Residents fear Utah ski town is going downhill : Many are concerned that the boom in Park City is robbing the community of its soul.

It was the winter of ’72 when Rob Slettom fell in love with a shabby mountain town where he could perch on a Main Street curb and not see a car for hours.

The 19-year-old Minnesota ski bum believed that he would live here forever, but now he’s thinking of moving on.

“The congestion and the traffic is getting to me more and more. That could drive me to leave here,” said Slettom, now 40 and a resort-property manager. “We’ve got to come to grips with what is happening to Park City.”

Once just another ghost town in the Rockies, Park City has been reincarnated as America’s fastest-growing mountain resort. Its population has grown five times over since Slettom’s generation discovered the collection of tumble-down shacks and played-out mines.

Construction is booming as ever-bigger houses for ever-more-wealthy urban refugees dot the hills and valleys around historic Main Street. Park City, population 5,800, has more than 400 real estate agents. Many residents say they fear that they’re selling a little piece of the town’s soul with each closing.

“They’re coming at us so fast, who has the chance to assimilate them?” asked Chuck Klingenstein, a town planning commissioner.

That concern about rapid growth and loss of ambience recently brought out hundreds of Park City residents for an unusual exercise in community-building over cheesecake and decaf.

Equal parts civic lesson and group therapy, the Community Vision ’93 meetings in living rooms across town are aimed at helping to determine city policy, but there’s a hidden agenda.

“This is not purely an informational activity, this is relationship building. Relationships are as important as the issues,” said Myles C. Rademan, Park City’s director of public affairs and the creator of the town meetings.

“As fast as Park City is growing, the natural process and institutions that lead to the creation of a community can’t work,” he said. “It (Community Vision) is an attempt to give people the opportunity, in an offbeat, non-threatening way, to form that community.”

But for many, the meetings mark the end of a love affair, not the start of a new relationship.

“There was a sense of mourning,” said Jan Jones-Schenk, who led one group discussion.

Many said they fear that wealthy newcomers are driving out the dropouts and the offbeat folks who never cared much about money and connections. They see Park City “becoming vanilla,” or a mean, fragmented place where everyone drives a Porsche and no one says hello.

Yet for newcomer Chuck Zuercher, who sold Orange County real estate until last year, today’s Park City is still close enough to paradise.

“I was getting tired of all the things we all hate about Southern California,” he said. “If you live with it every day, you don’t realize how bad it is until you come to someplace like this.”

Born of sweat and greed in the late 1860s, Park City’s story has always been one of rapid change. Soldiers sent to keep watch on Mormon settlers discovered the rich silver veins that created the town. Their raucous camp grew to a hardscrabble settlement of 6,000 people by the turn of the century.

When the silver ran out, the miners left Park City for dead. It was a ghost town until the 1970s, when the first ski lift opened.

When Slettom moved in, Park City had 1,100 residents. In staid Utah, it was an oasis for the odd, a place where quirks of the human spirit were not just tolerated but nurtured.

Like Aspen, Colo., and other Rocky Mountain resorts, Park City grew rapidly as skiing gained popularity. Demand for vacation homes drove up prices and drove out the dropouts.

But the town’s location added to its growth problems. Just 40 minutes from Salt Lake International Airport, Park City is popular among what Rademan calls the “computer-and-croissant crowd”--high-income entrepreneurs who can live anywhere and do business by fax, modem and jetliner.

And even their pilots live here. More than 125 Delta Air Lines pilots and their families moved in after Delta made Salt Lake City its western hub.

Long lines of commuters jam the two roads out of town each morning, while equally long lines of resort workers who cannot afford Park City rents stream in.

While many Community Vision participants spoke sadly about the changes, most seemed resigned. “I don’t mind the growth. It’s still a wonderful place to live, and I don’t see how you can tell other people not to come,” said Mardi Hudson, who moved here in the early ‘70s.

Yet Hudson, like most residents, backs slow-growth methods such as limiting the number of building permits issued each year, requiring developers to donate at least 60% of their land for open space and strictly regulating new buildings to ensure that they don’t clash with the old town’s feel.

Those planning tools may help keep some of Park City’s best features, but only the residents can decide if they have enough in common to agree on the future of their community, Rademan said.

“This is more to help people come to grips with what’s still good here and what’s holding us together--if anything is holding us together,” he said. “Whether this is just blowing in the wind is anyone’s guess, but we have to do something.”