There will be no arena built in southwest Utah.
The Utah legislature won’t have to spend a billion dollars or more for an arena-village for a developer who thought of building a minor league basketball and hockey venue. The Black Desert Resort ownership group in Ivins wanted to build an arena that could have potentially hosted a minor league hockey team, NBA preseason games, the Utah Jazz business’ G League team, concerts and other events. Ivins is in the southwest corner of Utah near the Nevada and Arizona border and not too far from Las Vegas which is about a two-hour car ride away. The Black Desert Resort spokesman Patrick Manning said the arena plan was never serious. “The arena was nothing more than one of 20 things we may do in the future. So we were doing some exploratory things with the legislature, but we are not going to do that in this next session. There’s too much happening. We’ve never spoken to an architect. So it was really just one of those things we threw against the wall to see what may come of it.”
But Utah is spending a lot of money on sports. The International Olympic Committee is bringing its 2034 Winter Olympics to town and if there is one thing that the IOC does well, it is extracting every last dollar it can from taxpayers’ pockets into staging its crown jewel event. Utah is spending roughly $900 million of taxpayers’ money to help Ryan Smith, the National Basketball Association’s Utah Jazz and the National Hockey League’s Utah franchise owner, to renovate the teams’ present facility and build an arena-village. Utah lawmakers are also willing to spend around one billion dollars to help build a stadium-village if Major League Baseball puts a team in Salt Lake City. It is just the price tag of being a big-league sports town.
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There will no new arena built in Ivins, Utah
