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Poll shows local Olympic support keeps evaporating
By adamg on Thu, 03/19/2015 - 9:53pm
WBUR reports its latest Olympic poll shows only 36% of Boston residents now back the idea of holding the games in Boston - and that more people hold an unfavorable view of Boston 2024 organizers than think they're swell.
Separately, WBUR reports Deval Patrick now says he'll shmooze International Olympics Committee top dogs for free, instead of for $7,500 a day.
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Comments
Just sit on a happy face
Maybe if they stopped giving us the MONORAIL! treatment and started actually owning the obvious problems and working in good faith to deal with them, the song and dance would go over better.
In the meantime, many of us were around during the Big Dig and see the same gang involved in this mess, and want to quickly hide the silverware. Information on the long-term effects of the Olympics in Atlanta and elsewhere is readily available, as is information on what "rezoning" has done to Chicago and NYC in anticipation of failed bids. Everyone is still extremely cranky after everything fell to shit during the Snowpocalypse (due, in part, to the mismanagement of the Big Dig by these same hucksters leading to the state paying for overruns and dumping the debt on the T). That means that a lot of folks are not about to buy the hype until we see a sustainable transit system that works on a daily basis.
What about us..
....brain dead slobs?
Not to worry
The ex-politicians have already been given cushy jobs.
...brain dead slobs?
You'll be given Cushy Jobs.
wonder how Mayor Marty's poll
wonder how Mayor Marty's poll numbers look?
Good luck....
The hilarious thing is that Boston 2024 still believes they can turn those numbers around. They actually promote the idea that the more the public knows about the bid the more they'll support it. Sorry but not sorry the opposite has happened. Good luck trying to turn the bid around when only 19% of the public views your group favorably. Very hard to gain trust when all they've shown is to ignore the public as much as possible and to continue doing everything in secret.
USOC to Boston: Open your eyes, sheeple
The US Olympic Committee issued a statement on the poll numbers:
HAHAHAHA!!
Thanks for sharing their load of BS. Always nice to start the day off with a good laugh.
In other words....
"We'll just wait and see how much money John Fish and his pals will spread around before we decide to give them the big windfall".
Clearly they haven't read the
Clearly they haven't read the report. The report is so peppered with caveats, that it hardly constitutes the ringing endorsement they pretend it to be. The first caveat is the $9.1b budget. The entire report is based on that remaining stable when, in fact, most have had significant overruns.
Your only reading biased
Your only reading biased Olympic info Adam. I am not sure where you are hearing these negative things.
Answer One Question
I'm not opposed to the Olympics. I think it might be pretty cool to have us mentioned in the same breath with LA/Atlanta/Sydney/Tokyo/Barcelona/London/Paris and others - all cool, diverse cities.
BUT, BUT, BUT - where is all this magical money going to come from?
Security from the Feds - OK
Transit upgrades - will be what they will be and it still won't be enough
Operating the games with various revenue sources - perhaps - but we need more details
Venues, Venues, Venues? What is all this public/private partnership we keep hearing about? We need to spend billions on this and I'm not seeing or hearing about any revenue sources to pay for this stuff. My suspicion is - for example Widett Circle - gets sold to the Olympic group for cheap. then they build the stadium. Then they tear it down and develop it for big $$$$. I have a better idea - skip the middle step. Let the city determine to sell off Widett Circle at an appropriate time and just sell it for big $$$$ to some developer if that's deemed appropriate.
Again - I'm not opposed - that's just how I'm reading the vague tea leaves so far available to us and I'm opposed to that. Show me how this costs me no money and I can get behind it.
Widett Circle Authority
If you look at the Boston 2024 plans, they are proposing creation of a separate authority to take the land, then sell it to a developer who I guess would be willing to spend billions to buy 84 acres of vacated "Midtown" land and build something like a residential version of the Innovation District.
They have similar dreams for Columbia Point, except they don't mention an authority - and half the units would be sold to UMass Boston for dorms.
disturbing
Thats disturbing. Acquire it, throw people out, then have the olympics, and then sell it off to the highest bidder.
What a scam.. what a big f'ing scam this is.
Highest bidder?
If only. More likely the bidder with the most clout (and most likely to eventually handsomely reward the people who have to pick the winning bid).
Highest clout?
It will be John Fish! He said that because he's captaining the bid, he wouldn't introduce a conflict of interest by attempting to also be one of the construction companies to build the stadia...he never said that applied to whatever was built AFTER the stadia are gone!
Next meeting
Someone should specifically ask about that very issue. All parties involved in Boston2024 should recuse themselves from post-games development.
Thanks
Been meaning to look up these docs in more detail and haven't gotten to it. But that's exactly it - we sell/give/whatever EXTREMELY valuable land on the cheap to some entity - and then layers of other people make the lion's share of the money off of it.
If it's a good idea to sell it - figure out how to maximize the profit -for example by finding an alternative for the current uses, rezoning it for 400 foot residential and office towers - and THEN sell it to some developer. If s/he'd rather build an Olympic stadium first - wonderful. But the city shouldn't lose tens or hundreds of millions (billions?) of dollars in the process or in any way shape or form be on the hook for cost overruns/liability etc.
...
hey, John Fish, it's "you're" - not "your" - as in "you're frickin' crazy if you think anyone actually wants this festering turd."
To help persuade the city, Mayor Walsh has suggested
Having another parade.
How long will it be until Deval
Launches a bias suit against 2024 for this obvious racially motivated outrage, initiated by the Mayor and the Man? Didn't he do something like that on the way out of Coke, or Texaco, or one of his other grifts?
I see a seven figure private settlement in the future. And Mandatory Diversity Training for all 2024 staffers!
Speakin of Deval
I find it laughable now that he's working "for free"
Sure he's not getting paid, but how much do you bet 100% of his expenses will be covered now? So essentially he's traveling for free. The only thing he's giving away now is his time.
Yup
And want to guess where he's going to go on these ambassador missions? Paris, Rome, maybe the Bahamas....
Duval got zinged at St. Paddys Day breakfast
on his $7,000/day fee. Liz Warren said that on Wall Street, they call that "minimum wage". Ba-dum (they really do need a drummer to do rim shots at the event).
And at Harvard Law?
$7500 for a full day's work would be slave wages.
Duval?
I've seen this typo before, usually in the screeds of Herald morons...is it an inside "joke" I'm not aware of?
I think it's just garden
I think it's just garden-variety stupidity.
My bad
Mis-spelling. Former Herald commenters had an aid to help people keep from the error. Deval as in devalue. Sorry I wasn't using that aid.
I dunno...
I have a friend who's a major Olympic booster (not kidding, she goes to every single Olympic games), and she truly believes that an Olympics in Boston will be great. She cites the LA games as one where there were many long-term benefits. Honestly, I lack the time to become enough of an expert on the economics of the Olympics to know if those numbers are legit, and I definitely lack the time to become enough of an expert to know if Boston could see a similar benefit.
But Andrew Zimbalist has plenty of time.
(don't blame me, I voted for Falchuk)
What were the long-term benefits for LA?
The coliseum? A stadium that was so outdated by the '90's it couldn't support a pro football team (Obviously there were other reasons behind this, but one of them was that the NFL team there needed a new stadium).
"The last three Olympic Games
"The last three Olympic Games in the US have been profitable. In LA and Salt Lake City, those profits were returned to the city or invested in legacy youth sports foundations such as the LA84 Foundation. LA84 has given $220 million to youth sports programs in southern California, impacting 3 million boys and girls."
https://www.facebook.com/boston2024/photos/a.42188...
Insert Dr. Evil voice here:
"Ten. Million. Dollars."
What return on investment does that represent?
I assume that the numbers for SLC are so large because it includes all the kickbacks to Mitt's buddies.
Following Up Myself Dept.
The article cited in this helpful Facebook graphic doesn't even include any actual figures to demonstrate how the "profit" figures were even calculated, other than a link to a Gizmodo article about LA. Not exactly authoritative.
Profitable?
FOR WHOM?
I'm sure rich people doing construction and real estate deals profited hugely - but where's the accounting of the costs of displacing people? Of the costs of shutting down a city for a month or more?
Note that Salt Lake City was a Winter Olympics and LA had a lot of existing infrastructure for the games AND it was FORTY YEARS before 2024, 17 before 9/11 security issues.
Real estate goobers made that $10 million in Atlanta but talk to anyone involved and there are clearly externalized costs not on the books that the city and the people who were forced out are paying for to this day. Those costs include maintenance on white elephant facilities and services for people whose neighborhoods were wrecked to build them, as well as struggling housing initiatives meant to absorb the displaced that never really worked out.
This is misleading. The
This is misleading. The "costs" of the the Olympics are measured based on net operating costs. It does not include environmental, infrastructure, or costs to other entities. Furthermore, the LA Olympic bid was based on a strategy quite different from Boston's - that is, to build NO new sporting venues venues and to use existing apartments (dorms) for Olympic villages. The Boston proposal is precisely the opposite of that - to build venues and find uses for them after the fact.
The NFL needed new stadiums
The NFL needed new stadiums everywhere, and seem to be constantly looking for teams to make new stadiums, so I don't think you can blame the olympics for that.
L.A. is the exception
My understanding is that L.A. was an exception where money is concerned in part because they reused infratstructure. That would not work in Boston since one of the purposes of the Olympics is to guarrantee that construction companies will have plenty of work to do once the Seaport development is complete.
That is purely conjecture of course. Based only on the fact that one of the major supporters happens to run a major construction company. But with honorable humility he already stated that his company would not bid on Olympic construction. Yet as another poster mentioned several weeks ago that offer does not preclude his company from taking the construction jobs that are left open while the other construction companies work on Olympic projects.
That promise also does not include....
... any commitment to not doing a whole lot of work that gets subcontracted out from bid-winning contractors.
To continue the Simpsons references
Two so far in the comments …
"Go ahead, throw your vote away!"
at least
he voted.. unlike many people who didn't.
Regardless, it's no one's business who you vote for, as long as you vote. Voting is what matters.
(and I voted for Falchuk too)
(and yes I know you're trying to be funny but still... voting matters, who you vote is your business, as long as you vote)
And it's also
nobody's business if you choose not to vote, or the political party whose ballot
you are forced toyou choose to select in order to vote.correct roadman
Yes! I agree, but people SHOULD vote, even if they vote for mickey mouse! But hey if they don't want to, it's a free country too.
But I would hope people would exercise one of the basic freedoms and cornerstones we have in this country.. VOTE!
Absolutely correct
But what we need to do is to find more and better ways to encourage people to vote. And keeping idiotic and meaningless records like "so and so didn't vote in the past election" or "so and so, although registered as Independent, actually took a Republican ballot in three out of the last five elections" doesn't help attain that goal.
To boost participation, perhaps what we need is to declare that, if less than X percentage of registered voters actually participate in an election, than the results of the election are null and void. We should also have a single ballot for primary elections, in which ALL eligible candidates are listed, and eliminate the archane "If your party gets less than X percentage of the vote, you're not automatically eligible for being on the ballot next time around" rules as well.
I didn't
I didn't throw my vote away. The people who voted for the candidate who would turn around and piss on their heads (because they saw it as preferable to the candidate who would turn around and kick them in the teeth, and because counting past two would require them to get their fingers out of their noses) are the ones who threw their votes away. Does that sound like you?
Special circumstance
LA '84 was the only bidder in the final round, since Montreal '76 was such a financial disaster that it scared off everyone else. As the sole bidder, LA was able to dictate terms to the IOC rather than the other way around, which is how they managed to make the Olympics work for the city. Doesn't really apply here.
What gets my feathers ruffled
Is seeing Boston2024 continue to push purposefully misleading tropes like "The last three US games were profitable!" because people like the above commenter keep hearing it and believing it. The MASSIVE and EXTREMELY IMPORTANT asterisks like what that above anon references are never mentioned so they don't make it into the public consciousness.
News flash:
-This bid isn't about "the children" like they claim (their PPT presentation even starts with a picture of a bunch of children jumping for joy). They keep talking about the "power of sport" but rather than spend public money to bring gym classes to the 50% of BPS students who don't have them right now they want to build on desirable land for a party.
-This bid isn't about "regional planning." Nothing in the bid does anything to spur or require anything of the like. In fact, by committing the city and region to hosting these games, the exact opposite happens as every available public dollar is thrown at a small number of sites to cater to one three-week event.
-This bid will not be funded privately. If you really believe that then you're too far gone.
-The cost estimates are not "conservative and unlikely to increase." For proof, see: every major construction and development project ever.
-This bid does nothing for the MBTA. They like to keep insinuating that because it must work well in their focus-groups, but the bid does not include a single penny for transit improvements. Instead, it counts on us to spend that money separately, meaning that $9b budget is now several billions bigger.
-That recent UMass report doesn't mean much. If you notice all of Boston2024's crowing about the report, they change the word "could" (as in, "could bring in revenue") to "would."
I think their PR team has done an overall crappy job (as do 52% of the state, it seems), but the one thing they have been good at is making sure that almost-lies are continually circulating in the (lazy) media and the public conversation. They are almost-lies because on their face they are false without the caveats, but no one ever asks the follow-up questions that expose that.