Rio Tinto Stadium - Financing

Financing

In 2005 a soccer-specific stadium for Real Salt Lake was approved for Sandy, a suburb of Salt Lake City. However, funding for the stadium was hard to come by. A vote in early 2006 struck down a funding proposal for the stadium. The proposal was declared "dead" by owner Dave Checketts at that point, putting the team's future in doubt. Parties from cities such as Rochester, New York, and St Louis, Missouri expressed interest in purchasing the franchise and moving it, but on the day Checketts had set as a deadline to have a stadium plan in place, a tacit agreement was put in place, and Real Salt Lake announced that they would move forward with the construction of Real Salt Lake Stadium, which would ultimately be named Rio Tinto Stadium. The groundbreaking, coinciding with the Xango Cup, Real's match against international power Real Madrid, took place that afternoon featuring elected leaders, team officials, as well as the entire rosters of both Real Salt Lake and Real Madrid.

The stadium plan was effectively killed on January 29, 2007. In response Real Salt Lake's owner announced the team would be sold and likely move out of the Salt Lake area after the 2007 season. In response to the stadium rejection, construction company Anderson Geneva offered the club 30 acres of land on which to build their stadium and multi use center, and offered the land for free. The land was estimated to be worth US$10 million.

A new stadium proposal was made on February 2, that would divert 15 percent, roughly $2 million a year, of the county's hotel taxes to the stadium project beginning in July until 2017. The bill was passed by the Utah State Senate.

On September 28, 2008, it was announced that the naming rights to the stadium were sold to the mining company Rio Tinto in a fifteen-year deal worth between $1.5 million and $2 million per year.