If its members cannot be convinced that a Major League Soccer stadium in Sandy is a good use of taxpayers' money, they are under no obligation to help fund it.
It matters not that the Utah Legislature passed a law that allowed such a deal. The fact that lawmakers apparently want to do a $45 million favor for their friends at Sandy City Hall and in the corporate suites of Real Salt Lake - but hang any blame that might ensue on the county - should raise warning flags for county officials, not draw their blind obedience.
Because there were no members of the Legislature on the firing line at their meeting Tuesday, it was Real honcho Dave Checketts who took the heat from council members. Several of them, quite properly, wanted a lot more than empty promises in return for the plan to cement an added 1.25 percent in taxes on hotels - mostly in downtown Salt Lake City - to provide a share of the planned $145 million stadium-hotel complex set for 9400 South and State Street.
Council members who spoke up for their constituents wanted some firmer assurances that Real, and the league to which it belongs, are not just a flash in the pan or another one of those high-roller sports teams that is happy to pick up and move whenever some other desperate city offers a better package of corporate welfare.
They want the books open and they want better assurances of fiscal success than a cooked study that pretends the one-time appearance of the USA national soccer team in a double-header at the much larger Rice-Eccles Stadium is an example of the numbers of fans that Real will draw from far afield.
Except for Councilman Randy Horiuchi, that is, who made the stunningly sycophantic argument that the county will lose face on Capitol Hill if it doesn't go along with a funding plan on which it had little input and from which it stands to gain nothing. (As if state lawmakers would ever show local officials the respect they deserve.)
The fact that the tax will come from the pockets of out-of-towners makes no difference. Money that goes into a rat hole, if that's what the stadium proves to be, should have gone to something else of use to the county's population, or else never should have been collected in the first place.
