Real S.L. is wooed by Utah County

Real Salt Lake owner Dave Checketts has more options than he has time.

The soccer team's contract with the University of Utah to use Rice-Eccles Stadium is up after its 2007 season, and if construction on a new stadium doesn't start somewhere by the end of August, Real Salt Lake has no home.

Now Utah County wants to play, and investors have dangled free land to lure the team south to the old Geneva Steel site.

"We've got to take a deep breath and look at all of our alternatives and decide what to do," Checketts said Thursday. "There's going to be a lot of things coming out of the woodwork here."

On Tuesday, after the Salt Lake County Council rejected Sandy's idea of using $30 million in hotel taxes to help build the stadium, the alternatives for a new Real home were Salt Lake City, the Utah State Fairpark, an out-of-state location and now, Utah County.

Then on Wednesday, Anderson Geneva, owner of the Geneva Steel property, called Checketts to propose the stadium as an anchor to a 1,700-acre mixed-use development in Vineyard.

Michael Hutchings, a partner in Anderson Geneva, said the development firm is willing to deed as much as 30 acres to Checketts at no cost. The company believes that handing over free land is worth it for the potential commercial development around a stadium, he said.

The former site of Geneva Steel, a World War II steel-production plant, is undergoing cleanup efforts that are expected to take another five years to complete. Portions of the site — including the proposed stadium area — are ready for development now, Hutchings said, although the project would still need to go through Vineyard's zoning process.

Anderson Geneva, an affiliate of Sandy-based Anderson Development LLC, has a Salt Lake County connection in House Speaker Greg Curtis. The Sandy Republican is a lawyer for Hutchings Baird & Jones law firm, and Hutchings is a partner in both the law firm and Anderson Development.

Curtis has said that he still solidly supports Sandy as the best site for a stadium. But Sandy Mayor Tom Dolan said Tuesday the project was "dead" in his city, and Curtis doesn't want another site to use hotel-tax money if Sandy doesn't.

Checketts has said from the beginning that he wants a public-private partnership to build the stadium, but Thursday he said that he might try to build exclusively with private money — although he acknowledged that option could be nearly impossible. Without public funding, the Utah County location is more tantalizing with its offer of free land.