February 16, 2010 Features

Still not worth the bailout

Olympic budget making a mountain out of a mega-project

by Laura Beeston

The legacy of Olympic venues might not be worth the expense in the long run. GRAPHIC DARNYA RUHKLYADEVA

“Mega-events like the Olympics leave a legacy of infrastructure that influences where future growth and spending occurs, but not much else. Certainly not sustainability!” —Craig Townsend, professor of geography, urban planning and environment

Despite a claim of sustainability, environmentalists and urban planners are unconvinced that Vancouver’s Olympic Village is worth the billion dollar price tag.

“There has been an attempt, at least on a symbolic level, to make the Olympic events and infrastructures about the environment and therefore worth the money, but ultimately, the people saying that sustainability is the primary goal of these projects are green-washing,” said Craig Townsend, a professor of geography, urban planning and environment at Concordia.
“This Village is ultimately a mega real estate project, which has used the Games to generate support that would have been difficult to generate at any other time, especially in a global recession,” he added.

In a secret meeting on Jan. 19, 2009, the provincial government of British Columbia passed Bill 47, allowing the Millennium Development group to borrow $458 million from the province to pay for the remaining construction of the Olympic Village after the original lender, Fortress Investment Group, backed out last fall.

“This is a lot of money that the provincial government could be spending in other areas,” Townsend continued. “In terms of the traditional lasting impacts on the urban environment, mega-events like the Olympics leave a legacy of infrastructure that influences where future growth and spending occurs, but not much else. Certainly not sustainability!”

Citing “The Big Owe” Olympic Stadium of Montreal, which was built for the 1976 Olympics and amassed a debt of $1.5 billion that was finally paid off in 2006, Townsend was wary about the over-ambitious government spending on these types of projects.

“Building something this expensive and permanent for a short-term event is bound to be problematic. Quite often the scale of these facilities is beyond the size of regional or local communities. In the case of Montreal, the Olympic Stadium was premised on an anticipated [amount of] rapid growth post-Games that never really arrived. As it turned out, Montreal had a decade of slow growth and we were stuck paying for these facilities that didn’t have any use.”

Townsend, who specializes in urban transportation systems, was also quite skeptical of the other projects currently siphoning provincial money in preparation for the Games, which he believes have been underreported in lieu of the Village scandal.

Specifically, he considered the $1.9 billion Sea-To-Sky Highway renovation project from Horseshoe Bay to Whistler “the exact opposite” of sustainable operations, arguing that there is “something perverse” about building a highway that connects the suburbs with an elite resort.

“Why should the public be putting this huge amount of money into something that is going to benefit just a very small number of people? Is that fair from a societal perspective? No. Sustainability is not just about preserving the environment. It is about the ways to build equality. The Olympics celebrate lifestyles that are inherently problematic for sustainability and this project specifically endorses the current inequities.”

Along with the criticisms of “sustainable irony” inherent to the 2010 Olympic plans, Townsend said what it all comes down to is business as usual.

“I appreciate the attempt to brand the Games with environmental initiatives, but if B.C. wanted to promote sustainability, they would have done something else entirely,” he said. “I find it depressing that the people in charge have been dishonest in telling people how much they love the Earth one day and then funding an eight-lane highway the next. This is, quite simply, superficial marketing. To a certain extent, the concept of a sustainable Olympics is just an add-on of selling the project.”

The true costs of the infrastructure projects initiated by the Games cannot be known until well after 2010, according to official reports from the Vancouver Olympic Committee.