Babalis campaigns for smart growth, housing and transit in Summit County race

Christie Babalis is asking District 4 voters to judge Summit County growth by one question: does a project make daily life easier around Kimball Junction, or only serve a developer in the short term?

The attorney and longtime District 4 resident is running on smart growth, housing affordability, transportation and long-range planning. Her argument is that Summit County should lean harder on infill and redevelopment in places it has already built up, including Kimball Junction and the Outlets Park City area, instead of pushing farther into undeveloped land. She says the county should use the roads, utilities and commercial nodes taxpayers already paid for, while putting more housing near job centers and transit corridors so workers do not have to add more cars to already crowded roads.

Babalis is running in a newly drawn District 4 that includes Kimball Junction and parts of Pinebrook and Old Ranch Road, along with upper Pinebrook, Sun Peak and Trailside. The 2026 race is Summit County’s first under a district-based council system created by state-mandated redistricting, a major break from roughly two decades of at-large county council elections. County officials said partisan candidates filed in January, while unaffiliated county candidates can still file through June 15. Council District 4 and District 5 are both on the 2026 ballot.

Her campaign also reaches beyond the next council term. Babalis wants county leaders to think 20, 30, 40 and even 50 years out, especially with the 2034 Winter Olympics already shaping planning conversations across Utah. A new Host Communities Committee has been meeting to set short-, medium- and long-term goals for the Games, underscoring how local land-use decisions now sit inside a much larger regional legacy debate.

That matters because the county is already wrestling with real tradeoffs. Leaders have been weighing a Utah Olympic Park development agreement that would shift approval of a 120-unit hotel from a conditional use permit to a low-impact permit, avoiding another public hearing. The same talks have raised questions about athlete, workforce and coach housing, while residents around Snyderville Basin have also watched traffic worries flare over Junction Commons redevelopment and the earlier Dakota Pacific fight.

Transportation is the other pressure point. The Utah Department of Transportation has identified Kimball Junction as an Olympic-related priority, and one proposal would add turn, through and bike lanes to SR-224. State officials have also treated double-tracking FrontRunner as a major need, with an estimated price tag of about $3 billion. That larger network problem is exactly why Babalis keeps tying housing and transit together.

Summit County’s own Kimball Junction neighborhood plan calls the area the Snyderville Basin’s designated town center, its primary retail-commercial district and the arrival point for the greater Park City area. Babalis is betting that voters want growth concentrated there, not scattered across open land, and that the county can still decide whether the next wave of development makes the commute, the tax load and the cost of staying here any better.