San Francisco is courting ruin with Olympic bid

If Mayor Ed Lee and Giants CEO Larry Baer have their way, the U.S. Olympic Committee will announce its selection of San Francisco to host the 2024 Summer Olympics as early as next week. Yet San Francisco voters haven’t been given a clue as to what holding an Olympics here would mean to our region.

We recently alerted the U.S. Olympic Committee of our commitment to take political action to ensure that no public money be spent on the Olympics if San Francisco is chosen to host the 2024 Olympics.

Mayor Lee is quick to emphasize that the $4.5 billion price tag for the Games would come from the pockets of private donors. That sounds reasonable, especially given the tremendous wealth in the Silicon Valley. Yet make no mistake, a Bay Area Olympic venue would create a level of financial, cultural and environmental ruin that our region might never recover from.

A recent study from the London School of Economics and Political Science uncovered that from 1976 to 2012, cost overruns of Olympics averaged more than 200 percent. If the 2024 bids maintain this 36-year pattern, the San Francisco Olympics’ price tag will climb to $13.5 billion before it’s over. Let’s not forget that the 2012 America’s Cup left San Francisco $11.5 million in debt, despite rosy projections about increased revenues and economic impacts. The reality fell far short of projections, and we believe that the region will experience the same broken promises that caused the America’s Cup to become a fiscal disaster for San Francisco.