"Turning a profit is the wrong measure of an Olympics. “I’m sure some cities have benefited long-term from hosting the Olympic Games, but I don’t think that is the primary reason for doing so. Hosting the Olympics is about serving the world and providing service to athletes and people from almost every country.”.... If funding falls short, city and state taxpayers could be on the hook to make up the difference."
Hey, who cares if you have to pick up the tab for the fun-and-games of the elite, austerity-strapped taxpayers?
"Group explores 2024 Olympic bid for Boston; The groundwork for a potential bid is being laid. But formidable obstacles, such as financing and transportation, stand in the way" by Mark Arsenault | Globe Staff, November 10, 2013
An elite group including some of the area’s most powerful business leaders, developers, and construction experts is quietly exploring the prospect of bringing the 2024 Summer Olympic Games to Boston....
The group also has recruited former governor Mitt Romney, who ran the 2002 Salt Lake City winter Games, as a key adviser....
An Olympic bid remains highly speculative, and group members say enormous challenges would have to be met....
Though Boston is packed with athletic venues that could potentially host events, the city lacks several major components necessary to host a Summer Olympics. Transportation between venues in a cramped city with an aging subway system would also have to be closely examined. And supporters would have to galvanize political and community support for hosting the Games and show that potentially expensive facilities could be beneficial to the city long after the Olympic torch is put out....
Wait until you see for jwho!
The fledgling effort to bring the Olympics to Boston was kept out of the public eye for two months as members explored the feasibility of an Olympic bid. In that time, it attracted supporters and advisers including Bob Reynolds, president and chief executive of Putnam Investments, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, former Massachusetts transportation secretary Jeff Mullan, outgoing Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis, and former state economic development secretary Daniel O’Connell, who is now president and CEO of the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership, a nonprofit public policy group made up of chief executives from some of the state’s largest corporations.
Yeah, they have all done such a great job running this society and city.
Davis, who gained a national profile after the Boston Marathon bombing in April, said he was personally recruited by Fish to advise the group on security issues. “I was struck by his commitment to it and by the people involved in it,” said Davis. “These are very substantial people in the community that don’t enter lightly into something this serious. The potential for economic development and infrastructure improvements is huge, but I really think it’s nice to have an exciting plan, an exciting proposal out there. My attitude is, why not Boston?”
I think I made it clear at the top why not.
Romney said the Games could be financed, in part, by television broadcast revenue, corporate sponsorships, and ticket sales. The federal government has traditionally covered security and some transportation costs....
However, if funding falls short, city and state taxpayers could be on the hook to make up the difference....
Boston would need at least three new major structures, and the Games require construction of an Olympic village to house roughly 15,000 athletes and coaches for the three weeks they would be in Boston....
How much is all this going to cost?
Critical to any plan would be what happens to the new structures after the Olympics.
There is probably no need for an 80,000-seat stadium in Massachusetts once the Games are done, members of the group acknowledge. But new construction techniques could allow a stadium to be built in sections, said Fish, some of which could be removed after the Olympics to leave a modestly-sized stadium with a capacity of perhaps 25,000 or 30,000. That would be roughly the scope of a facility Kraft is interested in building for his professional soccer team, the New England Revolution.
Yeah, but this is better because he can use other people's money to build it! See jwho benefits from the Olympics coming to Boston?
“Just looking at it from our point of view, we’re probably going to seriously consider a downtown soccer stadium somewhere in Boston or the Greater Boston area,” Kraft said in an interview. “We would try to help tailor something that could serve the needs of the Olympics and also our soccer team.”
The group will explore whether any local colleges and universities would help finance the building of an aquatic center, which could later be scaled down to a smaller campus venue.
That's what tuition increases will pay for, kids.
And the group is studying the future housing needs of the city, and whether an Olympic village could be designed to help meet them.
Detractors argue that hosting an Olympics is, at best, a mixed-bag for local economies. Hotels and restaurants, for instance, typically do very well, but other businesses can be disrupted by the temporary surge of tourism and the need for security.
Yeah, what we found out in London in 2012 was that local, everyday, mom-and-pop businesses get hammered. The Olympics were not an economic benefit, they were a burden and net loss.
But why let that spoil a party for the elite?
“Overall, the gains in the hospitality industry are lower than the losses experienced by other sectors in the economy,” concluded a 2008 analysis of the Salt Lake Games issued by the economics department of the College of the Holy Cross. “Given the experience of Utah, potential Olympic hosts should exercise caution before proceeding down the slippery slope of bidding for this event.”
Meaning it will be a NET LO$$ when the Olympics come to Boston!
For Romney, turning a profit is the wrong measure of an Olympics.
“I’m sure some cities have benefited long-term from hosting the Olympic Games, but I don’t think that is the primary reason for doing so,” said Romney. “Hosting the Olympics is about serving the world and providing service to athletes and people from almost every country.”
For the first and probably only time in his life Mitt Romney doesn't care about profit!
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Related:
"Mitt Romney’s ’02 Olympics short on transparency; Despite pledge, records destroyed" by Christopher Rowland and Callum Borchers | Globe Staff | Globe Correspondent, July 24, 2012
WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney.... a close-to-the-vest chief executive unwilling to share so much as a budget with a state board responsible for spending oversight. Archivists now say most key records about the Games’ internal workings were destroyed under the supervision of a staff member shortly after the flame was extinguished at Olympic Cauldron Park, after Romney had returned to Massachusetts....
Shows a pattern, doesn't it?
Romney and the Salt Lake Organizing Committee had no legal obligation to preserve their records or make them public, even though the state paid $59 million, and the federal government spent $342 million on the Games and contributed roughly $1 billion more in indirect aid for transportation projects and other capital improvements in the Salt Lake region.
Like other Olympics, the 2002 Winter Games were managed not by a public entity but by a private, nonprofit corporation that was exempt from public records laws.
Earlier Olympic organizing committees, too, had destroyed internal documents. Organizers of the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, burned records of their bid to host the Olympics — a move widely believed to have covered up bribery.
But Romney vowed that he and his committee would operate out in the open.
This guy is really looking like a serial liar.
Dubbed a “franchise player” by Utah’s Governor Mike Leavitt, Romney was charged with leading the comeback from a scandal in which some on the Salt Lake bid committee had quietly doled out cash payments to International Olympic Committee members during the host city selection process.
“Any time there has been a breach of trust by people at the top, that organization is going to be placed under a microscope, and that is appropriate,” Romney said at a news conference on Feb. 11, 1999, the day he was named chief executive of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee. “We will be viewed much more carefully than any other organizing committee, perhaps in the history of the Olympics, and we deserve to be so viewed. I believe we will come through with flying colors.”
Now destroy those records.
***********************
Salt Lake Organizing Committee officials confirmed to the Globe that most administrative records were destroyed in the months after the Games concluded.
Romney did not oversee the destruction of organizing committee documents. That task fell to Fraser Bullock (no relation to Kenneth Bullock), the committee’s chief operating officer and a former Romney colleague at Bain Capital, who took over as the Games’ chief executive when Romney left to run for governor of Massachusetts.
“Mitt didn’t have anything to do with any of those decisions,” Fraser Bullock said. “He was long gone, and it was really left up to the people left behind to decide what to keep and what not to keep.”
As president he will be responsible for the actions of those below him, sorry.
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I'm so glad he's a key adviser for Boston, aren't you?
Also see:
Looks like it is already dead based on the section in which the Globe stuck it.
UPDATE: Questions greet idea for Olympics
UPDATE: Questions greet idea for Olympics
