This looks super sketchy. I'm so glad we voted "No."
Final report on abandoned Olympic bid delayed until June
Scott Dippel · CBC News · Posted: May 10, 2019 6:00 AM MT | Last Updated: May 10
It will take more time before Calgarians will get answers to questions like "How much money was spent on pursuing a Calgary bid for the 2026 Olympics?"
Voters in last November's plebiscite chose to put the brakes on a bid when they rejected pursuing the Games.
A final report from the bid corporation was expected within a couple of months. But Mayor Naheed Nenshi said he's hearing that a report won't be ready until sometime in June.
Details behind the delay are not being released. But Nenshi said it's proving to be more challenging than anticipated.
He chalks it up to the complex structure of the bid corporation, which had many partners.
"Because you've got the other two orders of government and the COC (Canadian Olympic Committee) and everyone has slightly different procedures and policies on how to do this," said Nenshi.
"I am hopeful that we will be at council in the next month or so."
$30M assembled for bid
He'd also rather there just be one final report than a series of updates as the partners sign off.
"No one has any interest in reporting to council more than once on this," said Nenshi.
Plenty of financial questions remain to be answered about the now-abandoned Olympic bid.
The three levels of government assembled $30 million for the effort.
There has also been some jockeying about what should be done with any leftover money.
Coun. Jeromy Farkas was an outspoken council opponent of the bid.
He tells CBC News he's aware of the reasons why the final report is taking longer to complete but he's not allowed to talk about it publicly.
Councillor wants greater transparency
Farkas said there are several things he'll be interested in hearing about the bid.
"The first is a full accounting of the money that was spent, looking at exploring a bid for the Olympics," said Farkas.
"I'm very curious how much the Olympic bid corporation spent of taxpayers' dollars to promote a yes result in the plebiscite."
But for him, it's not just about the final report or following the money.
Through the bid process, Farkas railed often about the lack of transparency in the workings of the bid corporation.
"The big data dump I would like to see is all of the confidential material, the thousands of pages that council had access to that Calgarians didn't," he said.
"I would like Calgarians to be able to go through that themselves and judge for themselves whether the need for confidentiality was there."
It's not known when that material will become available.
Top city officials have said previously that most of that material would be made available at some point.
Key exceptions would be made for detailed information about the proposed security operation that was being worked on for the 2026 Games.
Any information that might be considered relevant to a potential future Calgary Olympic bid would also not be released publicly.
Source:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calga...2026-1.5130538
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