2024 UTAH LEGISLATIVE RECAP
A rendering released by Utah Jazz owner Ryan Smith envisions a downtown Salt Lake City street with shops and entertainment venues feeding to a new arena that would house a new National Hockey League team or the Jazz or both. The Utah Legislature put the wheels in motion for such a development with a pair of bills that would allow city entities to use tax revenues to build the venues.
John Rogers
Although the 2024 Utah Legislature’s 45-day general session ended without a ton of significant business-related laws being passed, one of the body’s final acts could have a major impact on business — especially the sports industry — in downtown Salt Lake City.
In the hours before the final gavel, state legislators passed a bill that would allow Salt Lake City to raise the sales tax in the area to create a downtown sports and entertainment zone, including a potential National Hockey League arena. City leaders could raise its current 7.75 percent sales tax rate by one-half of a percent “for no more than 30 years.” The bill also “allows the local government to designate the area” and “requires [any eventual team] to pay back any tax money it receives if it leaves before that time.”
In addition to a hockey venue, the project area “could include a reimagined basketball arena or one for both sports.” The bill allows for bonding for up to $900 million “for building or remodeling an arena.”
Almost concurrently with the law’s passage, Ryan Smith, majority owner and governor of the NBA Utah Jazz — an obvious beneficiary of the new law — posted a rendering on X of a “bustling downtown street” featuring an apparent new arena sporting a Jazz logo. The rendering shows the arena sitting at the end of a pedestrian mall featuring shops and restaurants.
“Our efforts are not about an arena, it’s about revitalizing a downtown that desperately needs investment,” Smith wrote in his X post. “Imagine a downtown experience like this with the NBA/NHL at its core.”
Meanwhile, a similar bill to benefit the building of a Major League Baseball stadium just a mile away in Salt Lake City’s Westside neighborhood passed in the final days of the legislative session. The bill authorizes the state to issue up to $900 million in bonds to build the stadium. But gone from the bill is a proposed hotel tax that would have been charged statewide and added an estimated $38.4 million a year into the project. A tax on rental cars remains in the law but won’t take effect unless Utah gets a Major League Baseball franchise.
The newly created Utah Fairpark Area Investment and Restoration District along North Temple Street — where Gail Miller and the Larry H. Miller Co. are hoping to locate a professional baseball team — would collect the state portion of new sales tax and property tax generated in the area and use it to subsidize the infrastructure and other amenities, like restaurants, hotels and bars in the area, as well as the stadium.
Other than the two headline-grabbing sports-related issues passed by the Legislature, the session was mostly about complex problems facing the state, such as drought that threatens the Great Salt Lake, housing affordability and education.
The session saw the passage of a record $29 billion budget, which included a massive surplus that solons used to address some of the more pressing issues. Included was a $400 million tax cut, about $380 million of which will drop the state income tax rate from 4.85 percent to 4.65 percent.
On the education front, lawmakers implemented a school-choice scholarship and elected to ask voters to remove restrictions on income tax dollars for public education by way of a constitutional amendment. The admendment would remove restrictions on using income tax dollars for public education and would allow jurisdictions to remove the sales tax on food.
Lawmakers passed a pair of bills meant to prevent minors from joining social media without their parents’ approval and to give individuals more legal power to sue companies for perceived damages caused by social media use by minors.
Early in the session, the Legislature passed laws restricting gender-related medical interventions for transgender minors, including a ban on transgender surgeries for children and teens and an indefinite moratorium on new prescriptions of cross-sex hormones or puberty blockers for kids.
As it is during most most sessions, abortion was widely debated this year. A Utah “trigger law” that went into effect when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, has been on hold pending results of a Planned Parenthood legal challenge. But the Legislature passed a restrictive abortion bill effectively closing down elective abortion clinics and forcing patients to seek abortions in hospitals.
Lawmakers effectively shut down the debate over the new Utah state flag, leaving the final decision in the hands of the governor, who has indicated his support for the new pennant. The current state flag would be kept and used as a ceremonial flag to commemorate the history associated with it under the bill.
And Halloween will remain on Oct. 31 with the failure of a bill that would have moved celebration of the holiday to the last Friday in October.