The public statement last week by Boston 2024 that it would support a statewide referendum on the proposal for Boston to host the 2024 summer Olympics shows a limbic shift in the way input for modern state policy is evaluated, if not finally decided.
The nonprofit Boston 2024’s proposal is to put the question on the November 2016 ballot as a referendum vote, saying it wouldn’t continue its pursuit of the bid unless a majority of Massachusetts voters approved. The announcement, and a full-page ad in The Boston Globe last Monday, came after the latest results from an ongoing poll sponsored by WBUR showing only 36 percent of Boston-area voters in support of Boston’s hosting the games. The shift of public support comes after a combination of transportation woes and rising concern about the debt legacy of the Games – and reports of a lack of communication earlier this year between Boston 2024 and the landowners whose properties were targeted for Olympic venues.
When there’s a big project with a deadline, landowners often hold out for higher prices, regardless of whether their parcel is at its highest and best use at the time. That’s human – and entrepreneurial – nature. Boston 2024 is up against the proposed 2016 referendum and the IOC’s selection of the host city in September 2017.
The public-opinion headwinds encountered by Boston 2024 have also been further fostered by the harsh winter and the attendant infrastructure problems of an aging transportation system. The problems go far beyond mass transit. There currently isn’t enough garage space in the city to meet today’s demand for parking. As existing open-air parking spaces get displaced by new building, that situation will only get worse. And that’s without the Olympics.
Before Boston 2024 there was the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership, a 14-member group of business leaders established in 2008, chaired and co-founded by John Fish, head of Suffolk construction, who also chairs Boston 2024. But long before that, there was the group of 25 business and financial leaders formally known as the Coordinating Committee, popularly nicknamed The Vault because they met in the vault of one of the city’s largest banks (try getting away with that today). Their efforts brought new construction to what had been a stagnant downtown.
The Vault’s endeavors took place in an era in which history was written by the winners. Add to that the federal expansion of the interstate highway system, which involved a considerable amount of land-taking. That era of synergy and collaboration has since been succeeded by a combination of accelerated private development and increasing disenfranchisement on the part of those who feel they are being excluded from the history-writing process.
Olympics dissenters are justifiably wary about the possibility that the Games may become a debt sink. People today are older and wiser about past projects that failed to deliver, and some know from hard experience that a rising tide doesn’t lift all boats equally – that those most tightly moored to the dock, the ones with no exit strategy, are at risk from rising waters.