Mathew Prince talks Vail Resorts, Park City

So, I was born and raised here. I care a ton about this town and I can't remember being more discouraged. Like the 5-acre site: I don't care what you build, just build something. We have gotten to a place where we are just paralyzed. This town used to do deals on handshakes. I had a meeting with a guy who just wanted to put heated sidewalks down basically in a portion of the business district. He would pay for it all himself. He'd pay for all of the heating himself. The city engineer said, "I think it's a great idea." It got completely tied up in planning and legal here. There's way too much that we have basically with the staff here. And again, they work really hard, but we need more artists and architects and fewer technocrats and bureaucrats. We are strangling this place by just saying nothing can ever change. The fact that we're debating whether the steps going up to City Hall are historic and need to be preserved in any way—who cares? At the end of the day, we're seeing tax revenue decline like crazy. We're seeing merchants on Main Street shuttering because they can't continue to survive. And when my dad was growing up here, he used to come up to Park City to see it as the ghost town. And I worry if we don't actually start building things and making this place better, that's what's coming back.

It is insane to me that we see a 25% decrease in tax revenue and that the city accountants are like, "Well, you know, if we do some creative accounting, it doesn't look so bad." The minute a company said that, you would say, "There's fraud going on there." And I'm not accusing the city of fraud, but I am accusing everyone of basically whistling past the graveyard. I care about this place a ton, and I'm having a hard time getting excited about investing in it because everyone here is trying to preserve some past that never existed. I was here in the '70s. It sucked, right? Anyone who's like, "I want to go back to that"—chances are that what they remember was what it was like being 20 and drinking a lot, doing drugs, and sleeping around. And then they're trying to worship and fetishize that. That's a horrible thing. We've got to get back to actually trying to build things and making this community better. My challenge to any high schooler listening to this is come to the next planning commission meeting. Come to the next city council meeting, because when those people show up, as opposed to the absolute usual forces who we hear way too much from, then we'd actually build a community which people would want to live in. I am proud of the fact that I grew up here. I want to invest in this place, but I'm really discouraged that we've built a place that went from doing deals on handshakes to a place where, immediately when you try to do anything unique or original here, or try and invest in the community at all, the first thing you get is just a series of lawsuits. And I think we've seen real great leaders step away from this place because they're just so discouraged. That has to change, and if it doesn't, again, Park City is going to be a ghost town.

I mean, you should make this a place where you want to be. Again, my ideas are not necessarily right, but I'm just like, "Do something." But I would close Main Street to vehicles. I would put a true trolley that goes up and down on tracks. I'd open kiosks all the way down for various merchants. I'd develop Swede Alley. I'd certainly put a grocery store. I'd put several more hotels. City Hall is insane to be City Hall. The number of parking spots that get taken up in China Bridge by city vehicles—every single one of those vehicles parking there is costing a local merchant over $120 a day. That's killing them. And so we should move City Hall to the 5-acre site, and make that a hotel. We need great hotels down here. Other things that should happen: at the town lift, we should build a gondola that goes from here to Alta. Think about how amazing that is. Run it until 1:00 in the morning, allow anyone who's staying over in the Cottonwood Canyons to be able to come over, have dinner, see a show, go out for a drink, and then get on the gondola and go back and stay there. As well as doing that, we've got to bring more people and life to this place. And again, I think there's a sort of reverence of, "Oh my gosh, it's so historic, it's got to always look exactly the same." That's just garbage. We've turned Old Town into just a series of Airbnbs. I think we're basically the only family that lives in Old Town anymore. And that's horrible. You want people to be here, but those are expensive homes and they're pretty small. So let's relax some of the regulations. Sure, they can still look like miners' shacks, but let them combine two of them together so you can actually have a home where people want to invest and live. Those are the sorts of things that have to happen if we're going to be able to have this as a sustainable place. But stop talking about the issues and actually build something. We spend way too much time debating this. I don't care what goes on the 5-acre site, but if we don't break ground in the next year, we are a failure as a community. Simple as that.