If you were getting all excited about former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson saying he planned to stage a public referendum on the city’s plans to sell $900 million worth of Utah Jazz arena renovation bonds and pay for them with a sales tax hike — for new readers, yes, this is the kind of thing people can get excited about here, don’t say you weren’t warned — you can stand down, as Anderson said late Friday that he’s not actually gonna do that:
We know many are disappointed that the issue of a new sales tax was never put to public vote. We share in that frustration. However, efforts to pursue a referendum will distract time, effort, energy, and resources from the important work of addressing essential issues facing our city, and undermine the opportunities for working together with SEG on matters of mutual passion and concern. Also, there is no certainty about the prospect of meeting the requirements for the sales tax increase to appear on the ballot for a vote. Therefore, to achieve a cooperative alliance that allows us to work together from this day forward for the benefit of the entire community, we will not pursue a referendum.
That’s a lot of words (and a lot of nosism) that comes down to two things: 1) I’d rather work with Jazz owner Ryan Smith than agin’ him, and 2) that whole referendum thing might not have worked anyway. Door #1 sounds more like a cover story for #2 than the other way around, and FoS commenter Ian noted last week that the referendum felt dodgy from the start: Utah referenda can’t be used to overturn legislative decisions that passed by a two-thirds supermajority in both the state house and senate, and the sales tax hike for the arena easily cleared that threshold. So it looks as if Anderson may have been talking before his ass had had a chance to talk to its lawyers, and now that he’s heard back he’s decided to pivot to “Can’t we all just get along?”
The Jazz/Utah Hockey Club (man, is that going to get old to type by the end of this season) arena deal still isn’t finalized, mind you, since Smith and the city still need to agree next year sometime to a lease extension on the renovated arena and the planned surrounding development. With city and state legislators both overwhelmingly in favor of the deal — even if Utahns as a whole are not — it doesn’t seem real likely that this will be a major roadblock, but stranger things have happened, occasionally. If you’re a local (or ex-mayor) with hopes of changing this sales tax subsidy, you know which clouds to yell at.
Hey, I’ve been cited by the man himself and become FoS famous!
In all seriousness, glad my knowledge of arcane Utah constitutional law has been of service. Sadly, I’m afraid it’ll probably come into play again as the state legislature gears up for another session and tries to figure out how to pay for that $900 million they “earmarked” for the ballpark and Fairpark redevelopment scheme last time.
No surprise Rocky Anderson bailed out so quickly. Dude has been mostly trying to stay politically relevant after a disastrous comeback bid for the mayorship last year. Mayor Mendenhall sucks and has been mostly feckless, but the days of “Rock Solid” supporters have long since passed.
I imagine the conversation between Gary Bettman and Smith went like this. “I need a man who has powerful friends. I need a billion dollars in cash. I need those politicians you carry in your pocket, like so many nickels and dimes.”
Apropos of nothing…
It occurs to me that “dropped” now means something different to a lot of people. In the case of this headline, in means “given up on,” which is how it has been used for a long time.
But to younger people especially, it may mean “introduced into the market.” Albums, especially in hip-hop, “drop.” I have heard that so many times that when I first read this, I thought it meant that the ex-mayor was going to somehow force a referendum.
Also, Ian’s post reminded me that “feckful” was once a word to mean “efficient or effective,” but one never hears it. Maybe that says something about the state of political and commercial leadership in the modern world.
I really think the Utah deal for the Coyotes happened as fast as it did because there was an owner willing to pay expansion-level prices for a team and a state legislature that had already planned to set aside money for a stadium, albeit for an MLB club. Bettman went to Smith and said “if you want a team, it’s gotta be now and that state money needs to go to a hockey-ready arena.” Smith and Utah pols were willing to play ball (or, er, puck) because a bird in the hand is better than 2 in the bush.
Having worked for Smith’s old company and still keeping contact with some folks who went to SEG from Qualtrics, they were planning on bidding for an expansion team in like 2027. They were basically forced to pull a fire drill and squeeze years of work into essentially months. Hence the “Utah Hockey Club” placeholder name and Utah Jazz employees working double duty because operations staff hadn’t been filled out yet.
Besides Utah taxpayers, the biggest loser was Big League Utah. They’d been working meticulously towards a new ballpark as part of a massive redevelopment district on the west side for years, only for the sales tax revenue to be pulled out from under them. The Miller family and Rocky Mountain Power (the land owners for the proposed ballpark) have deep political connections though, and I’ve no doubt they’ll be looking to dip into the state kitty in other ways.
This may have been their only chance to get an expansion team. If RS had passed on this chance to bid in 2027, he might be facing stiff competition from bids in Atlanta, Houston, or any of the other ideas for expansion teams that always get mentioned.
None of the other possible markets currently has an owner with a more-or-less clear path to a viable arena and $1 billion in a suitcase (I’m sure it was not delivered that way, but it is fun to imagine). But any number of them might have both of those ready in just a few years.
Utah is attractive to the owners and the sponsors because it is growing rapidly and it avoids the headache of having to shift Detroit to the western conference. But it is more of a “nice to have” than a must have for the owners.
And, as you said, he wanted to cut the line to the public trough to get ahead of the baseball bid.
I still think Utah is an incredibly risky market for the NHL, but the 1-2 combo of a deep-pocketed owner willing to invest and a state legislature willing to hand over fistfuls of cash for a new venue made it at least palatable for the owners. If Utah had only one or the other I think it would’ve run aground, because they’d be recreating all of the risks of Phoenix for only a fraction of the potential market. But even if UHC fizzles after a few years in fan support, SEG has got such a sweet deal that they’ll still spend at the league average and not lose money.
I see this less as Bettman trying to invest in a major market or expand hockey’s footprint than it was a way to make a long-running problem go away quickly. I think the NHLPA and owners were going to force Bettman and Meruelo’s hands if they hadn’t. If UHC ends up a smashing success and the 2042 #1 pick is some kid named Jaxxton from Taylorsville who grew up rooting for the Yeti then that’s gravy. But really, this was to keep a franchise from being a bottomless black hole that wouldn’t even invest the bare minimum.
I think they also “fixed” their one problem child franchise, AND got paid big for it. It allows them to start thinking the next round of expansion.
Kinda like how MLB waited for Tampa and Oakland to figure out their stadiums before future expansion, kinda still waiting I guess.
Bettman gets crapped on a lot but I think most people would say the league is much more stable now than it’s ever been at anytime in his tenure.
I will say, the Coyotes became a problem child franchise because Bettman pigheadedly stuck with that market when it was way past its shelf life. They should have cut bait back in 2009, or 2011 when True North offered to bring the team back to Winnipeg, or in 2013 when Seattle was an option. There were countless opportunities to more gracefully transition out of Arizona than what transpired, and Bettman doesn’t really deserve any credit for cleaning up a mess he made because his ego was too big to admit failure in the desert.
The other caveat is that Bettman blew through an expansion candidate to get this done. SEG was the sure-fire expansion group that could both serve as a fallback in case other potential markets fell through as well as play off the bigger cities to extract more concessions. With Smith and SLC off the table, Bettman has to hope more viable candidates emerge if he wants to open up expansion again. Atlanta and Houston weren’t ready yet this time around, and I’m sure he’s loathe to being stuck in an awkward situation where Quebec City wins an expansion by default.
The Salt Lake City market is an even smaller market than I figured before. How many families from Daybreak or Herriman will take the kids to the homeless drug market known as Downtown SLC. Alejandro Puy gleefully voted for blowing a billion dollars on subsidizing NHL hockey while open air drug markets flourish in his district. The same factors that caused hockey to fail in Arizona, and then some, will cause a failure in Utah. Demographics are also working against hockey in SLC. Inner suburbs like West Valley City, Taylorsville and South Salt Lake are becoming majority Hispanic. That worked out how well in Glendale for Bettman?
Yeah, I think it’ll depend on how you define “success” for the NHL in SLC. I would not at all be surprised if attendance and sponsorships struggle once the newness wears off and hockey never really catches on as a sport in Utah. But, this $900 million handout and development giveaway of prime real estate ensures that SEG still ends up in the black with this team. SEG would have to fuck up royally to lose money with what they’re able to make off the development side of this deal. Is that a win for the NHL? I guess, but there are almost certainly other markets where this team could’ve been more profitable AND without having to fleece local taxpayers. It also won’t really create more hockey fans. The smarter play would’ve been to move the Yotes to Seattle, then focused the expansion bid that eventually went to the Kraken on getting a team in Houston.
Really, this is a repeat of NHL’s ventures in other “nontraditional” markets, where local subsidies allow the club to defy gravity and stay financially viable. Outside of a misguided 15-ish period from Glendale city government, Arizona politicians wisely never gave that kind of support to the Coyotes. Not only is Phoenix an incredibly tough market to make hockey work, they never had the kind of subsidies that, say, Nashville or Broward County gave up.
Why not just call them Utah HC? A certain Merseyside soccer team has been known as Liverpool FC for over 100 years and nobody has ever been confused.
Utah HC is one of the options fans could vote for. I doubt it will win.
I voted for Utah Hoodoos.
Serious question. If Utah bid and received an MLB expansion team in 2027 (start date say in 2029 / 2030), what would they do with the new Triple-A stadium, which would only be five years old in 2030?
Similar with Nashville. Nashville’s Triple-A stadium is still pretty new and a very nice ballpark (I was there last year).
Would they keep their Triple-A team in addition to their shiny new MLB expansion team? (I mean, you have Atlanta and Minnesota with their Triple-A team in the same market. And of course the Sacramento RiverCats / A’s starting next year.)
Extremely unlikely in the case of markets as small as Salt Lake or Nashville, where you’ll have trouble selling tickets to just one MLB team, let alone that and a AAA team. (The same is true for Sacramento, but nobody thinks that’s a long-term solution for the A’s and River Cats.) I’m trying to think of the last MLB expansion team that went into a market that wasn’t a spring training site and had an existing minor-league team — the Denver Zephyrs played at Mile High, the Seattle Rainers played at Sick’s, neither of which was remotely new. My guess is they would abandon them for baseball and try to turn them into amphitheaters or something like the old Bridgeport Blue Sox stadium — compared with the price of an expansion team and a stadium for it to play in, writing off a nearly new MiLB stadium is pretty much a rounding error.
I’m not as hyped as an SLC MLB team as most people, but I don’t think the Daybreak Bees will be actual competition for the MLB franchise. It’s far enough away that it will mostly attract families from that suburban area, probably be a nice facility for high school and college tournaments.
The people going to those games will be deciding between sitting at home doing nothing or going to the game cuz it’s cheap and nearby, schlepping the fam downtown to see a more expensive, less family friendly product is just note going to be a consideration for most people.
Ahem. Bridgeport BlueFISH, not BlueSOX.
That is correct, thank you! Bridgeport was the Bluefish, Utica was the Blue Sox.
The interesting part is the owners of the new AAA park and the potential Utah MLB team are the same, so they must have thought this out. My guess is they’d still keep the minor league club. The new minor league park is way out in the ‘burbs at Daybreak (a “new urbanist” Mormon Stepford development that gives off some majorly cursed vibes) so they wouldn’t exactly be competing against each other. The new minor league park is also super small – only like 6k – and is definitely being framed more as a value-add for the well-heeled residents of Daybreak and south Salt Lake County than as a major venue.
The bigger question is what will happen to Smith’s Ballpark once the Bees and University of Utah leave as tenants. It’s still pretty nice and only 30 years old, plus has a dedicated Trax station. The Ballpark neighborhood has been rapidly deteriorating though, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone locally who wants a 15k seat stadium. Mayor Mendenhall promised a “plan” for that venue and neighborhood to be released earlier this year…and still nothing. There’s a “Ballpark NEXT” fund with a few million dollars from the Miller family breaking the old lease, but no one knows what they’ll do with it.
“But Ian, why not just build the MLB stadium over the old ballpark and expand the footprint to the parking lots across 1300 S? Wouldn’t that be cheaper, help the businesses already there, take advantage of the amazing views of the Wasatch Mountains, and utilize existing infrastructure?” Ah, but then you couldn’t have a mammoth multibillion dollar development boondoggle that will displace poor residents from Rose Park!
Honestly, if your development isn’t displacing poor residents, you’re just not trying very hard.