GRACE LEONG - Daily Herald | Posted: Friday, July 21, 2006 11:00 pm
Real Salt Lake owner to make decision on stadium deal by Aug. 12
The partially toxic dirt fields of the former Geneva Steel plant are a far cry from verdant green soccer turf. But Dave Checketts had his first glimpse of what could be potential sites for Real Salt Lake's soccer stadium in Vineyard on Friday.
For a few hours Friday morning, Checketts and Real Salt Lake CEO Dean Howes met with the principals of Anderson Geneva and toured several sites along Utah Lake, including a 30-acre site in the central part of the 1,700-acre former steel plant, for the proposed soccer stadium.
Anderson Geneva offered to donate the 30-acre site and even buy the soccer team to keep it in Utah after the Salt Lake County Council rejected a proposal that would put $30 million in hotel taxes toward buying the land and building infrastructure for a proposed stadium in Sandy. Salt Lake County later made a fledgling offer of $23 million in hotel taxes for the stadium, but Real Salt Lake still hasn't responded to the county's latest offer.
No deal was reached between Anderson Geneva and Checketts on Friday, but both sides "had substantive talks" about the Vineyard site, transportation access and the possibility of entering into a joint venture on retail and commercial development on Anderson's planned 1,700-acre mixed-use project, said Mike Hutchings, a partner in Sandy-based Anderson Development.
He said Checketts was "impressed" with the property's proximity to three Interstate 15 interchanges, the future commuter rail line from Utah County to Ogden, as well as the planned Mountainview corridor freeway from Davis County to the northwest portion of Utah County through Lehi and Pleasant Grove.
"He likes that our offer isn't dependent on the legislative or political process. After the experience he had with Salt Lake County, that's very attractive to him," said Rondo Fehlberg, former BYU athletics director and a partner with the law firm of Hutchings Baird & Jones representing Anderson.
Checketts could not be reached for comment immediately on his views of the Vineyard property.
The sheer size of the privately owned Geneva property also gives its developers the flexibility to determine where the stadium can be located and how to build its commercial and retail space, he said. In addition, the site is within 50 miles of two-thirds of the state's 2.5 million population in Utah, Salt Lake, Juab and Wasatch counties.
Fehlberg also downplayed concerns over the partially remediated slag piles and fields at Geneva. "Checketts has every confidence we'll be able to clean the site. He knows some of the most successful MLS stadium sites like the Columbus Crew in Columbus, Ohio, were built on brownfields, or remediated toxic ground. The bottom line is the teams that are making money tend to have their own stadium. So it's important for him to have a stadium deal worked out."
Checketts is supposed to make a decision on where the stadium will be sited by Aug. 12. Real Salt Lake hopes to have its own 20,000-22,000 seat stadium by April 2008.
"He's taking our land proposal and evaluating it very seriously. He told us he'd try to make some kind of decision within the next few weeks," Fehlberg said. "And if he puts the team up for sale, he said he'd discuss it with us. But he made it clear that's not his priority right now."
This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page D6.