BOB SALSBERG, Associated Press
BOSTON (AP) — Gov. Charlie Baker again appears to be showing impatience with the progress of Boston’s Olympic bid organizers in completing a detailed plan for hosting the 2024 Summer Games.
The governor told reporters at the Statehouse on Thursday that the Boston 2024 group needs to release the plan within the next month to allow enough time for public discussion of it. He noted the group faces a mid-September deadline to formally notify the International Olympic Committee of the city’s bid, with a formal presentation to the IOC due in January.
“If you work the clock back from when the final presentation has to be made and you allow an appropriate time for the public to vet this issue, I think it’s important that sometime soon there be a plan that people can review and then discuss,” Baker said.
Boston 2024’s chief executive, Richard Davey, has said the group expected to release next month a revised plan that will include specific details on key items such as the Olympic Stadium and athletes’ village as well as other smaller venues where events could be held if Boston hosts the games.
“We’ve been working really hard on the detailed plan,” Davey, a former state transportation secretary, told The Boston Globe on Wednesday.
In March, Baker also complained of “unanswered questions” and slow progress by Boston 2024, a nonprofit group, in finalizing key elements of the Olympic bid, including venues.
The Republican governor and Democratic legislative leaders later announced plans to hire an outside consultant to independently analyze the Olympic bid and advise state government on whether the effort could place an unfair burden on taxpayers.
Baker indicated on Thursday that a consultant would be named shortly.
Boston was tapped by the United States Olympic Committee in January as the U.S. bid city for the 2024 Olympics. Public opinion polls have pointed to some skepticism among Massachusetts residents about the wisdom of hosting the games, and organizers have promised to abide by the results of a statewide referendum likely to be held in November 2016.
The IOC is scheduled to make its selection in 2017, with Rome, Paris and Hamburg, Germany, among other likely contenders.
2020 host contract the last under old Olympic bid process
Meanwhile in Denver, the U.S. Olympic Committee released a copy of the host city contract for the 2020 Tokyo Games — a boilerplate document that will be outdated when Boston, Rome, Hamburg and other cities prepare their bids for the 2024 Olympics.
The contract is filled with stipulations a city must fulfill to host the Summer Games — including security, agreements not to sue the IOC, and an outline of the very important marketing agreements. But the template is being altered now that a new bidding process is in place.
Leaders in Boston said they have reviewed the 2020 contract but they did not make it public because it wasn’t their document. The USOC released it Thursday. It was virtually identical to the boilerplate material for previous Summer Olympics that all candidate cities sign.
The USOC gave the 2020 document to Boston and other cities when they were considering bidding for 2024. But since that contract was written, the IOC has adopted Agenda 2020 in an attempt to streamline the bidding process and make the Games less expensive and unwieldy.
“Because the template was created prior to the adoption of Olympic Agenda 2020, it is not a reliable model for the 2024 Host City Contract, and for that reason we asked that it be maintained in confidence,” USOC spokesman Patrick Sandusky said. “However, due to ongoing interest and because template contracts for other Games are publicly available, the document is now available.”
The document gives the broad brushstrokes of what any candidate city must do to host the Games. There are some details — for instance, the organizing committee must agree to give the IOC 7.5 percent of cash revenue from contracts it signs as part of the marketing program — but there are no hard figures about how much money is spent on the massive construction projects that all Olympics eventually become.
The draft contracts for other Olympics, including the 2022 Winter Games, have been in the public domain for some time.
IOC spokesman Mark Adams said the 2024 contract “will evolve to reflect the changes brought about by the IOC’s Olympic Agenda 2020 reforms.”
EDDIE PELLS, AP National Writer, contributed to this report.
