were unverifiable.
The Resort sought judicial review and argued that the Commission did not give sufficient weight to the Resort’s experts and that the Commission had improperly yielded to public clamor. The district court disagreed, and the Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court’s reasoning that public comments that raised reasonable questions about the reliability of the expert analysis underlying the Resort’s parking mitigation plan were not public clamor, but are reasonable concerns based on evidence in the record that cast doubt on whether the report was reliable. The Court of Appeals therefore concluded that the Commission’s findings were supported by substantial evidence and that it had not acted arbitrarily and capriciously when it determined the Resort’s application did not meet required criteria.
Takeaway: When public comments provide information that speaks to the application’s compliance with applicable regulations, this may properly be considered as evidence. However, public “clamor”, on the other hand, is a more subjective term that, on another occasion, the Court of Appeals has commented as “connoting a degree of irrationality or emotion” synonymous with “hubbub, rumpus, tumult, and din,” and is not a legally sufficient basis for denial. See, Harmon City, Inc. v. Draper City, 2000 UT App 31, P27.
