SportsWest vice president Dean Howes maintains RDAs were made for projects such as the new soccer stadium, which he argues will infuse jobs and economic development to areas surrounding the stadium. While some aspects of Bramble's effort — like forbidding neighboring cities from using RDA funds to attract a big-box retailer across the border — are good, RDAs should be allowed to do projects like the stadium.

"Him (Bramble) throwing this in is just a way to kind of add fuel to the RDA fire," Howes said. "His fight has more to do with Wal-Mart's being taken from one town and put into another town . . . It's a little frustrating to us."

Oka said the lack of RDA dollars would mean a larger private financial commitment from SportsWest and its backers. Howes said even if Bramble's bill passes, "we will work within the system" to build the stadium. SportsWest is looking for Salt Lake County to put a $30 million stadium bond on the ballot so voters could approve some public funds for the $60 million stadium. Until a soccer-specific stadium is built, Real Salt Lake will play at the University of Utah's Rice-Eccles Stadium.

Real Salt Lake owner Dave Checketts plans to decide where to try to build the stadium — in Murray or Salt Lake City — soon.

SB184 could put a halt to tax dollars for much more than the soccer stadium, prohibiting RDA money to be used for any retail projects. That provision has raised an outcry among city leaders who say the bill will be the death blow to RDAs and to city sales tax coffers.

"The way the bill is written, RDA ends. As of May 1, there is no more RDA," said Randy Sant, economic development director for Sandy city.

The bill, Sant added, goes too far in curbing RDA abuses and revokes city government's major economic development tool. Sant and other city leaders who met Wednesday at the League of Cities and Towns said the divisive issue should be worked out in a task force or compromise, instead of in extreme legislation on the Senate floor.

"A more proper way of dealing with this would be to get all the players around the table and talk about it and say let's fix it," Sant said. "Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water."

Tossing legitimate RDA uses in an attempt to reform would mean economic downfall for cities like Midvale where a Sharon Steel Superfund site has been branded as an RDA to help develop the once-toxic site.

Lee King, Midvale city administrator, said without those RDA dollars, the site would likely not have been developed and the city's sales tax revenues would have remained stagnant.

"The choices were to leave it as it was — 265 acres of weed-infested lot — or to find a way to put it back online as a productive site," King said. "This bill sort of eliminates the only tool that we have of addressing these extraordinary causes."