This is really the $64,000 question, right? Two Globe columnists – Shirley Leung and Joan Vennochi – have reported that Boston 2024 head honcho Dan O’Connell is promising not to force an Olympic venue down the throat of any community that doesn’t want it. Here’s Leung:
Boston 2024 has sketched out 33 possible sites for venues, and president Dan O’Connell vows to hold a hearing in each community where there is a proposal. If the neighborhood says no, on to the next site. If this is done right, we should all be sick of seeing the Olympic rings and talking about where the main stadium could be built.
And here’s Vennochi:
A key section of the six-part bid proposes 33 sporting venues, including many in Boston. Pressed for more public accountability, O’Connell is vowing to hold a hearing for each proposed site; if one neighborhood says no, a back-up will be picked.
OK, that all sounds great. But Vennochi asked the critical follow-up question, namely, how does a community actually say no?
But when I asked how a neighborhood’s opposition would be determined — by a vote, for example, and by whom? — O’Connell replied, “I don’t know. We will look to the elected officials.”
Laughable, right? In Boston, for example, apparently Mayor Walsh is already so sure that Boston residents are totally on board with the Olympics that he sees no need for a vote or anything troublesome like that. He’s pretty sure that the only naysayers are those hippies from No Boston Olympics (his actual quote, at 13:38: “I haven’t really heard from people other than a few people from ‘No Olympics’ that have said they’re opposed to it”). Because, you know, he saw a couple of polls a few months ago. Wow.
As alert BMGer jcohn88 correctly points out, the existing polling is in fact far from definitive on the question. Plus, how could the polling actually say anything meaningful at this point, since – as has been repeatedly pointed out – nobody save a tiny cadre of insiders actually knows what Boston would be signing itself up for? If a poll’s respondents don’t actually know anything about the question they’re being asked, it’s hard to see how it can be taken as a meaningful commentary on anything. Garbage in, garbage out.
As of now, Boston 2024’s supposed commitments to transparency and community engagement are looking like a lot of talk with very little behind them. Even more worrisome is the current sense that certain elected officials (*cough*Marty Walsh*cough*) don’t seem terribly concerned about holding Boston 2024 to those commitments because of their own (misplaced?) certainty about what their constituents actually want.
Pay attention, folks, or this could be a done deal before most people even realized what was happening.
The whole piece is, really, but I hope that last point sinks in with people fast.
The time to demand answers is now – before Boston is selected – because if we wait, it’ll be too late. As soon as this is turned into a national (and corporate) issue, Massachusetts and Boston residents will lose almost all say in anything.
Is that we will lose the bid nod from the USOC, as I outlined in my prior post, we are years behind the joint DC/Baltimore bid which has been actively meeting with IOC and USOC officials since before the 2012 games. Did Boston 2024 send any witnesses from its team? Any paid observers to report on best practices? Did it even exist then?
San Francisco and the DC bid have also contracted out paid lobbyists to work on their bids. Have we done that? If we have, which group and who is paying for it?
The key reason to kill this in infancy is to avoid chasing after a bid-paying millions just for the preparation-and then losing to one of the cities with a big head start.
…Or, put another way, how to say no to a war? Or to the Big Dig? Or anything? Why is there a difference for the Olympics?
Without getting into whether or no the Olympics make sense on their own, I’ll simply note that big –perhaps overwhelmingly big– decisions are exactly why we have executives and representatives in the first place. I say the residents of Boston are on board with whatever crazy, half-baked, nonsensical scheme that Marty Walsh could propose because that’s the power they gave to him when they made him the Mayor. If they don’t like it, they can vote against him next time. But holding a straight up vote and then turning about face and demanding an instant veto on his decisions sure doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Petr, you really need to get over this Prussian democracy fetish.
It’s neither how things work nor how they ought to.
I got your little joke. It was funny.
How do things work, then… pray tell?
I’m serious. Tell me.
in that electeds do what they think best, for some definition of “best,” within what is feasible.
Only sometimes this is tempered by what people want. And sometimes, though it is rare, grassroots movements change the scope of feasible.
…. the “electeds’ do what they think best and the judgement upon what is feasible or otherwise is left to the other branches of government. The general plebiscite tempers nothing. If you want to change to a system where the general plebiscite does temper things, I’m with you. If you want to pretend that such is the system we have now, i’m not with you.
If the people don’t know what they want next week they can’t know what they want in 3, 7 or 11 years. Some of them don’t even want to know such things. So they elect representatives to think long, deep and full time about what is needed, not just what is wanted.
And it’s worth thinking hard about why the Olympics are different from other gigantic projects on which, as you correctly suggest, a popular vote is not routinely held. One difference, I think, is that proponents of the Olympics are expressly promising community support. Again, Dan O’Connell insists that he’ll ascertain neighborhood support, and if the “neighborhood says no,” he’ll move on. We don’t normally see that kind of language when talking about public policy. Interestingly, we did with respect to casinos, and indeed, local communities do get to weigh in on whether they want to host a casino.
Another difference, though this one is less clear-cut, is that the Olympics is purely, 100% optional. There’s no possible case to be made that hosting the Olympics is somehow incumbent on Boston or Massachusetts. Whereas roads, bridges, health care, etc. etc. – all that stuff is different. And yet there’s no doubt that, if we do host the Olympics, a lot will be asked of the people of Boston and of Massachusetts. That combination of circumstances seems to me to take the Olympics out of the realm of ordinary public policy decisions which, however grandiose, we do ordinarily entrust to our elected representatives.
Does the IOC consider popular support as a factor in its selection?
as jconway observes, Berlin is already committed to it. “‘[T]here will be a vote for all Berliners to decide. We want the widest possible support for this.'” Seems perfectly sensible.
And yes, the IOC considers public support. For instance, in evaluating the 2020 cities the IOC commissioned a poll (PDF, scroll to Annex C) in each of the three final candidate cities. They may have more detailed public support requirements, but I didn’t see them on a quick Google search.
You can bet that if the IOC sees any significant public protest over hosting the Olympics in Boston, they will choose another city.
They Olympic bid comittee has to show us their cards and make a genuine and honest effort to get community input and buy-in or else they will be wasting their time and money as well as ours.
I’m sympathetic to the notion that, for an ostensibly private endeavor like the Olympics that, as noted, is optional, the governmental role might be reduced to arbitration and permitting between planners and communities. I’m also sympathetic to the notion that, for all that is going to be asked of the citizenry, the returns might well be wreathed in glory and acclaim and so…well, there it is.
I do, also, have a strong notion –though weakly held— that the premise of the question “how does a community say no’ is predicated upon the notion that the default choice, in general, is opposite whatever the politicians want… which is kinda nonsensical if you think about it and why I ask ‘what an elected official is for…?’ On the specific question of the Olympics I’m not sure that, however vocal the opponents might be, the question is, automatically, ‘no’. I’ve heard a wide range of responses from ‘bring it on’ to ‘meh’ to ‘hell no’ and, so, I’m uncertain that developers will actually have that much difficulty getting community buy in.
And, I do think we are going to find out…
Your point would only make sense if this was a campaign issue. It was not.
But the way things are going, this is definitely going to be a campaign issue when he comes up for reelection.
… J. Random Politico from doing “whatever the hell they want” is the system of checks and balances and not the general plebiscite.
As well it should be. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.
Encouraging politicians to promote a vote and live by its result is an appropriate “check and balance” for this particular issue.
But as I said, Marty Walsh can simply stake his reelection on the issue if he wants.
Neither the Massachusetts nor the Federal Constitution allows for a specific vote for/against the actions of a specific politician. Both constitutions were envisioned and enacted to expressly DENY undo influence upon a politician by a plebiscite. That’s why any and all Mass referenda are subject to the possibility of a veto by the governor or a repeal by the state legislature.
Legislators and governors are not puppets.
Duh. My point exactly. As much as some want to veto now, you cannot. Any veto by the general public over Marty Walshs actions occurs only the next time he is up for election. That’s it. Maybe if Boston had thought more wisely about it then, it wouldn’t be an issue now. Maybe not.
I forget who it was who noted that “Americans will cross the globe to fight for democracy but they won’t cross the street to vote for it.” Methinks there’s a little of that sorta mentality going on here…
They can, however, veto legislation enacted by the General Court which would overturn the results of same.
…why I so often seem to use apostrophes for plurals. Of course I know better:(
Why don’t this people have a detailed plan for something that might happen 9 1/2 years from now?!?!? What secret devilry are they up to???? WHAT ARE THEY HIDING!!!!
People on this site are working themselves into a lather because nearly impossible foresight is being laid out to their satisfaction. They expect that today Boston 2024 should be better organized than First Night 2015. I’m starting to wonder if it’s a massive parody of the “frantic liberals are the reason we can’t have any fun anywhere anyhow” attack line from the right.
they did submit a detailed bid that was hundreds if not thousands of pages long. So … ya know, someone has been doing some planning for something.
. . .what is the harm in making the plan public? What possible secret ingredient could they have 9 years before the ’24 Olympics?
… the opposing poles of desire acting upon the Olympics just the existence of detailed plans, methinks, might offer a glimpse of future battle lines: on the one hand there are the Olympics boosters who promise that the sun will shine brighter, the moonlight be more romantic and that every child born in the city thereafter will be above-average and, upon the other hand, detractors who prophesy a never-ending night gloaming over a fiery hellsmouth from which demons emerge to steal our motivation to do anything else…
So, yeah, tho’ the truth is probably somewhere in the middle — it should be both difficult and lots of fun — and doesn’t, as you point out, require these kind of details almost a decade out, there’s a great deal of positioning being done to stave off the momentum of the other side: which momentum driven by each’s sides caricature of their own position.
Also, I think one of the issues we have with this is exactly the problem that there are going to be too much risk exactly because of the impossibility of foresight.
In any case, we really haven’t been told anything yet, except for obviously bogus promises of zero taxpayer cost, and are expected to jump on board.
They promised transparency and so far they have utterly failed to live up to that promise. It is fair to conclude that they are willing to say whatever they think will make people happy but aren’t terribly concerned with actually keeping their word.