The Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics are Brewing Constroversy

With the 2010 Winter Olympics just about a year away, controversy plagues the city of Vancouver. The reason? Mismanagement of the Vancouver Olympic Village which has led to a “financial crisis” for the city.

To sum up in one sentence – Vancouver Olympic organizers screwed up, and the citizens of Vancouver are expected to pay for it. It seems like ordinary citizens paying for others’ failures via tax dollars is a recurring theme nowadays.

In a move that seemed reasonable at the time, and in line with what other past Olympic hosts have done in the past, the City of Vancouver and the Vancouver Organizing Committee decided to build an Olympic Village that would be later sold as apartments or condos. The project was to be built by Millennium Development Corporation and financed by Fortress Investment Group (FIG), a U.S. hedge fund. The project was budgeted at $750 million and construction was to be finished by November 2009.

Not only is the village nowhere near being constructed, it’s already $125 million over its budget. To further complicated matters, pre-sales of condos are down, and so are their selling prices as a result of economic woes. Aside from the $317 million already loaned to Millennium Development Corp. by FIG, the remaining tab, potentially $1 billion, may be dumped on Vancouver’s taxpayers. It seems like Vancouver’s politicians forgot about the “completion guarantee” they signed just two years ago, backing the project fully.

What’s even more angering, especially to Vancouverites, is the lack of accountability and transparency of their government. Just a few months ago, Vancouver issued an emergency $100 million loan to keep work on the Olympic village going, negotiated in secret without notifying the people of Vancouver. And just last week, Vancouver was seeking an emergency session of the provincial legislature, asking for emergency authority to borrow $458 million, which normally would require a public vote. In this case, they claim, there just isn’t time to ask the public, hence the emergency. They were granted the money, having to alter the city’s charter to make it possible without public consent.

Vancouver hasn’t even bothered to ask the federal government for funding. Prime Minister Stephen Harper stated: “I will be crystal clear. We will not be funding cost overruns at the Olympic Village.”

We’re seeing governments across the world bailing out all sorts of corporations with taxpayer money. First the U.S. and the financial industry, then their auto industry. Canada shortly followed suit, bailing out their own auto industry. And now there is talk of the UK bailing out their financial and auto industries. Should Vancouver be allowed to jump on the bandwagon and finance the rest of the Olympic village project with their taxpayers money too?

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Tags: 2010 winter olympics, controversy, olympic village, vancouver

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 8:58 pm and is filed under Municipal Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.