NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman doesn’t want any arena drama in Salt Lake City.
The Salt Palace and Abravanel Hall could be impacted as stakeholders work to build a sports and entertainment district around the Delta Center.
Public details, though, are still sparse, with many of the most important aspects of the project still to be decided. This much is clear: The plan calls for significant changes to the Salt Palace Convention Center and could impact both historic Japantown and Abravanel Hall, a beloved center of the arts downtown. Utah Jazz owner Ryan Smith posted this rendering of the proposed downtown sports and entertainment district on X on Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2024.
“He said there were options he was open to. May have been Provo, may have been the south end of the valley, may have been Herriman, may have been Sandy,” Adams, R-Layton, said. “I honestly believe him. I don’t know if he had an exact location for it. I think there were multiple locations.” Fans attend an introduction event for the Utah NHL team at the Delta Center, on Wednesday, April 24, 2024.
“That concern was motivating enough for everyone to sit around and spend a lot of time talking about those issues, and it became clear that downtown was the best option for the state and for Salt Lake City,” McCay said. Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall enters the Delta Center before an event to introduce the Utah NHL team on Wednesday, April 24, 2024.in downtown Salt Lake City of “up to 100 acres,” or 10 city blocks, which must include and “be roughly centered around” the block with the Delta Center.
In particular, the plan primarily involves city blocks east of the arena, the current primary tenant of which is the Salt Palace Convention Center. Salt Lake County owns the center’s 515,000 square feet of exhibition space, along with the land the center is placed on — placing the county, too, at the heart of negotiations about the sports district.
“It’s about having more flow, more energy, more passion, more activity, more arts, more education,” Smith said. “And being able to look back 30 years from now and saying, ‘That’s the center of Salt Lake City.’” A source familiar with the negotiations said that loosening of liquor laws just blocks from Temple Square and LDS Church headquarters would not have been possible without sign-off from Utah’s predominant faith.“When I look at the map and I look at downtown, the whole convention center and the Salt Palace and all that area, that takes up about 30 acres, a lot of space,” he said. “It’s vital, but there’s also probably a lot of space that we could actually use in a better manner.
“I hope we have the leadership that will recognize and will support and help us,” said Jani Iwamoto, a former state senator and leader of the effort to preserve the area. “We don’t want to move. We’ve been there for over 100 years, and I know that we’re committed. We’re not going anywhere.” “The reason why we wanted to see that particular district was because it was right in the heart of L.A.,” Smith said. “I can’t wait to kind of show the plans on how we’re going to do it.”said the district would push development forward in the city, comparing it to the creation of City Creek Center in 2012.
Another benefit of renovation: It’s probably cheaper. One point in favor of this plan over creating a new arena, multiple officials said, was that a larger percentage of the sales tax increase money could be spent on elements of the entertainment district that don’t include the stadium itself. Further construction would be in the offseasons to come, but the Smith group wants to wait until the plans are finalized outside of the arena to reveal those inside of it.
The city’s first in-public interaction with the plan comes May 7, when Smith Entertainment Group representative Mike Maughan will present details to the council. That discussion will also involve council members sharing their concerns and key decision points on the project. Those pitfalls, she said, include a historic return on investment on publicly funded sports venues that hasn’t been “stellar.”
Meanwhile, Mano said at a council meeting this month that, while he is still weighing the proposed tax hike, the project could help right historical wrongs — including undoing what he called the “racism-fueled, ‘urban renewal’ project” that made way for the Salt Palace in the 1960s. “The reason I’m in support,” Lopez Chavez said, “is because we’re seeing the ability to restore justice into our downtown in terms of opening up conversations and prioritizing Japantown, as well as looking at other facilities that are owned by other entities, like our convention center, to improve pedestrian modalities and walkways and thoroughfares in our downtown.”
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