Salt Lake County officials aren't going to get any help in their decision whether to grant public money to Real Salt Lake for a soccer stadium in Sandy. Even the report released Friday by Economic Research Associates, the independent consultants they hired to examine Real Salt Lake's business plan, leaves some doubt in the air.

To be sure, the report seems to cast a bucket of cold water over the team. Even in its best-case estimates, RSL would come $1.2 million short of what it would need to pay off stadium construction bonds.

But those figures don't include money from other team holdings, such as a radio network. And, in any event, team owner Dave Checketts disputes the report's assumptions on how many concerts the stadium could attract each year. His arguments do carry some weight, considering Checketts used to run New York's Madison Square Garden and has a lot of connections in the concert industry.

Even the report's population figures are open to dispute. It lists the population in a radius of 10, 25 and 50 miles from the stadium site and concludes the team would play in the smallest market in Major League Soccer. People who live in a 50-mile radius are considered unlikely to attend games because it would be too inconvenient. But a radius of about 35 miles would have increased the figure substantially because it would have included much of Utah and Davis counties, which surely contain some soccer fans willing to make the trip. And that likely would put the team's market ahead of Columbus, Ohio.

So, report and all, the county is left not too far from where it started. It must decide whether a soccer stadium is a proper place to invest $30 million in hotel room taxes. And, if it decides the answer to that one is yes, it must decide whether the county would be getting enough in return to justify the investment, and whether the county would be adequately protected against losses.

Frankly, the answers to most of those questions remain no.

The only exception lies in the deal County Mayor Peter Corroon has managed to negotiate concerning how the county's money would be spent. It would go only toward purchasing land and other tangible assets, which would indeed protect taxpayers.

We refer, as we have in the past, to the economic studies of Dennis Coates, an associate professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County; Jordan Rappaport, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank; and Andrew Zimbalist, professor of economics at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. They each found that publicly funded stadiums, regardless of the sport, do not provide any tangible returns in the form of economic growth.

One need look only at Franklin Covey Field in Salt Lake City, a stadium built completely with public funds, to understand this. At the time of its construction, officials predicted it would be an economic generator for the area. More than a decade later, it is clear those predictions were wrong.

Professional sports can provide an intangible benefit. They can increase a community's visibility as a team name is repeated on sportscasts. But even the MLS as a whole is still working on visibility in an overcrowded sports world.

As it always has, the county, and it alone, must decide whether that meager return is worth extracting money from hotels countywide. Given all the above, it shouldn't be hard to say no.