The Utah state legislature, in the final days of its session on Thursday night and Friday, passed bills to pay for both $900 million in construction costs for an MLB stadium and $500 million in construction costs for an NHL arena, if Salt Lake City can land teams in both those sports. The bills now go to Gov. Spencer Cox, who is expected to sign them.
As for how the sports venue subsidies will be paid for, that’s still a little bit up in the air:
- The $900 million in baseball money will start with the kickback of state sales taxes within a 200-acre “entertainment district” around the stadium; property taxes from the district would also be used to pay for potentially $500 million in infrastructure and other non-stadium construction. (The stadium itself wouldn’t pay property taxes, since it would be owned by the state.) The bill’s “sponsors concede other revenue may be needed,” reports the Salt Lake Tribune, to cover half of a planned $1.8 billion stadium construction tab.
- The $500 million in hockey money — which according to the legislation can be used for either a new arena, renovations to the Jazz‘ arena, or both — will come from both a 0.5% citywide sales tax hike and the kickback of all sales taxes from a “10-block revitalization area” around the arena or arenas, as the case may be. There’s also talk of “reorienting” the Salt Palace convention center by rebuilding parts of it, which would come with an unknown price tag.
This is being widely reported as $2 billion in subsidies, which isn’t quite right because that’s the number you get from adding up all the future tax payments over time, but that’s just how the state would pay for $1.4 billion in spending right now. On the other hand, it also overlooks things like all the future property tax breaks the two venues would get, not to mention any additional costs like maintenance and upgrade funds that might be approved as part of leases with these so-far-hypothetical teams — so “around $2 billion” is probably a fair assessment.
That’s a staggering amount of money for two sports venues of any kind, but the two bills passed with little opposition once it was decided to focus entirely on future sales tax money (and, in the case of the MLB stadium, future we’ll-get-back-to-you-on-that money). Besides, who could say no when former Atlanta Braves star and Utah resident Dale Murphy turned up to sign baseballs for legislators:
There are 75 state representatives in Utah and 29 state senators, making that $19.2 million per autograph, handily breaking Babe Ruth’s record. Guess Dale Murphy really does deserve to be in the Hall of Fame for something!
Salt Lake Coyotes and Salt Lake A’s roll off the tongue nicely….two billion catches the back of the throat though.
Don’t worry, it will be closer to double the initial funding by the time they are done… we shouldn’t forget the IOC is part of the reasoning for the arena build and you know how that generally goes…
And, as any good contractor knows, once you have the owner standing there staring at a giant hole in the ground, s/he can’t say no to overspending and leave the hole partially unfilled.
There are a lot of crazy things being ramrodded through state legislatures right now. Something weird is going on.
Yeah. We keep electing people (often even if we would prefer not to, thanks, gerrymandering) and not holding them accountable. That’s the weird stuff happening.
All uses of public money for things like this should be ballot initiatives.
Jackson County voters will be total fools if they vote for the 3/8 percent sales tax extension. Kansas City already built the Sprint Center for an NBA team that has failed to show up for 15 years.
Salt Lake City has the subsidies, but do they have the people? Certainly not for two winter sports teams. I think Denver is the smallest NHL/NBA city, and it’s nearly twice as large as SLC. And SLC smaller than any current MLB city.
Ignorant of the fact that MLS has a club in Utah whose public image is not looking good.
Over the weekend Real Salt Lake had their home match vs. Los Angeles FC turn into a shambles: delayed 2 hours by high winds, paused after 4 minutes because of lightning, completed in a snowstorm that covered the pitch. LAFC correctly called out RSL over the conditions. Most US sports media haven’t highlighted this story cos they believe “soccer is for furriners”. You had to go to BBC Sport in the UK for the details.
If RSL are getting a government subsidy for their stadium, question all the government subsidies for all pro sports in Utah. Oh wait, the Utah legislature is too busy forcing anti-porn laws on Utahns to know better.
LAFC needs to STFU. MLS bends over backwards to try to make them a celebrity superteam.
Soccer is an outdoor game usually played in winter. If they can’t handle that, go play somewhere else.
RSL vs. LAFC would have been postponed had it been scheduled anywhere other than Murica. That’s how poor the conditions were.
As well, CF Miami are now MLS’ glamour team thanks to the presence of Lionel Messi.
Yeah, no. Snowstorms happen in some MLS cities in early March, and the league will always defer to playing the match over rescheduling it. It’s also not the home club’s call – it’s MLS’, so not sure why RSL looks bad from this episode. That’s some fine whine by LAFC’s manager for coming out flat against a mid-tier club. There was a freak blizzard that pummeled the metro area for a couple of hours with gale-force winds, but after that it was your run-of-the-mill early spring snowstorm in the mountains. Steve Cherundolo only has himself to blame for his squad playing so badly.
Denver is actually not the smallest NHL/NBA market (which matters more than the city proper). St. Louis, Orlando, Charlotte, San Antonio, Portland, Pittsburgh, Sacramento, Las Vegas, Columbus, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Nashville, San Jose, Milwaukee, Raleigh, Oklahoma City, Memphis, Salt Lake City, Buffalo and New Orleans are all smaller MSAs than Denver and all have either an NBA team or an NHL team.
I think he meant smallest market that has both the NBA and NHL. It’s definitely the smallest market where the NBA and NHL share the arena as it’s smaller than NYC, Chicago, LA, DC, Boston, Toronto, Dallas, Detroit and Philly
Yeah that’s what I was getting at. The smaller markets tend to be either/or NBA or NHL. Takes a hefty population to support both. Salt Lake City would be by far the smallest city to have both.
I think it could work if those were the only two major sports in town but if they add MLB, and it looks like they will, the winter sports might struggle a bit
Maxwell Trueblood
Utah already has 2 major conference colleges, the Jazz play in winter and skiing is huge in Utah. Baseball might succeed in Utah, there isn’t much competition during the summer and Utah’s demographics align better for baseball. NHL hockey in Utah will probably end the same way as in Arizona.
Minneapolis/ St Paul is close in size to Denver, Atlanta couldn’t support hockey and Tilman Fertitta doesn’t seem eager to bring hockey to the 4th largest city. Detroit and Boston are the next smallest cities with both, but both are original 6 teams in states with a strong hockey culture. Salt Lake County is a third the size, and it is questionable if corporate sponsors from Silicon Slope would trudge into Downtown Salt Lake City on a weeknight. The same exact problem the Coyotes faced in Glendale. Bottom line, NHL hockey in Utah is virtually guaranteed to fail.
Agreed. It might be fun for a while, and if the fans warm to the team it might even be successful for a limited time.
But the market itself does not seem large enough to support everything that is already there. It is a growing market, but one wonders when the practical limit will be reached.
If the NHL’s goal is just to ‘find a spot that we will never get $750m in expansion fees for’ and ‘that is better than Phx was’, maybe Salt Lake City will be good enough for them (in the same way Winnipeg was good enough as a parking spot for the the Thrashers. See what you can shake out, then if you can’t extract the kind of subsidies you want, bail at a later date and set up the shell game somewhere else).
It’s not going to be a great or even good market. But it could be better than Phoenix metro while not using up a cash machine expansion location. Maybe that is all the cartel wants?
While this subsidy is ridiculous- Utah is the only example I can think of where a major sports subsidy (2002 Winter Olympics) provided long term benefits. Most of the facilities from the Olympics are still in use, hosting lead to most U.S. Olympic training programs moving to the area. The rather extensive light rail system was initially built for the Olympics and the state now has much more liberal alcohol laws that go back ti making the state more open to visitors in 2002.
That is partly true for Calgary as well, Al. Several of the facilities are still in regular use and have provided training bases for Olympic athletes (not just Canadian ones either).
The problem now, of course, is that there is rarely enough snow to run winter sports facilities without (expensive) augmentation.
Isn’t this a problem Salt Lake City is seeing as well and figures to see more of into the future?
And if SLC is never awarded a team from either league, and the stadiums end up like Olympic venues worldwide, abandoned and filled with pigeons, I’ll laugh and laugh and laugh…
They won’t be built until teams are in place, at least, so they won’t be sitting around vacant. But it’s still a question how the state can drive a hard bargain on leases once it’s already approved the funding.
Dale Murphy, probably: Do you want to know the terrifying truth, or do you want to see me sock a few dingers?
“other revenue may be needed”.
Well, that might be the only honest part of this bill. Other revenue will absolutely be needed. In my view, count on it being nearly double that. You aren’t going to build an NHL arena in a high snow load zone for $500m. And if you apply the price-multiplicative effect of ‘The Olympics tm”, then you have yourself a real race horse on your hands. Oakview’s $700m would be a decent starting point, but maybe add $50-80m on top just to satisfy the IOC delegates’ needs.
So, the MLB subsidy should nicely cover the arena. Then what?
Will some of it come from private sources? If so, how much? And from whom and in exchange for what?
This looks to be closer to a $3bn bill than a $2bn bill to me.
The Coyotes have run out of suckers in Arizona, from Phoenix to Scottsdale to Glendale and Tempe. Everyone else in the valley now realizes what the Coyotes are, so it’s time to move to another state to find a sucker. The requirement to have Utah in the name reminds me of when the Coyotes changed from Phoenix to Arizona to make Glendale feel better about shoveling hundreds of millions into a black hole.
Salt Lake City will be a worse disaster than Glendale for the Coyotes. At least Glendale has hoards of Canadians, Minnesotans and Chicagoans visiting during the hockey season and attending Coyotes games. Utah has zero snowbirds, unless a snowboarder is considered a snowbird.
If Glendale weren’t hoarding Canadians, maybe there would be some left over for Utah!