PROVO, Utah — Months into the process of considering the Vesper amphitheater proposal, Provo’s City Council announced Wednesday that the developers withdrew their application.
The project was slated to be discussed during the council's September 8th meeting.
“This gives the public more time to listen and learn and ask us more questions,” said council member Katrice MacKay.
McKenna Brown is among the many who’ve been asking questions.
“This originally was pitched to me that it’s a gravel pit and it’s unused and ugly and we need something fun for the community," said Brown. “But when we actually looked at what was being proposed - a 20,000 seat arena as big as the Marriott Center at BYU. 6,500 parking spots that will invade our Squaw Peak.”
Her opinion was swayed with time and research. So Brown helped to host a community meeting Thursday night, hoping to bring the variety of issues at hand to the broader audience she feels it will impact.
“There’s traffic, there’s sound, the financial aspects," MacKay said. "There’s UDOT, the aesthetics, the dark skies. I mean there’s like so many different aspects.”
“Where it’s actually located on Provo land is closer to Orem," Brown said. "We’re impacting Orem, Vineyard, Wasatch County.”
On Thursday, Orem’s mayor and city council formally opposed the project in unison.
Before that, Fox 13 News talked over the phone with the executive team behind it.
David Osmond and Brian Bayles said they need to hold firm on many of the key components to their plan, such as their size of 150,000 square feet and 20,000-seat capacity.
But they added that they don’t live in a silo. The developers said part of the reason they’re withdrawing is to account for all of the feedback they’re receiving.
While they didn’t get into specifics about the changes they’re making, Provo’s council indicated there were issues in the application with parking requirements and the critical hillside overlay zone.
Councilmember MacKay said they’ve felt the weight of a proposal of this scale and so they want to be thorough when it comes back to their table.
“It’s definitely the biggest project we’ve ever looked at in Provo, so it’s a little unprecedented,” MacKay said.
Locals add that they, too, want a more informed look at what this will mean for the future of their community.
“It’s imperative that we ask for traffic studies," said Brown. "The infrastructure isn’t holding, they say they can fix that. Well, we like the small town feel - that’s why we are in this part of the state. We don’t want more infrastructure. We don’t want to ‘Salt Lake’ our Provo.”
The developers say their hope is to return to the city with a re-worked application within the next few weeks.
But city officials note they will have to restart the process. That means going back to the planning commission, which recommended denial of the project by a 5-2 margin back in June.
