Two years and three months behind schedule, the City of Los Angeles and LA28 have finally published the elusive “Games Agreement,” defining how the City is locked into hosting the Olympics. This agreement was supposed to address a number of unanswered questions about how we’re going to host the Olympics in 2028. In reality, the agreement offers few new specifics. It is a superficial document that places an unacceptable amount of risk squarely on the shoulders of Angelenos: The City remains on the hook for cost overruns. Systemic critiques of the Olympics tied to gentrification, policing, and the environment go unaddressed. There is no escape hatch in the case of a climate disaster, a recession, a pandemic, and/or if a majority of Angelenos demand cancellation, as residents of Tokyo did earlier this year. And our elected officials are poised to concede their power to run Los Angeles to the oligarchs who run the IOC for the next decade.
What’s not in the Games Agreement:
- A commitment not to displace or ‘sweep’ unhoused Angelenos
- Protection for low-income tenants from rampant gentrification
- Guarantees of street vendors’ rights
- Limits to the mass expansion of policing and surveillance
- A commitment to keeping ICE and CBP out of our city
- A reckoning with the environmental toll of hosting such a massive event
- An opportunity for Angelenos to debate the merits of hosting the Olympics
- Any semblance of a transparent public process of deliberation
- The bare minimum financial protections for the city (aka taxpayers!) that existed for LA 1984
- A cancellation clause for LA, without which the city has no real leverage in protecting itself from an Olympics institution that so often decimates host cities
If City Council cannot negotiate a contract to include these basic protections and commitments, it must Vote ‘NO’ on the Games Agreement.
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Full analysis:
LA remains on the hook for cost overruns
The Games Agreement continues to assume a best-case scenario for the Games, while providing no meaningful checks on the sort of vast cost overruns that are typical of the Olympics. LA’s Olympics are currently budgeted at $6.9 billion dollars, not including the roughly $1-2 billion dollars of security costs. For all the talk of LA hosting a “no-build Olympics,” there are still $1.5 billion dollars budgeted for venue construction. A best-case scenario for construction cost-overrun based on recent past Olympics is around 51 percent.* At that rate, construction costs would balloon by $765 million on venues alone, more than blowing through the $270 million contingency that LA28 is contractually obliged to set aside. And this calculation is looking at only a subset of the potential for cost overruns through the rosiest of perspectives. (Moreover, the Games Agreement reveals that any talk of contingency funds need to be taken by a grain of salt: LA28 plans not to have significant portions of the supposed contingency funds in hand until after the Olympics, which defeats the point of “contingency.”)
You may have heard that LA is the only city that has hosted an Olympics that didn’t lose gobs of money. That only happened because of moves taken by city leaders at the time that Mayor Eric Garcetti and the City Council have decided not to make, instead writing a blank check for the IOC. For the 1984 Olympics, the City of LA established hard, inflexible barriers to protect the city’s finances. City Charter Amendment N and an ordinance passed by City Council restricted municipal spending on the Olympics to a maximum of $5 million from specific tourism-related taxes, removing the City as the guarantor of last resort. For LA28, Angelenos remain the guarantor of last resort. All non-security cost overruns will fall on the people of LA. The current city government has failed to do the bare minimum to protect Angelenos.
The agreement is full of attempts to make it appear like the City and LA28 are mitigating the risk of cost overruns. LA28 promises to secure an insurance policy that covers “natural disasters, communicable diseases, terrorism, civil unrest, cyber-attacks, event cancellation, and coverage for reduced ticket sales and other revenue losses should the events become less appealing.” Does such an insurance policy actually exist? And if it does, why hasn’t LA28 got that policy yet? The LA Times suggests “this type of insurance has become more expensive during the COVID-19 pandemic, so LA28 plans to wait for rates to stabilize over the next few years.” Insurance companies just paid out big time for Tokyo 2020, and LA28 thinks these policies are going to get…cheaper? We’re not convinced. But we did notice that the Olympic bid did not even have an insurance budget. So where is that insurance money going to come from? Most likely the pockets of Angelenos.
Another instance of risk mitigation theater arises in section 7.9 of the Agreement, which states the City of LA “shall be reimbursed prior to any other municipality for any municipal resources of services.” At first glance, this language appears to be a cold maneuver by LA to ensure its position first in line in the case of cost overruns or revenue shortages. But remember, the City of LA is the final guarantor of these Olympics. So if LA28 runs out of money to reimburse other venue host cities like Inglewood, Long Beach, or Santa Monica, the City of LA will have to pick up the check. Getting paid back first doesn’t matter if you’re left holding the check at the end of the party. And LA is the only city that has written a blank check for the Olympics, meaning that LA could well wind up cutting checks directly to Inglewood and Long Beach long after the torch is extinguished.
Meanwhile, we have seen no evidence to suggest that LA28 will reimburse the City for the significant amount of work that city staffers have already poured into these Olympics plans. The Games Agreement implies LA28 will only begin reimbursing a limited number of city liaisons in 2024, even as it details how departmental liaisons will be increasingly involved over the next three years. It is a reminder that for all the claims that these Olympics will be privately funded, the Olympics are already consuming public resources including labor time and money. These are resources that should instead be used to serve residents’ actual needs and to tackle our ongoing urban crises.
LA’s low-income communities of color remain most at risk
The Games Agreement pays superficial lip service to one argument we’ve been making for years: that the Olympics will adversely impact unhoused Angelenos. All recent Olympics have been used to justify the forcible displacement of unhoused people from city spaces visible to tourists, in part because the IOC and corporate sponsors demand a “clean city” (ie. free of poverty) for the global media spotlight. The agreement says LA28 will work with advocates for the unhoused — not necessarily including any actual unhoused folks — to identify and “mitigate” any “adverse impacts.” But LA28 chair Casey Wasserman has admitted there will be sweeps that clear unhoused individuals to prioritize the “safety” of tourists, saying: “We are a city whose economy very much depends on tourism, and that’s a competitive industry that requires us to create a safe environment for visitors.” Let’s be clear: there is no humane way to remove, clear, or sweep human beings. Sweeps only serve to exacerbate conditions for people living on the street.
The plan to release a “human rights strategy” in 2024, seven years after bidding for the Games, shows that human rights are an afterthought for these Olympics. Although the Games Agreement calls for working groups on transit, security, community business, local hiring, and sustainability, there is no concrete call for a human rights working group. Nor is there any acknowledgement of the multitude of other rights violations that accompany hosting an Olympics: accelerated gentrification and displacement tied to stadium-centered development; the mass expansion of policing and surveillance apparatuses and an amplification of existing racist, violent practices; harassment and displacement of street vendors; intensified targeting of undocumented residents and workers for deportation; intensified policing of sex workers; the restriction of rights to protest; and the environmental toll of inviting hundreds of thousands of people to fly to your city at once. The Games Agreement acknowledges that “the Los Angeles region continues to add to its already expansive inventory of world class sports venues,” but LA28 leaders refuse to admit that the Olympics plans are driving this expansion, and they refuse to take any responsibility for the displacement driven by these investments. In short, LA28 and the City still fail to take seriously our coalition’s systemic critiques of hosting an Olympics.
“Flexibility” for LA28. No escape hatch for LA
Casey Wasserman told the LA Times the Games Agreement “can’t be an agreement that locks in every detail because the one thing we need is flexibility. Seven years is a long time and the world can change a lot.” The world can change a lot, which underscores the irresponsibility of deciding eleven years in advance to gamble $7 billion on a large party with a reputation for trampling on the rights of local people. The Games Agreement gives LA28 “flexibility” in the sense that it kicks the can down the road on making key decisions. Plans to create a working group for sustainability and a “strategy” for human rights are a classic instance of a liberal institution commissioning a study to look into the harm it’s causing, and then counting that study as “action” to address the problem. LA28 boosters continue to tell Angelenos to just trust that they’ll figure it all out later.
But this same “flexibility” for LA28 locks the City of LA into a position of less and less power as the Games creep closer. There is no exit clause for Los Angeles in this Games Agreement. There is no escape hatch in the case of a climate disaster, a recession, a pandemic, and/or if a majority of Angelenos demand cancellation, as residents of Tokyo did earlier this year. A section of the contract called the “Recession Principle” locks the City into delivering a set level of municipal services in 2028 based on a study of “normal” services from 2022 to 2024, even in the case of a recession or other crisis. So much for “flexibility.” LA is giving up its basic authority to control its own activities in the case of a municipal emergency. (What’s more, city leaders responsible for bringing the Games to LA may be incentivized to juice those “normal service” levels now, to give LA28 a better chance of coming in “on budget.”)
The contract’s rhetoric about LA28 working in “close coordination with the city” obscures that LA28 is only required to update City Council once a year. LA’s elected officials are conceding their power to run this city for the next seven years, and honestly, we fear most of them are happy to abdicate responsibility. This contract is an insurance policy for LA’s leaders, not its people, providing them with a convenient excuse for when anything goes wrong with the Olympics, letting them claim that it was out of their control.
The Games Agreement is perhaps the last meaningful opportunity LA’s City Council has to assert its power. And yet it plans to vote on the contract within three weeks of publishing it — three weeks that bridge the Thanksgiving holiday. The City is not being given a reasonable opportunity to weigh these risks, and at the very least to get better terms from a negotiation that has taken the better part of three years and still hasn’t produced a single hard number. And this is how every step of the Olympic decision-making process has transpired: behind closed doors, with vague promises, and taking huge risks at the expense of the most vulnerable all in the name of a two-week party.
Again, if City Council cannot negotiate a contract to include the following basic protections and commitments, it must Vote ‘NO’ on the Games Agreement. Otherwise, the real “Games Footprints” will be the traces of the Olympic machine trampling all over our city.
- A commitment not to displace or ‘sweep’ unhoused Angelenos
- Protection for low-income tenants from rampant gentrification
- Guarantees of street vendors’ rights
- Limits to the mass expansion of policing and surveillance
- A commitment to keeping ICE and CBP out of our city
- A reckoning with the environmental toll of hosting such a massive event
- An opportunity for Angelenos to debate the merits of hosting the Olympics
- Any semblance of a transparent public process of deliberation
- The bare minimum financial protections for the city (aka taxpayers!) that existed for LA 1984
- A cancellation clause for LA, without which the city has no real leverage in protecting itself from an Olympics institution that so often decimates host cities