With help from the Legislature, officials at the Utah Olympic Park hope to start selling a lot more $200 bobsled rides.

A resolution being debated on Capitol Hill may allow a Chicago developer to build a luxury hotel at the 2002 Winter Olympic venue in Snyderville.

The plan could settle a dispute that pits Terrace Development Partners against Sun Peak residents who oppose current plans to construct a 275,000-square-foot hotel/condominium complex in a neighborhood roughly one mile west of S.R. 224. While developer Jim Haft claims a preliminary approval from the Summit County Commission cleared the way for a structure with more than 300 rooms in Sun Peak, last week, commissioners declared they would only support a 140-room hotel in the neighborhood.

With Bear Hollow Drive once the main entrance to the UOP, a hotel has been envisioned in the area since the early 1990s. But according to Rep. David Ure, R-Kamas, the confines of the 2002 Olympic venue is perhaps a better place for the project.

Though House lawmakers unanimously passed Ure's House Joint Resolution 30, this week the legislation was stalled in the state Senate. The resolution would allow a private developer to buy land at the venue.

"We did a good job of getting this through," Ure said Monday.

The legislative session ends March 1.

But building a hotel near the base of ski jumps, a luge and a bobsled track would be a tight squeeze, Summit County Community Development Director Nora Shepard said.

Summit

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County planners say the plan likely wouldn't comply with the Snyderville Basin General Plan and Development Code.

The park received more than $70 million from the surplus of the 2002 Olympics, however, it does not operate in the black, Utah Athletic Foundation President John Bennion said.

"We need the high-end tourism at the park to help pay our bills," he recently told The Park Record.