Stadium deal upsets Salt Lake

As Sandy city inches closer to a Major League Soccer stadium, the same roadblocks that stopped Salt Lake City from landing the venue are slowly beginning to crumble.

Sandy will be home to Real Salt Lake's stadium, and if two pending bills pass the Senate next week, roughly $41 million to $45 million in public money would funnel to the project.

But Salt Lake City still believes that the soccer stadium belongs downtown in the capital city.

"Salt Lake sometimes isn't recognized as the capital city," said Alison McFarlane, an economic development adviser for the city. "It is still the center of government and finance and transportation. Capital cities need to be bolstered — a strong capital city means that everything outlying can be strong as well."

McFarlane, who pitched several different Salt Lake sites to the soccer team throughout 2005 before the Sandy announcement, wants the Legislature to eschew politics and give all cities the same tools for development that Sandy plans to use. McFarlane's boss, Mayor Rocky Anderson, has ideological battles with the Republican super majority in the Utah Legislature.

"We don't have the clout among our city delegation that communities like Sandy have with the monopoly on political power in the Legislature," Anderson said.

Sandy is home to House Speaker Greg Curtis and former Senate President Al Mansell.

"We're set on building in Sandy," said Real spokesman Josh Ewing. "And since then, we've had pretty broad support."

A bill in last year's session from Sen. Curt Bramble, R-Provo, prohibited cities from using redevelopment agency projects for sports facilities. RDAs capture property tax from a development to be used for infrastructure improvements at that site. That bill made it impossible for Salt Lake City to purchase the stadium land without RDA funds.

However, this year, Bramble's RDA bill lifts the sports facility provision.

"I don't think it was ever fair to amend the RDA to exempt out of soccer just because of Salt Lake," Salt Lake County Councilman Joe Hatch said. "Everybody should be on a level playing field, and it was clear that it was not."

But it's not just the RDA legislation that's still pushing city officials' buttons.