As of July 27, Boston officially backed out of the 2024 Summer Olympic bid.
Finally.
By that day, almost 50 percent of the local population has been sick and tired of the constant upheavals and limp negotiations between the city and the U.S. Olympic Committee, and I’m a proud part of that statistic. Now we can all puff out a collective breath of relief in knowing those of us in the metro area won’t have our lives upturned due to millions of dollars of transformative construction in the coming years.
Construction with funding that, as Mayor Marty Walsh and many others have argued, would come straight out of taxpayers’ pockets.
Earlier this summer I worked for the United Independent Party, a novel political party whose founder, Evan Falchuk, ran for governor in the 2014 gubernatorial elections. Though most of the work consisted of registering citizens to maintain the party’s gravity – my main task during my month-long vocation – one of the organization’s top platform points was to gain support in deterring the city’s bid.
“The average cost overrun for the Olympics is 252 percent,” one of Falchuk’s staffers explained to me and other interns during orientation my first day in the empty conference room on the office’s second floor, right across from Old City Hall. “It could end up costing more than $20 billion for Massachusetts itself.”
That difference would have come from higher taxes, diverting spending or borrowing – another financial impediment the state would have had to contend with beyond its $35 billion in “outstanding debt and debt service,” part of which is due to the Big Dig. Even that won’t be paid off until 2038.
Not to mention, the city is small – less than one-fifth the size of Los Angeles, the next U.S. city on the bid. Los Angeles is familiar with the whole system, and is equipped with some of the infrastructure as a two-time Games host. Manufacturing of the stadiums, Olympic Village ($2.5 billion) and the Media Center ($500 million) from the ground up would be absolute overkill for both the city and the surrounding towns that will inevitably be pulled into the mess, all for it to be torn down once the Games end. And with the notorious traffic patterns as a consequence of the three week influx of fans, tourists, media and private companies in an already crowded and scholarly city, it would have been outright calamitous.
Bostonians don’t have to worry anymore. “I cannot commit to putting the taxpayers at risk,” Mayor Walsh announced at a City Hall press conference, stating that the USOC has been clamoring him to sign a contract for the host city by a September deadline. “If committing to sign a guarantee today is what’s required to move forward, then Boston is no longer pursuing the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.”
Now that the deal is off, Boston 2024, the privately-funded organization that developed the city’s Olympic bid, is “winding down its operations, which included at least 20 paid staffers with salaries ranging from $30,000 to $300,000,” according to the Associated Press. Officials declined to comment on any more regarding finances, but promised to release a final report “at some point,” following the timeless corporate ambiguity we’re all too familiar with.
Of course, the consultants and vendors are still concerned about getting paid: “Through the first three months of 2015, Boston 2024 spent roughly $2 million, with about $1.1 million going to 25 consultants who were collectively expecting to earn over $4.5 million annually for their work.”
Yikes. A 75 percent cut is brutal for anyone. Not to mention they’re still not off the hook from USOC’s withdrawal fees, which have been capped at $3 million for the institution instead of the usual $25 million penalty.
Yet my sentiment lies with that of No Boston Olympics, especially given all the technicalities that come with hosting the Games, including all the financial baggage that comes with it.
As I frequent the streets of the quaint and relatively peaceful city, a charming amalgam of historic significance with modern metropolitan raucousness, I don’t see why we need the Olympics to shed light on a city already basking in the sun.
Noosha Uddin is a Collegian columnist and can be reached at [email protected].
Correction: A previous version of this article credited the wrong author.
