From the Globe:
Mayor Martin J. Walsh Monday vowed not to mortgage the city’s future in order to bring the 2024 Summer Olympics to Boston and said he is willing to let US Olympics organizers choose another city to serve as its host.
Walsh said at a hastily called City Hall press conference that the US Olympic Committee is pushing him to sign a host city contract soon. But he said he will not sign any such contract until he knows more about the financial picture of the proposed games.
“I cannot commit to putting the taxpayers at risk,’’ said Walsh. He said if signing the contract is required by USOC, then “Boston is no longer pursing to host the 2024 Summer Games.”
USOC members are set to discuss Boston’s status at a board meeting Monday. Walsh thanked bid organizers for the hard work they’ve put in so far, and said, “we’ll see what happens” going forward.
Walsh said he will not yield to pressure from the USOC to put taxpayers on the hook to guarantee the 2024 Olympic Games take place in Boston.
“I refuse to mortgage the future of the city away,’’ he said. “This is a commitment that I can’t make without ensuring the city and its residents will be protected. … I think it’s unfortunate that it’s come to this point.”
At his press conference Mayor Walsh asserted that “the opposition is 10 people on twitter”… perhaps he needs to step back from his friends and consultants working for Boston2024 to get a more realistic view of the situation. His move today he stated was based on what “rumors he read in the papers over the weekend” and calls he had with Boston2024 members, an IOC member and Gov. Baker. He appears to be heeding the Governor’s example…real facts before signatures! Finally.
he spoke with USOC not IOC member
There is absolutely no way that Boston 2024 can possibly obtain enough insurance to avoid very significant financial risk to the city. Marty Walsh isn’t dumb. He knows that perfectly well, and yet he still hedges. But does he honestly believe that there will come a time when he can go ahead and sign it anyway, and no one will notice?
He should simply state that he will not sign a host city agreement that requires the City to insure the games. If that prevents Boston from being selected, then so be it.
As I predicted about three months ago, he now realizes this is an albatross that has wasted most of his political capital this first term. He needs to ditch the Olympics in order to avoid becoming a lame duck. Make no mistake, this is not the end of the beginning, it’s most definitely the beginning of the end.
Marty is smart enough to take the many good proposals that have been unearthed, like the fairly low cost improvements to Columbus Rd, and turn them into political capital.He will gain from the improvements to the MBTA, even though he makes no contribution to them. Marty will win re-election, this Olympic mis-step long in the rear view mirror. Come visit the city before you offer your prognostications about local politics.
I’ll be back Labor Day, looking forward to seeing my folks and catching up with people. If anyone knows anyone who is hiring someone in the policy and communications fields, I’m all ears. Looks like I need to be willing to work for food and lodging at this point though.
I never said Walsh was a one termer, but the risk was higher if he didn’t pull out of the bid as he did today.
…he’s an expatriate Cantabridgian. Granted, there is a different frame of reference over there, but it makes him a local, sorta.
Walsh will have the powers that come with incumbency, and he’s personally liked. My read of polling to date indicates that negative sentiment about the Olympics never slopped over the Mayor among the Bostonians that were sampled.
Back to cases: James you’ve been a source of documentation and good policy stuff, and I for one thank you.
Even though you’re a R&L/UC alum.
I am an outsider trying to break in, the things I learn from others here and the relationships I have made due to BMG are invaluable, and are starting to slowly pay dividends. I am reconnecting to some Cantabs regarding this cycle, lots of key transitions for the council and committee coming up, and I hope to stay involved there as well as best I can. Giving the job search a few more months while working on grad school applications, there is a lot I still need to learn and hopefully that can help. Applying exclusively to MA schools, the Midwest has been fun but its time to come home.
that conway is a former resident of Massachusetts but it is a bit difficult to swallow his commentary about our politics when his source of info is print and electronic info, not real involvement and probably never having met any members of the Walsh team.
I do agree with you that incumbency and the current polls indicate that Mayor Marty is in fine shape. Personally, I like Marty, somebody I have worked with a lot in the past, but think he has made many mistakes. None of them are fatal. I don’t think any of them even draw any blood but are jump points for people who don’t like him.
And yes, conway has supplied some good info about the Chicago Olympic experience. Absolutely.
I know one staffer from Walsh’s transition team whom I respect very much, and I like Marty personally too. This was just a big blunder from a policy standpoint, but, it would’ve been worse had he gone all in or if we had won the bid. He made a good decision today for the city.
I’d never heard that one.
people from multi-syllabic locations. Nobody every figured out how to call a resident of Massachusetts something other than Bay Stater or a MassHole.
Harmony hadn’t heard of it either, kinda pretentious but kinda fitting.
Liverpudlian and Mancunian.
We from the great metropolis suffered with the disparaging “Granbanian” given to us by our neighbors in South Hadley.
…the Latin form of Cambridge in England.
And it relates to graduates of the university rather than denizens of the town-but we’ll take it! High and Latins team was the Cantabs, and there is still a Cantab lounge
Marty has enough money and support in the city to win re-election. Go ahead, name the last mayor who lost a re-election bid.
Don’t pull this college commentary from out of state. Come back here and do some real work before you bloviate here. Stop poisoning our local political discourse.
…and has been contributing intelligent commentary for years. You on the other hand showed up not too long ago and have proven yourself a bully.
almost since its beginning, but under a different name. I have grown tired of people who make up crap about things and post ten times per day. Attending Google University and reading a few blogs does not make one an expert or even informed.
… since you don’t say which different name you once posted under.
If you’re going to use the fact to try to gain some moral highground, it is incumbent upon you to tell us the name you once posted under and why you changed it.
I don’t care if you believe me, petr. And I am not trying to gin any higher moral ground, just refuting a fabrication made by Christopher and now reiterated by you. As my mother often said, two wrongs don’t make a right.
Prove it’s not a fabrication. Tell us your previous username and why you changed it.
In fact, how do we know that you weren’t sanctioned, under your previous account, by the editors for some behavior? And how do w know this username isn’t just an attempt to circumvent their sanctions… ? We don’t know that.
So prove it’s a fabrication. Tell us your prior username.
You joined us in your CURRENT persona in November. If you were here before that you must have had a different personality along with a different handle since I’ve been here a few years myself and do not recall anyone else treating me or other BMGers the way you have.
You not only have a way of ginning up disagreement with those who basically agree with you (You and JConway agree the Olympics were a bad idea for example, yet you grab on to a minor difference and don’t let go.), but you can’t just explain what you see is an error. You have to make it personal and not let up until the other one cries uncle. You have also IMO abused our rating system and do not fit with the BMG culture surrounding downrates. No sooner had you (using your current handle) arrived on the scene than you decided to set yourself up as the arbiter of accuracy and acceptable lines of argument. Sometimes it seems if you don’t see an obvious disagreement, then you make one up by twisting another commenters words as if you WANT to start a fight. All in all, it has been a much less pleasant experience for me here since you arrived, but I suspect you don’t care.
(Apologies to the editors and others for that rant, but I really needed to get that off my chest.)
… you gonna pull this kind of shit you better STFU about all that ‘post conflict’ moral masturbation you invoke every time somebody questions your bona fides.
Perspective is perspective. Jconway has one. I don’t agree with it, but it’s his and the locale from which he posts is of no never mind to you.
You don’t like, you can find some other blog to piss all over.
giggle.
Because without their support, the Mayor’s promise to sign the agreement is not sufficient.
…nor the expertise to do that, although they arguably tried.
There’s a political vacuum in the City right now, and the Council likes that just fine. Hence the passive-aggression of the Body as a whole regarding the issue.
… didn’t want you to think I agreed with this horseshit
Gloat.
Gloat.
… the more I think that it is the USOC who is looking for a graceful exit. By pressuring the Governor and Mayor to do something they have to know they won’t do (especially in the Governor’s case), they give themselves a public excuse to drop Boston and switch to L.A. Of course, they have had more than enough excuses to do so for months. You really have to wonder what favors were called in to get the USOC to pick Boston in the first place.
They liked the idea of a walkable bid, wanted to spread the bids around, and liked the fact that we promised an affordable bid utilizing existing space. Of course, the bid got out of control, as local officials had to spread the venues around to other cities to win state support at the last minute, eroding the walkability factor, and the Boston 2024 folks just assumed certain properties would be available without asking ahead of time.
It was really the amateurism of this bid that sunk it, I suspect a credible group could have gotten the job done, it still would’ve been a colossal waste of money and political capital, but it would’ve probably worked. We should be thankful they were so incompetent. It’s incumbent on No Boston Olympics and other progressive opponents to spin this as a victory for smart growth, wise infrastructure investment, and government and corporate accountability rather than simply an anti-tax revolt as many others will try and claim it to be.
as a true walking Olympics was intriguing. Boston would have been a very salable games for the IOC. We’re appealing. The way the committee handled this from the outset was a farce. To them, it was always a development project with the Olympics as the hook to get them access to the properties to do their development. As for their constant claim of transparency, who are they kidding, it was the most opaque thing attempted in Boston in ages. I guess I can’t blame them for that. They created a dog of a scheme that they didn’t want anyone to understand, and hiding details was their best best to get it ok’d before what has happened happened. Good riddance, now pull the plug officially.
Didn’t the USOC notice that we didn’t have space for many of the important venues? Wasn’t anyone aware that Boston has a well established reputation for not using public money for sports venues? Why did they think that Bostonians would welcome paying for a temporary stadium?
I agree that they probably bought into the “walkable” concept, but it is clear that they didn’t actually think very carefully about the glaring problems with the bid.
Inept as Boston 2024 has been, this debacle is partly the fault of the USOC. Unless they learn their lesson — and there is no reason to believe they will based on the public comments we have heard from them so far — we can expect to see this pattern repeated in future bids.
… the $275 million in City money used to finance the rehab of Fenway Park.
That article was in reaction to a proposal for $275 million in public money. They didn’t actually get it.
Here’s what finally they got, from ballparks.com:
Plus a sweetheart deal from the BRA giving the Red Sox control of Yawkey Way on game days and the air rights over Lansdowne Street.
That is from a proposal to build a new Fenway Park that never happened.
The BRA deal is real, however. Of course, the BRA is infamous for its opaque land deals in any case, none of which are done with the public’s approval.
n/t
BRA’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit challenging the Yawkey Way deal was denied earlier this month.
The Curtatone Corrollary to the bid was an interesting idea to integrate the bid into existing laundry lists of public works that are desperately needed, and it was a road foolishly not taken.
While I consistently rejected the catalyst argument for the Olympics, there is a real danger the conservative opponents of the bid and Baker spin this as an anti-tax rejection, rather than the anti-cronyism and pro-transparency rejection it was. I really hope No Olympics continues in some form as a grassroots advocacy front advocating smart growth and progressive revenue. We should harness this grassroots energy that helped defeat the corporate elites of the city and use it for future campaigns.
I think there’s been too much criticism of the 2024 advocates and their (admittedly flawed) strategy. The fundamental problem with the Olympic bid, in my opinion, was that there was no real demand for any of the necessary facilities – even the Olympic Village dorm plan wasn’t entirely credible. Had this been one of those occasional periods when Boston needs a large stadium, much more support would have been forthcoming. The whole “we’ll build it and then tear it down” thing was a sure loser.
What, did he plan to cover the expense out of the Boston property tax?
Who thought he could bind taxpayers to anything, anyways?
(It appears he was able to summon up some gumption after he saw that Baker suffered zero repercussions for blowing off the 2024 deadline)
Just how many towels can you throw in? Just askin…
Walsh is playing hardball — which is what many of you said he should do– and we shall see the results. I, for one, respect his game, whatever the outcome.
However, I am surprised that, apparently, many here believe the run-up to other Olympics, including the ’84 games are so much more tidy. It wasn’t. They aren’t. It’s surprising when so many people who think they understand mega-projects are surprised that they don’t plan pretty.
That’s why we don’t want them, especially when we didn’t ask for them in the first place but are asked to pay for them.
… no mega projects. Ever. Anywhere…
I wonder how many people said that prior to the ’84 games in LA??
We don’t want megaprojects unless they can be proven to be necessary. As much of a mess as was made of the Big Dig, we really did need to do something about the crumbling Southeast Expressway. We should have done it better, but we had to do it.
The Olympics, on the other hand, we don’t need to do. Now if we can do the Olympics without it being a “megaproject”, for instance if the venues and transportation infrastructure were already in place, then it would be much more palatable.
And of course with respect to LA, this has been gone over many times by now, but LA already had the venues and didn’t have to sign a host city agreement. The Olympics were also much smaller and cheaper 30 years ago.
People don’t want mega-projects because they represent risk, change, and all sorts of scary things. So they use necessity as an excuse to oppose them. There will always be mouth to feed before we can build a project or a study that questions a proposal. We can always have our math to point to as a reason to cling to the status quo. We are supposed to be proud of a minor chamge in health care laws as a “legacy” of the best chance to implement progressive policies in half a century. Mega projects have become something other places do.
New York is undergoing a profound megaproject that will directly improve its ability to remain a globally competitive city. Mayor Daley called the CTA Blue Line his father’s greatest legacy since it provided a direct link from the airport to downtown and he insisted a transit system be built in tandem with the new expressways. He was aware that Millenium Park was his biggest legacy, with or without the Olympic bid. Both have contributed to Chicago’s ability to draw international tourists, conventions, and global businesses to the city. It is possible for a Japanese businessmen to get off his plane, hop on a direct express transit line to downtown, and walk out at Millenium Park and take a selfie to share with his colleagues back home.
New York has finally realized that, and is turning an ancient and decrepit airport into a hub for innovation, with direct transit linkages that will finally allow people to get downtown rapidly.
No reason Boston can’t think big and make no small plans in the words of Daniel Burnham, but let’s think of plans that benefit the entire city like he did in Chicago, like Olmsted did here, and like Kevin White did with Fanueil Hall and Quincy Market or Mayor Collins did with several infrastructure initiatives. Now that the Greenway is complete, does anyone question whether the ends of the Big Dig was worth it? The means still deserve scrutiny, but the ends reconnected the city and continue to draw people from around the world. That’s the vision we need to have. The Olympics as proposed by Boston 2024 were not that vision.
How bout dem apples?
Just saying.
Predictions were well-grounded and correct.
It was funny to watch progressives say they’d support the bid if it built the T, commuter rail, smart growth, don’t screw over the poor, etc., like this was the all-you-can-eat buffet at the Sizzler. There were always just two options: The pu-pu platter that sticks taxpayers with all the risk, or the USOC would tell us to GTFO & they’d give our table to L.A., who judging from the media coverage are eager to lap up whatever gruel at whatever price tag the USOC serves up.
…I’m a little confused because I thought the Mayor already signed something, like the document that caused an uproar because it seemed to infringe on the first amendment rights of city employees to criticize the bid. On the other hand I think this was done out of sequence all along. The USOC should have gotten all the necessary agreements BEFORE choosing Boston as its candidate.
http://www.wistv.com/story/29636810/boston-out-as-us-candidate-for-2024-olympics
Congrats to LA!
via email:
1. Is this a fairly profound grassroots-y victory?
That’s what it feels like to me, that while many played a role (including BMG for sure), NBO pulled off a pretty big David beats Goliath? Can anyone think of an analog?
2. Will that allow us to watch from afar and see if, indeed, the costs run over in 2024?
I know the details vary dramatically b/w Boston bid and what will become their bid.
But the general idea — that these projects tend to run over — from our point of view, won’t LA test that just as well as Boston?
1) Totally a grassroots victory, I am sure Evan Falchuk picked up a lot of signatures and donor lists for his party too. Whether it was opportunism or sincerity, probably a combination of the two, it shows that someone working outside the establishment can hold it’s feet to the fire. No Boston Olympics was a truly grassroots, bipartisan organization, Chris Dempsey is a great organizer and we will surely hear from him down the road, and hopefully they keep the organization open to mobilize that body of people towards smart growth, infrastructure investment and the progressive revenue streams needed to run it. This is a golden opportunity to work outside the system and I hope the effort doesn’t end now.
2) Precisely
LA already has a stadium ready to go, which it is already converting to an NFL ready use, and a sports entertainment complex that is walkable within venues and connected to major highways and mass transit. It also has the capital freed up to do this. Granted, it’s citizens may not want the games and it could be a boondoggle for them. Which is fine by me, they’re Lakers fans after all 😉
….a successor group to Tank the Tax run by Rep. Geoff Diehl helped too.
This may help his Senate campaign as well.
A bunch of lazy narcissists with room-temperature political IQs (in Celsius degrees) who couldn’t organize a bottle party in a brewery.
I’ll be laughing about this for weeks.
Now as to the questions posed above:
1.) With all due respect to NBO, the battle was more a media than grassroots affair. To their credit, opponents did their research; but the victory was primarily due to Boston 2024’s arrogance and magical thinking. When one’s opponent makes every political and policy mistake in the book – starting with their avoidance of basic due diligence and lack of even rudimentary organizing on the ground – the battle is already halfway won.
There is an analog, but you won’t like it. The ballot question committee that opposed indexing the gas tax was outspent 34 – 1, but won in the 2014 State election.
2.) Re: LA. Yes there will be overruns – there always are – but LA has better infrastructure (and more available land).
over-inflate the role of ten or so BMG bloggers in the slow demise of the Olympic bid. It went under due to the catastrophic weight of its false claims and arrogance.
…just delusions, fantasies, magical thinking, category mistakes, cognitive biases, and all the other stuff that goes with a disconnect from reality.
The accusation of arrogance is justified.
They very clearly and explicitly stated that there was no public spending in the 1.0 bid when Boston first won the bid. That was not even remotely true.
They falsely claimed they had spoken with owners of land on which venues were to be placed. They falsely claimed they already had support in place from a wide number of politicians.
I was indulging in a little bit of gloating, and guess that my attempt at humor fell flat.
The point I was trying to make was that the level of incompetence, including the false claims indicated either an intelligence level so dense it bends light; or perhaps something other than the capacity for rational thought.
Mea culpa.
This clearly suffered from a severe dose of groupthink.
for criticism of those false claims and ignorance, which can’t manifest in a vacuum. The effect is hard, if not impossible, to measure. It’s pretty certain we weren’t responsible for the low approval numbers. There was a lot of opposition on the other side of the aisle as well.
I can’t stand Howie Carr and if you attribute the result to media coverage (social or otherwise), you would have to admit that he had the most media reach of any Boston 2024 opponent.
i.e., enough people to swing the needle on those polls, I don’t think they were following all the ins and outs of who was saying what. For opponents, it seemed to be much more about taxes and traffic with a bit of anti-elitism thrown in.
Via the Times. Once the Grey Lady sings, it’s over
Though if we’re giving up this easily and quickly, Boston would never have what it takes to actually pull off the bid. Looks like the 2004 DNC will stand as our high-water mark.
Related: http://www.theonion.com/article/pretty-cute-watching-boston-residents-play-daily-g-31554
the US Olympic Committee took their ball and went home.
You don’t think this was mutual? You think that the USOC wanted this? 2024 was practically locked in as an American games, and now we look like a bunch of schmucks. A cobbled-together bid from LA might have a shot, but the USOC looks as bad out of this as Boston.
I have been in a half-dozen cities of more than one million people around the world in the past year and even though I often mentioned the games bid, nobody knew about it. OTOH, I would estimate that half of the people with whom I conversed about Boston knew about our hospitals or universities, and another large chunk want to move here because we are among the coolest places on earth. Really.
In short, outside of a few thousand people in the US, nobody gives a shit about the Boston/USOC decision. We don’t look bad. We look good when we make sure our real gems are promoted and places like the Common are protected from the local pillagers. If we could make our public and private transit work, we would look even better. We certainly don’t need an over-priced bridge in Lowell to be world class.
Think about it. How many times in the past have you been aware of bids by competing cites for Olympic games, particularly preliminary ones? We’ve been at the epicenter of this for months, and we’re particularly interested in following things like this closely, but many are not, and once you get out of our media market, it’s a minor story to most people.
B2024, the USOC and IOC will get almost all the blame for this, which they richly deserve.
They make insane demands of their hosts and people across the world have figured that out. Boston isn’t the first (Norway beat us to it) and won’t be the last to tell the IOC to take a hike.
That they would’ve looked worse with the half assed bid Boston 2024 submitted with strong public opposition, LA can probably present a decent option for the IOC to consider, and probably reject, but they could position themselves for another bid down the road.
I think the planners and boosters shouldn’t blame the opposition, but look at the points we were making and think of ways to address them. We want badly needed infrastructure improvements now, we want to make the city more affordable now since there is a real housing shortage, and we want to prioritize sustainable smart growth that is climate change sensitive.
I think really having those three governing principles guide our regional development can put us in a position to bid for a games as a cap in the hat so to speak by the 2030s, perhaps after IOC has undergone some house cleaning after seeing city after democratic city reject the games or lament hosting them. But Boston was nowhere near ready for the nine year period requires for these games, and we should be doing these things anyway, not because international elites want us to.
Who cares who hosts the RNC/DNC?
Who cares who hosts the Olympics for that matter? Unless you are actually planning on attending, it really isn’t going to matter to you.
I get that most people are fine with keeping Boston small, a nice place that doesn’t bear mentioning as another Paris or Tokyo. That’s fine — they might like that Onion article.
I want to believe that the city I love can do pretty much anything doable on a global scale. Others desperately didn’t want to contemplate that, and made their fears and hesitancy a reality. They managed to shrink Boston to fit their worries.
I wanted America to win in Iraq, but I knew we didn’t have a prayer. Same here.
We can think big and become a global city, the Olympics was not essential to that endeavor nor was opposing it antithetical to that endeavor. You thought it was a vital catalyst, I viewed it as an expensive distraction and a road block. Let’s work together now on building a city that works. I want the same city-but you have to recognize the city we have isn’t the city we want, and there are many paths from point A to point B.
I did not want the US to “win” in Iraq. It was a disaster before it started because it was based on fraud and ignorance. I was in Iraq during the war. I went there to clean up the mess we made, not “win” it.
The next time you want us to “win” a war, think about the bodies that come home in boxes in the cargo hold of airplanes instead of in the passenger section.
I always opposed the Iraq War, my point is, war proponents accused opponents like us of hating our country, wanting it to fail, and yes, thinking small. But our hubris and arrogance resulted in tragedy. The plan was doomed to fail from day 1, just like the Olympics. That’s all I am arguing when I use this analogy. You can love your country and want it to succeed and oppose a war, love your city and want it to succeed and be glad it lost an Olympics it couldn’t afford.
You wrote:
I wanted America to win in Iraq.
I think that is borderline obscene. Have you ever seen a person, a body, a family who lost their life due to war? Dead people are the only way that wars are won.
You would be hard pressed to find any statement I’ve ever made in my time here supporting that war, opposing it got me into progressive politics. Opposing it shaped my political identity more than any other issue.
My point is, sabutai argued we are thinking small for opposing the Olympics, and that’s the same thing Bill Kristol and all the neocons said about opposing Iraq. That opponents hated Anerica and wanted it to lose, I didn’t want to lose, but I knew it would lose since the mission was impossible and a horrid waste of human life. I am attacking the logic that supports blind optimism and hubris substituting for rigid analysis in the field of policy, not supporting it.
I find it very odd that your talking point seems to be that true opponents of the war wanted America to lose, I don’t think any of us wanted that, we wanted to avoid defeat by avoiding that god awful war in the first place!
the war. It was a colossal lie from the start and your reiteration of the notion that “I wanted America to win in Iraq” is part of that lie. I never wanted America to lose, nor win. I wanted peace and went there to help create it. Obviously I ain’t that good at my work (LOL) as the battles continue, but every American who says “we should win that war” against a country or terrorist insurgency adds to that.
Please don’t explain away your comments about winning the war in Iraq. At least until you do some volunteer work with vets or Iraqis who were disabled in the war.
And we completely agree about this issue. It was an avoidable tragedy, just like the Olympics, happy to oppose in both circumstances even if proponents argued I hated my country or my city. Sorry if my language confused you.
Baby steps
isn’t giving up.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/usoc-drops-boston-olympics-bid-2015-07-27-161032646?dist=afterbell
If you have the Wall Street Journal, here is more details…
http://www.wsj.com/articles/usoc-drops-boston-olympics-bid-1438024640?mod=mktw
No loss (except for Boston 2024).
He has done a lot of work in his day job and free time to fight this bid, and is a BMGer who really walked the walk on this effort.
RyePower, Mark Bail, and HRs Kevin linked to a lot of other economists and studies I wasn’t familiar with, your insights and perspectives were invaluable and illuminating. I know a few of you were able to attend the sit down with Walsh so I appreciate that as well.
We are all progressives, I fully expect to be recommending many posts and comments from sabutai, petr, and Christopher in the future. Your hearts were in the right place even if we disagreed on this one.
JConway extends the olive branch and you reward him with a downrate?
Boston Politics and Business has always had this aura of the secret guys in the back rooms with cigars moving the chess pieces around the board, and assuming the little guys (ummm… us) would just do as told. It certainly didn’t start with “The Vault” but that was an important symbol.
This whole bid felt like a return to that.
Those who get to stand up tall today, the 10 people on twitter, the three-person No Boston Olympics group, all put together in McGyveresque spit and glue and a paperclip, showed that once again Massachusetts is more interested in building from the ground than heavy-handed fancy pictures delivered from behind closed doors.
Democracy is messy. Politics is messy. Development Politics is VERY messy. But the way through it is transparency, engagement, involvement, having people out front who will listen, be responsive, work collaboratively, be humble.
The post-mortems will find dozens of things wrong with the bid. But fundamentally, that’s at the very core of what happened. The big guys with all the money just never imagined it could be possible that they would be defeated by people who had nothing to gain… other than a better vision for the city, and the ability to…
organize
Some of the most criticism came from the Boston Business Journal and the Wall Street Journal.
And, for what it’s worth polling indicates that wealthy respondents were the most apt to oppose the bid.
Much of BBJ’s material came from FOIA requests from the opposition. I am not sure if BBJ would have taken the position it did on its own.
Regarding that poll, I thought I had seen the opposite in an earlier poll in which it appeared that the wealthiest respondents were (slightly) most favorable and if you look at the crosstabs of the WBUR poll in the article you point at, you don’t see any meaningful difference between the income levels. So I don’t think it is really true to say that polling shows any such thing.
Wealth isn’t the question. Nor is it about various businessmen. It’s the insiders in power who were a part of Boston2024.
So you’ve basically attempted to distort my point.
…and that the opposition was reflected and reinforced by the media that caters to their interests, such as the Boston Business Journal and the New York Times.
Further credit should be given to David Bernstein of Boston Magazine who also FOIA’d Boston 2024.
Re: the inside political game. By May there was pretty much of a consensus on Beacon Hill between Legislative leadership and the Governor’s office that the Boston Olympics were toast. Mike Capuano, Steve Lynch, and the rest of the Massachusetts Congressional Delegation were conspicuous in their lack of enthusiasm for the project.
Boston 2024 did a great job kicking in the doors and insuring transparency, but they were extremely fortunate in their adversaries. The pro-Olympics cabal (if you want to call it that) was a small subset of the Commonwealth’s power elite that did not reflect that elite’s internal consensus.
It in no way diminishes NBO’s victory to state that in addition to engagin the public, they also played a superb inside game.
…but ignores my point. I’m not saying (or not intending to say) that every power broker in the state was in on the bid. They clearly weren’t, or Baker would have supported it along with Rosenberg and DeLeo.
I’m saying that the organizers acted like a power-brokering cabal, as you put it, and that’s a big part of why it fell apart. By acting like this shrouded group of cloakroom dealing insiders, they gave even people they could have won over a sense that none of this was really on the up-and-up. Massachusetts has had enough of the behind-the-scenes dealmakers (From The Vault to the BRA to the series of Speakers who’s resigned in disgrace) to have created a natural instinct against insiders.
Which, by the way, might be a good lesson for Democrats to learn in general.
I misconstrued your argument.
timing is amazing- USOC did not pull the bid after Walsh statement. They had decided before – Walsh just tried to make the most of it…
Walsh did previously say he would not sign the agreement if he thought it would put the city at risk to pay for cost overruns. However, the timing and extra emphasis he used today definitely indicated that he was trying to more strongly distance himself.
backstop costs. That’s part of the deal. Saying he wouldn’t sign onto that was a deal killer. The IOC would have to change its entire business plan. That wasn’t going to happen. The USOC’s press release says they decided jointly with Boston 2024:
After all if the USOC really believed Boston 2024’s claim that their insurance plan would cover the risk, then they should have been perfectly happy to go to the IOC without the City acting as a backstop. I think the fact that this was a deal killer is a pretty good indication that even the USOC doesn’t believe that there would not have been serious cost overruns.