LOS ANGELES (CNS) – The Los Angeles City Council will have veto power should Olympic organizers seek to move any events outside of the city for the proposed 2024 Games, according to a memorandum of understanding unanimously approved today by the council’s ad hoc Olympic committee. The veto power was a crucial one requested by some council members amid growing concerns that the $2.6 billion NFL stadium currently being built in Inglewood would prove a tempting location Olympic organizers might eye for the opening and closing ceremonies. At last month’s committee meeting, Councilman Paul Krekorian raised concerns about venue changes and said moving too many of them outside of the city would change the “value equation” for the council. A key provision of the plan for the Olympics calls for utilizing existing venues like the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for the opening and closing ceremonies and building no new permanent structures. Some of the proposed venues, such as the Rose Bowl in Pasadena and the Honda Center in Anaheim, are outside of Los Angeles, which has raised concerns on the council that too many venues would end up outside the city and thus diminish the economic benefits of being the host city. The MOU between the city and the LA 2024 Bid Committee was negotiated by the Chief Administrative Officer and the Chief Legislative Analyst and now will go to the full council for approval. LA 2024 is competing with bid committees in Paris and Budapest, Hungary to bring the Olympics to Los Angeles in 2024. The bid committee still needs to finalize all venue plans and present it to the council for approval before Feb. 3, which is a “stage 3″ deadline when the committee will submit its final packet of documents to the International Olympic Committee. Following the submission of the documents, the bid committee will make a series of presentations to IOC officials before the final selection is made in Lima, Puru in September. LA 2024’s proposed budget for the Olympics is balanced, with projected costs and revenue coming to $5.3 billion and includes $491.9 million as a contingency to address any unexpected financial deficit. Krekorian, who is chair of the Budget and Finance Committee, expressed confidence in the budget today and said Los Angeles, which has hosted the games before in 1932 and 1984, is the only city “on planet Earth”’ to have hosted two Games that both resulted in a budget surplus. “I’ve become very much convinced that a surplus is not only possible but it is a likelihood,” Krekorian said. CNS-01-13-2017 13:43
Olympics MOU
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