Quote:
Originally Posted by Flamenspiel
So you want them to spend more? Not less. There is a lot of this going around, how the bid is so expensive but then they should add this, that, and the other thing.
You can't have your cake and eat it to.
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I think this is because of the sunk cost of hosing the Olympics.
Operating the Olympics costs something around 3 billion (warning just using rough numbers for illustration). You get 1 billion from the IOC and 700 million or so in revenues leaving the host city to come up with 1.3 billion dollars or so to operate the games. So if you spend 1.4 billion on infrastructure all levels of government pay 2:1 for the infrastructure.
Instead if you add a 5 billion dollar infrastructure program to the Olympics you spend 6.3 billion for 5 billion dollars worth of infrastructure and if the feds matched half of the cost through the sport fund you could argue the province is getting 5 billion in infrastructure for 3 billion dollars. So the bid would be a very big positive cash flow through Alberta.
So by thinking small but not getting the Olympics to pay for themselves we backed ourselves into a corner where there are large risks. A doubling of the City contribution is very possible within reasonable estimating practices.
So we have a high risk bid to the city with limited benefits vs a high risk bid with tons of benefits.
I would have more of an appetite for an 8 billion dollar Olympics with 5 billion in infrastructure.