Salt Lake City aiming to become Little Vegas

A rendering of the proposal for the Downtown Revitalization Zone project presented to the Salt Lake City Council on June 11, 2024. (Screenshot of a Smith Entertainment Group presentation)

Utah’s sports money barons have gotten together with the Legislature to promote Salt Lake City as Little Vegas, only without gambling, unless of course the Legislature decides to throw sports gambling into the picture in Utah.

Las Vegas recently got heavily into the professional sports world starting with a major league hockey team in 2017, followed by a major league football team in 2020, and will soon pop up a major league baseball team to complete a perfect trifecta of sports entertainment in that desert mecca. Vegas essentially became Little San Francisco after stealing two professional sports teams away from the environs of the City of Fog. Now Utah wants to complete its own trifecta on the Vegas model.

A pair of sports entertainment developers in Utah have negotiated new partnerships with our one-party legislature to add an MLB baseball team to the Fairpark area adjacent to downtown, and a NHL hockey team to the Delta Center area downtown to complement our highly successful professional NBA basketball team, the Utah Jazz.

SLC Council votes unanimously to endorse revitalization zone deal with Smith Entertainment Group

Nevada will accomplish its sporting empire piecemeal over the course of a decade, but Utah proposes to add two new teams all of a sudden, kicking off those two development efforts virtually together in late 2023 and early 2024. Is this Utah’s solution to the decline of families, economies, governments, media, churches, and education systems happening here and across America? New sports complexes? Really?

In any event, the sports entertainment industry is really heating up in the City of Salt now with the special “revitalization” arena district legislation passed by our hard-working Republicans on the hill. But that is not all that is heating up. Business propaganda is clutching into high gear as well.

The developer of the expanded Delta Center complex says it is not just about “sports and entertainment.” It is also about “education,” “families,” and “culture.” The developer apparently does not deem it necessary to mention how a new sporting complex will aid education, family budgets, fine arts, and church attendance, but those kinds of generalized one-word promises are necessary to throw in to justify the billions in new public tax money needed to make the projects fly.

The new hockey team project will, in the words of the developer, “help with the homeless situation” too. The model for that sort of help was amply demonstrated for citizens last year when Utah welcomed the NBA All-Star game to SLC in February 2023. Our business and government homeless helpers herded all the homeless away from downtown streets into various off-the-streets day-care centers and temporary sleeping facilities so out-of-towners would not discover . . . you know . . . that Salt Lake City has a big homeless problem.

Developers also promise that the new sports district will help with “the safety situation” in Salt Lake City as well. Perhaps this will relieve the Legislature and the city of the arduous and as-yet unfulfilled task of reforming our law enforcement and criminal justice systems. Those particular needs were well documented in the long and drawn-out reporting by local and national journalists investigating the Lauren McCluskey murder in our fair city.

In northern Virginia, a deal is moving along to transfer Washington, D.C.’s professional hockey and basketball teams to neighboring Alexandria, where business owners are salivating about new cultural, shopping, and housing opportunities. Utah developers describe “the vision” here in the same way Virginia’s governor Youngkin describes the new project there as “visionary.” There is no mention by Youngkin about new educational, crime prevention, and homeless opportunities, however. Folks in Virginia apparently are a little less gullible than Utahns about the actual substantive goal of America’s new public-private sports partnerships.

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