Utah taxpayers have committed another $300 million to the downtown Salt Lake City sports district, this time to bury part of 300 West, east of the Delta Center, to create a pedestrian plaza between the arena and property the Smith Entertainment Group recently acquired from Salt Lake County.
Money for the road project comes on top of $900 million in sales tax revenue already being channeled into SEG’s sports, entertainment, culture and convention district.
Lawmakers added this major street construction on line number 3,644 of a massive 126-page transportation bill on the third-to-last night of the 2025 legislative session.
Despite the project’s size, it went almost entirely unmentioned and unnoticed, aside from a passing reference to money being pegged for U.S. Highway 89 improvements in a “county of the first class.”
Highway 89, which includes 300 West, stretches across Utah, but Salt Lake County is the state’s only first-class county.
House Minority Leader Angela Romero, D-Salt Lake City, said she wasn’t aware of the $300 million for 300 West until The Salt Lake Tribune asked her about it.
“If we talk about transparency, we weren’t transparent here, as a body,” she said. “If you can imagine the frustration for me, can you imagine the frustration for taxpayers?”
Sen. Wayne Harper, R-Taylorsville and the sponsor of the transportation bill, said lawmakers had been discussing the project for about a year and that the Utah Department of Transportation had the money available in a fund that mainly contains federal highway funds and gas tax revenue.
“It was decided at the very end [of the session] saying, ‘OK, in order to meet all the needs of all the stakeholders, let’s go through and appropriate money that’s been sitting on the shelf and put it in there so we keep 300 West open, we go through and enhance the pedestrian and traffic and the experience of people in that area,” Harper said. “I didn’t perceive it to be something big, because we talked about it for over a year, and then we just made the decision right at the end.”
Japantown impact
Members of the Japantown community, along 100 South just east of 300 West, knew there had been talk of what to do with 300 West but were unaware the Legislature had allocated money for it.
“It’s going to have a pretty big impact on [the Japanese Church of Christ] and there wasn’t much consultation with anyone in that community,” said Rolen Yoshinaga, a board member of the nearby Salt Lake Buddhist Temple and part of a subcommittee representing the community in talks with SEG. “It was all run through the Legislature, and it all went pretty quick. It really snuck up on a lot of us.”
Representatives of Japantown — the remnants of a once-bustling Japanese enclave — have repeatedly expressed concerns that large-scale construction and congestion in the sports district could hinder worship services, funerals and community events at the Buddhist building or the Japanese Church of Christ.
SEG has promised to involve the community, Yoshinaga said, but “there’s a lot of promises and not a lot of follow-through.”
“The next thing you see are movements in the Legislature, all of those things happening,” he said. “I think the community is kind of losing its patience with them.”
An SEG spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
UDOT’s options
(Christopher Cherrington | The Salt Lake Tribune)
Robert Stewart, director of UDOT’s Region 2, which includes downtown, said his team is in the early stages of working with SEG to figure out its vision for the project.
“We’ve already started those discussions with SEG, and we’re going to bring the county and city into them,” Stewart said. “I don’t know if we have an exact time frame on how fast we’re going to move to build. I know SEG is in a hurry [since] they’re remodeling the Delta Center. … They would like our solution to match their tempo, but we still have to go through an environmental process and engage in comment periods. … That’s our standard process, so I don’t know if our time frame matches theirs.”
SEG’s concept for that area was no secret. In early artist renderings that Utah Jazz and Utah Mammoth owner Ryan Smith posted on social media, the seven-lane highway was notably absent and in its place was a sprawling pedestrian mall.
Last year, The Tribune reported that Smith’s group was exploring the option and UDOT confirmed it had looked at options, all of which would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
In an early study in January, UDOT provided five options for the plaza — ranging from funneling traffic through an underground tunnel extending three blocks to a “hybrid” option that would sink the road for about a block and create a much smaller walkway (roughly a third of a block wide) above the highway.
Cost estimates and construction timelines varied wildly, from $1.6 billion and more than 10 years for the three-block tunnel to $297 million and four years for the scaled-back “hybrid” option — roughly the amount appropriated by lawmakers in their late-session maneuvering.
“That’s not a full billion-dollar tunnel,” Stewart said. “That’s a different solution. So that’s where we’re working from is that hybrid solution and how we make that fit in with what SEG wants … That’s where we are on the vision quest."
With the hybrid design, Stewart said, UDOT could maintain three lanes of traffic in each direction but the left-turn lane would be eliminated.
Spokespeople for the city and county said they don’t have information about the plans and referred questions to UDOT and SEG.
SEG recently bought a fifth of the Salt Palace Convention Center — 6.5 acres on the northwest end of the building directly across 300 West from the Delta Center — for $55 million. If the pedestrian plaza is built, it would connect the arena’s plaza to the newly acquired property.
— Tribune reporters Jose Davila IV and Jordan Miller contributed to this story.
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