Here's the complicating factor in SLC, though. A few years ago, the Mormon Church basically bought most of downtown and rebuilt it into a combination LDS vistors' center and commercial mall space. They used tithing money to do it all. For those uninitiated in how the LDS church makes its money from its members (outside of the various billion-dollar real estate, farming, and multimedia empires it runs), there are two basic sources - tithing, which is a mandatory 10% pre-tax donation from every single dollar a Mormon makes in any capacity, and "fast offerings," which is money members voluntarily set aside when they perform a fast (the idea being that you donate the money you would have spent on your food to the church to help the poor). In theory, neither tithing nor fast offering money should have been used for the church's commercial interests - the members are told and it is understood by them that these donations are meant to help the poor and the needy and to support church membership and meetinghouse upkeep, etc. (although now the church doesn't even pay for janitorial service for local meetinghouses and requires the members to do it for free as "celestial service").
So when the church announced this massive commercial purchase and the plans for creating a closed walking-traffic high-end shopping and commercial district in a section of downtown that used to be open to car traffic using member-donated money, it really rankled the population in general (and the membership in particular - I recall a whole lot of damage control and spin doctoring from the pulpit about how this commercial district would bring more souls to God and bullshit of that nature). It generated a lot of bad blood in the city toward entities like the Mormons exploiting their tax-exempt status, their membership-donated millions, and their absolute failure to put their plans to any sort of vote or even a survey.
Now here comes Ryan Smith promising a similar "transformative" commercial project, only now instead of just fleecing the poor Mormon folks, he's trying to get everyone's tax money to build his revenue generator. I guarandamntee you that he's leveraging every LDS resource he can in his pursuit of this project - I have no way of knowing for sure, but my thinking is that he might even use his connections to work with the same lobbyists that got the LDS downtown project greenlit. So he has a big advantage over a guy like Alex Meruelo because of the incestuous nature of government and religion in Utah. But, all that said, the general consensus among the populace is mostly, "Not again..." And complicating things further is that nearly $2 billion of public tax money sitting around waiting to be spent on sports facilities that nobody bothered to get permission from taxpayers to collect.
The honeymoon period helped wallpaper over these issues, but Smith and SEG need to work their asses off to get ahead of this pronto now that the wallpaper is starting to peel off.
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