Summit County Unemployment Rate December 2014 – 3.1%

Source Department of Workforce Services

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SUMMIT COUNTY, UTAH LARGEST EMPLOYERS

Source: Research 360, Decision Data
Source: Utah DWS

NOTE: The Following Information Does Not Include Federal, State or County Employers or Construction Companies

#1 Company Name Employees
#2 Deer Valley Resort 500-999
#3 The Canyons 500-999
#4 Backcounty Com, Inc. 250-499
#5 CFI Resorts Management, Inc. 250-499
#6 Montage Hotels & Resorts LLC 250-499
#7 Park City Mountain Resort 250-499
#8 Park City Surgical Center 250-499
#9 Stein Eriksen Lodge Owner’s Association 250-499
#10 Triumph Gear Systems, Inc. 250-499
#11 All Seasons Resort Management, Inc. 100-249
#12 Dakota Mountain Lodge 100-249
#13 District Office 100-249
#14 Glenwild Golf Club LLC 100-249
#15 Hotel Park City 100-249
#16 McDonald’s 100-249
#16 Park City Fire Service District 100-249

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Summit County, Utah Overview 2015

Economic Development Corporation of Utah

Summit County is located in Northern Utah, approximately 30 miles east of Salt Lake City in a geographic area known as the “Wasatch Back” referring to the backside of the Wasatch Mountains. It contains 39 of Utah’s highest peaks and has earned its reputation as an upscale getaway, bringing in many new development opportunities.

With a highly educated and affluent population, exceptional schools, a myriad of recreational opportunities, and an urban lifestyle within a rural setting, net in-migration is anticipated. In Summit County, tourism is the largest single component of the economic base; it provides more than 6,500 jobs in travel and recreation related employment, 53 percent of Summit County’s total employment. Previous economies were based on agriculture, logging, and mining.

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Vail to invest $50 million in upgrades at Park City, Canyons resorts

Deseret News
Morgan Jacobsen
Dec. 8 2014

PARK CITY — Park City Mountain Resort will receive a facelift over the coming year, including a gondola that will connect it with the adjacent Canyons Resort, the resorts’ owner announced Monday.

Vail Resorts Inc. plans to spend $50 million on improvements at both resorts, which combined will create the largest single ski area in the country, with 7,300 acres — more than 11 square miles — of skiable terrain, according to Bill Rock, Vail’s chief operating officer.

“I think people have envisioned something like this for many years,” Rock said. “This is an opportunity to take it to a whole new level and continue to garner the well-deserved reputation as a world-class mountain town and resort.”

Central to the plan is the Interconnect Gondola, an eight-passenger, high-speed lift running from the base of the existing Silverlode Lift at Park City to the Flatiron Lift at Canyons. The route will include an unload station at the top of Pine Cone Ridge, allowing riders to ski into either Canyons Resort or Park City Mountain Resort when conditions permit.

A one-way trip in the gondola will span almost 1 ½ miles, taking up to nine minutes, Rock said.

Park City upgrades

Vail plans to increase capacity on the King Con lift from four to six people. The Motherlode Lift will also be upgraded from a fixed-grip, three-person lift to a four-person, high-speed detachable chairlift. Both upgrades will reduce crowding and lift lines, Rock said.

The current Snow Hut restaurant will be torn down and built anew with 500 indoor seats at the base of the Silverlode Lift, next to the Park City terminal for the Interconnect Gondola. Parts of the Summit House restaurant will also be renovated.

The plan also includes almost $5 million in “catch-up” maintenance and upgrades at Park City, in addition to the $5 million in normal annual maintenance of the two resorts, Rock said.

Canyons upgrades

Additional snowmaking operations will be installed on two trails in the Iron Mountain area of Canyons, which resort officials expect will become increasingly central ski terrain because of its proximity to the Interconnect Gondola.

The Chicane ski trail will be widened to improve access to the Tombstone Express and Interconnect Gondola lifts.

The Red Pine Lodge restaurant at Canyons will also be renovated and expanded to accommodate an additional 250 indoor seats.

“Our goal is to have all this done next summer ready for next winter, so it’s a pretty substantial project,” Rock said. “That’s what makes this proposal so unprecedented is no one’s ever done an expansion like this in the U.S. ski industry, as far as we can tell, in one season.”

Rock declined to say whether the upgrades would affect admission prices.

Community impact

Markus Fragassi, manager at Park City Sport Ski & Snowboard Rentals, said the announcement gives answers to questions from locals and visitors wondering what the next step was for Park City Mountain Resort after it changed owners earlier this year.

“The reactions are very excited from guests coming in from out of town,” Fragassi said. “It’s going to be pretty huge after a couple years. It’s going to make the machine roll even faster.”

Fragassi, who works near the Town Lift in downtown Park City, said traffic will likely increase over the coming years, but he hopes the announcement will draw curiosity from new visitors this season.

“It might boost some interest for this season, not just future seasons,” he said. “It’s definitely going to show some local businesses that Vail is here to improve visits and get more people to come to town.”

For the 2015-16 ski season, Vail plans to operate Park City and Canyons as a unified resort under the name Park City Mountain Resort. The Canyons base area will be renamed Canyons at Park City.

Nathan Rafferty, president of Ski Utah, said combining the two resorts and making Utah home of the nation’s largest ski resort will “shine a really bright light” on Park City and the state.

“I think it’s really hard to overstate what a big thing this is for our industry,” Rafferty said. “I think it’s safe to say Utah will be one of (Vail’s) featured products for next year with so much going on out here.”

The project must gain approval from Park City and Summit County officials before construction can begin at the conclusion of the current ski season. But Park City Mayor Jack Thomas expressed enthusiasm for the proposal’s “commitment to the community.”

“Any improvement in the infrastructure on the mountain is a very positive thing because Park City Mountain Resort, Canyons Resort and Deer Valley Resort are really the economic engines of the community,” Thomas said. “So when they rebuild their engines, we’re excited about it.”

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Park City Mountain Resort is now simply ‘Park City’

New brand unveiled as Vail Resorts combines two properties

The Park Record
Jay Hamburger
07/31/2015

People planning to ski or snowboard at the resorts widely known as Park City Mountain Resort and Canyons Resort next winter will simply be headed to Park City.

PCMR officials on Wednesday introduced a widely anticipated rebranding of the two properties, which will be linked into a single resort by the start of the ski season in November. The resort said the combined property will be referred to as Park City. Park City Mountain Resort, though, will remain the official name even as the resort is marketed as Park City.

The announcement was made at Legacy Lodge in front of a large crowd of resort representatives, the business community, fans of the resort and a few City Hall officials.

The event was a celebration marking the rebranding, complete with live music, samples of resort menu items and a promotional video.

“There’s only one place like Park City,” Bill Rock, the chief operating officer of the resort, told the crowd of several hundred, mentioning snow, the proximity to the Salt Lake airport and the authentic nature of the Park City community.

The simple name is a result of a complicated set of circumstances that led to Colorado-based Vail Resorts acquiring PCMR in 2014. The event was scheduled as work proceeds on an ambitious set of improvements that will link PCMR and Canyons Resort into one property. The resort will spread through more than 7,300 acres, making it the largest in the United States.

Colorado-based Vail Resorts owns PCMR and operates Canyons Resort as part of a long-term agreement with the Talisker corporate family.

Linking the two properties was the priority when Vail Resorts acquired PCMR in a deal that also settled a bitterly contested lawsuit centered on the former PCMR owner’s lease of Talisker land. Vail Resorts executives outlined the broad idea of linking the properties at the time of the PCMR acquisition. Details were made public over the following months as Vail Resorts secured the necessary permits from government panels in Park City and the Snyderville Basin.

Resort officials on Wednesday, meanwhile, announced the gondola will be called Quicksilver, a name meant to convey the speed of the gondola and harken back to Park City’s silver-mining days. It had been referred to as the Interconnect Gondola in recent months. The gondola will carry eight people per cabin from the bottom of the Silverlode lift on the PCMR terrain to the Flatiron lift at the Canyons Resort terrain, covering 7,650 feet or nearly 1 ½ miles. The ride will last between 8 1/2 minutes and nine minutes.

They also said the name of a new restaurant at the base of the gondola close to the Silverlode lift will be Miners Camp. The restaurant had been called Snow Hut for years. The new restaurant will accommodate more people than the older one. Miners Camp and the gondola are seen as the most important upgrades in Vail Resorts’ $50 million in upgrades planned in anticipation of the upcoming ski season.

The resort unveiled a new logo that uses the name Park City and a Canyons Resort marking that resembles the infinity symbol. It is red, the primary color of PCMR, rather than orange that had been used by Canyons Resort.

The crowd was told the base at the former Canyons Resort will be called Canyons Village. Staff uniforms will be the same across the combined property and the slogan ‘I Ride Park City’ will remain. The website for the property is parkcitymountain.com. The canyonsresort.com website loads to parkcitymountain.com. A new trail map was introduced.

In an interview, Rock explained the idea of marketing the resort as Park City rather than Park City Mountain Resort. He said people see the destination as Park City.

“Park City Mountain Resort is the official name of the business. But, you know, people out in the world, when they think about where are they going to go ski, they say I’m going to ski in Park City. And everybody knows Park City is one. That’s why we said there’s only one. There’s one destination,” Rock said.

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Powdr sells Park City Mountain Resort to Vail Resorts

By Jason Blevins
The Denver Post
09/11/2014

Powdr Corp. has sold its Park City Mountain Resort to Vail Resorts for $182.5 million, ending a tumultuous year for Utah’s most popular ski destination.

“Selling was the last thing we wanted to do, and while we believe the law around this issue should be changed, a protracted legal battle is not in line with our core value to be good stewards of the resort communities in which we operate,” Powdr chief executive John Cumming said in a statement. “A sale was the only way to provide long-term certainty for PCMR employees and the Park City community.”

The deal requires Vail Resorts to retain Park City Mountain Resort employees and calms the community’s concerns over the future of the ski area, the largest economic engine in the tourist-dependent valley.

Cumming launched his now seven-resort Powdrempire in Park City in 1994. His flagship resort grew into one of the most popular ski areas in North America.

The sale ends a fiery legal battle that pitted Powdr against its landlord, Talisker Land Holdings. Powdr in April 2011 was a few days late in renewing its long-term lease with Talisker for more than 2,800 acres of upper terrain at Park City Mountain Resort.

That lease, which dated back to the 1970s, had the resort paying roughly $150,000 a year.
Failing to properly file paperwork renewing its 20-year lease will go down in history as the ski industry’s most costly clerical error. Business classes will review this case.

Talisker grabbed the missed deadline as an opportunity to oust Powdr and find a new tenant. It leased its neighboring Canyons ski area to Broomfield-based Vail Resorts in May 2013, offering the continent’s largest resort operator the chance to run Park City Mountain Resort if Vail handled the legal eviction process.

Vail promised Talisker $25 million a year plus a share of revenue for the 4,000-acre Canyons, with an eye toward taking over Park City Mountain Resort and creating the largest single ski area in the country.

Powdr promised a fight. Cumming said if Vail and Talisker prevailed in the eviction, he would rip his chairlifts from the upper terrain and run a smaller resort from the base area land he owned on the border of the mountain and the village of Park City.

A Utah judge in May evicted Powdrfrom two-thirds of Park City Mountain Resort’s skiable terrain, but stayed the order while Vail and Powdr discussed a potential agreement. A compromise seemed distant earlier this year, when Cumming rebuffed Vail’s offer to buy or lease his base area land. Powdr owns Colorado’s Copper Mountain and seven other ski areas in Nevada, California, Oregon and Vermont.

Vail chief Rob Katz said both sides “worked really hard in good faith” to reach the resolution.
“It was a difficult situation and one that needed time to get done,” Katz said.

Vail will include Park City Mountain Resort as part of its wildly popular Epic Pass, which now offers skiing at 22 ski areas.

At the end of April this year, Vail Resorts had $307.4 million in cash on hand. Cumming said the sale “positions Powdr well for future growth.”

“We’re excited to explore new lifestyle and mountain sports opportunities,” said Cumming, whose Powdr acquired the five-facility action sports’ Camp Woodward in 2011 and an award-winning action sports television series sponsored by GoPro in 2013.

Vail valued its May 2013 deal with Talisker for Canyons resort — a 50-year lease — at $306 million. Add $183 million and Vail Resorts picked up more than 7,000 acres of ski terrain in Utah for roughly $489 million.

Vail said Park City Mountain Resort will yield $35 million in earningsbefore interest, depreciation, taxes and amortization, or EBITDA, a measure of cash flow. Canyons is delivering about $25 million in EBITDA for Vail Resorts. A combined EBITDA of $60 million — a conservative estimate analysts expect soon could reach $80 million — means Vail Resorts picked up the two resorts for roughly eight times annual EBITDA. (And it landed Park City Mountain Resort for a little more than five times EBITDA.)

Multiples of earnings are typically used to gauge ski resort transactions and eight times is on the low end for hospitality industry sales. Five times is a fire sale, mirroring Vail Resorts’ 2002 acquisition of the 4,800-acre Heavenly ski area in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., for $99.2 million.

“They got it cheap. This is the best case scenario for Vail,” said analyst Whitney Stevinson, who covers Vail Resorts for JMP Securities. “The real opportunity is combining these two resorts someday and driving even more skiers and revenue.”

Stevinson expected Wall Street traders to embrace the deal. Vail’s stock hit an all-time high of $86 a share before finishing at $85.75, up 11.7 percent.

Vail Resorts’ focus now is connecting Canyons with Park City Mountain Resort, Katz said.

Connection would require a short lift, which needs approval from leaders of Park City and Summit County, Utah. Katz said he hopes to erect the short lift next summer, in time for the 2015-16 ski season.

“If we could put it together, it creates the largest ski mountain in the U.S. Larger than Vail at 7,000 acres,” Katz said, noting how the two mountains “complement” each other.

Canyons has steeps that thrill experts. Park City Mountain Resort has a bounty of heralded intermediate runs. Park City has a huge downtown village. Canyons has a more private, secluded feel with luxury lodges.

“It’s a wide variety. It’s something comparable to what you see in Vail and Beaver Creek, but in this case the resorts are connected,” Katz said.

Vail will operate both resorts separately this winter. The company has yet to strategize future marketing or branding plans that could lead to a name change.

“There is a lot of brand equity in — and strong connection to — the name ‘Park City’ as both the mountain and the very special town,” Vail Resorts spokeswoman Kelly Ladyga said.

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Vail to take over Canyons operations

May 29, 2013
FOX 13 News
Alexandria Autrey

PARK CITY – Vail resorts announced Wednesday that the company entered a long-term lease with affiliate companies of Talisker Corporation for Canyons Resort in Park City, Utah.

Vail resorts will assume all of the resorts operations of Canyons while Talisker has retained the development rights for a 4 million square foot real estate at the resort.

“With 4,000 ski-able acres, easy access to the town of Park City and $75 million in recent resort improvements, Canyons is a perfect complement to our collection of world-class mountain resorts,” said Rob Katz, chairman and chief executive officer of Vail Resorts.

The transaction also incorporates the potential for the lease, without any additional consideration to include the land under the ski terrain of Park City Mountain Resorts that is adjacent to the Canyons. This subject is still pending litigation.

“We look forward to the litigation being resolved and hope that Vail Resorts can play a constructive role in helping to arrive at a solution that offers the best outcome for guests of both resorts,” said Rob Katz.

The Company also announced that purchasers of the Epic Pass for the 2013-2014 winter season will receive unlimited and unrestricted access to the Canyons, Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone, Northstar, Heavenly and Kirkwood.

The lease has an initial term of 50 years with six 50-year renewal options and provides for $25 million in annual fixed payments.

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Summit County Labor Force

Source: Utah Department of Workforce Services.
Utah Department of Workforce Services, Workforce Research and Analysis Division 21
Updated July 2014

The three top industries accounted for 23.7, 14.6 and 13.8 percent of total jobs, respectively.

The 5,539 jobs in accommodations and food services are almost divided equally between food services (mostly restaurants at 2,848 jobs) and traveler accommodations (2,691 jobs).

Retail trade employment in 2013 averaged 3,413, with the largest sub-industries being clothing and clothing accessories stores (851 jobs), food and beverage stores (646 jobs) and sporting goods, hobby, book and music stores (327 jobs).

In arts, entertainment and recreation, most of the 3,224 jobs are within three sub industry groups: skiing facilities (2,025 jobs), Golf courses and county clubs (485 jobs) and performing arts and spectator sports (436 jobs).

The Summit County jobless rate topped out at 8.0 percent in November 2009 as a result of the recession. It has since receded to average just 3.9 percent in 2013. Unemployment continues to decline in 2014. Initial claims for unemployment benefits are at their lowest level in five years.

Summit County’s forecasted job growth in 2014 should range between 700 to 900 new jobs, which is somewhat better than the 697 experienced in 2013. Employment gains among the majority of industry sectors will continue, however the rapid increases in professional and business services will likely moderate.

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SUMMIT COUNTY

Utah Department of Workforce Services
Workforce Research and Analysis Division
Updated July 2014

In 2013, Summit County job growth slowed modestly from the pace of expansion seen in 2012. For the year, job growth was 3.1 percent or 697 new payroll positions, bringing total employment on average for the year to 23,362. Jobs grew 3.6 percent in 2012.

The top performing industries are as follows.

Professional/scientific/technical services added the most jobs, increasing by 130 mostly among computer systems design, advertising, management consulting and technical services.
Construction employment expanded by 102 jobs, primarily related to residential construction activities.
Connected to the improving housing environment was an increase in real estate services of 111 new jobs.
Arts/entertainment/recreation grew by 91 positions, with two thirds of these in skiing facilities.
Health care and social services employment expanded by 87 jobs.
Finally, retail trade added 82 net new jobs.

There were three industries that noticeably reduced employment.

Accommodation and food services cut 46 positions in 2013. This appears to be a little retrenchment from strong growth the previous two years.
Manufacturing shed 33 jobs by-in-large in computer and electronic product manufacturing.
Private education employment declined by 25.

In 2013, three top industries paid 37.8 percent of wages and provided over one half of all jobs (52.1 percent) in Summit County.

In terms of total wages, accommodation and food services paid $135.9 million or 15.9 percent of the county total.
Retail trade jobs paid $95.0 million, or 11.1 percent.
Arts, entertainment and recreation paid $ 92.8 million, or 10.9 percent.

These top industries reflect the importance of recreation, tourism and travel to the Summit County economy.

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