The process moved way too quickly and had far too few opportunities for public input.
But Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall and members of the City Council can feel good that the details of their agreement with the owners of the Utah Jazz, Utah’s new National Hockey League franchise and the downtown Delta Center include some real protections and benefits for the city and its taxpayers.
Struck under a compressed timeline imposed by the Utah Legislature, the deal between the city and the Smith Entertainment Group (SEG) to “revitalize” the Delta Center and environs into a new “sports, entertainment and cultural district” claws back significant public benefits in return for the roughly $900 million to be raised by a half-a-percentage-point increase in the local sales tax. (SEG is kicking in $3 billion of its own money.)
Money raised from a fee on Delta Center tickets will help restore the Japantown historic neighborhood and fund affordable housing and public art. And the city has imposed hundreds of millions of dollars in fines should either or both of the sports franchises move away from downtown in the next 30 years.
Mendenhall and others gloss over the fact that they aren’t measuring the benefits of the new district vs. the status quo of an already vital and growing downtown. They are measuring it against what downtown would look like without the draw of major league sports, competing with, Daybreak, Draper or wherever the basketball and hockey teams moved to.
Considering how little leverage they had going into these negotiations, it is remarkable that city leaders wangled as good an arrangement for their taxpayers as they have.