Scott Logan, CEO of Halifax’s 2014 Commonwealth Games bid, released a number of bid figures Wednesday while admitting he’s been too cautious about disclosing information. But Logan says the potential costs of hosting the Games will remain secret.
Included in Wednesday’s disclosure were the salaries of the bid committee’s directors and their travel budget.
Logan promised the process would be as transparent as possible but he says the expected budget of hosting the Games won’t be the subject of public debate until after it is submitted to the Commonwealth Games Federation in May, reports CP. He added bid details will be provided on a quarterly basis.
Although the bid has faced criticism from residents and some local politicians for being too secretive, the bid committee has said releasing the budget before would give an unfair competitive advantage to its competitors Glasgow and Abuja.
The bid committee has spent $457,000 travelling around the world to 33 Commonwealth countries to promote its bid and ask which sports they considered a priority.
Logan said, “those trips have allowed us to gather really good information that we think has allowed us to put a really good bid together. We need to assure those voting delegates that we can deliver, so when we’re there we’re not just having fireside chats”.
Halifax’s budget for the Games would include an endowment fund to help maintain the new athletic facilities for decades, said Logan. “We want these Games for legacy reasons (but) we don’t want to create facilities that we can’t sustain into the future. We want to ensure that decades into the future those facilities are viable and continue to give back without costing the taxpayers additional dollars”.
He said the Halifax bid committee’s different approach to the endowment fund makes it an exciting part of the bid. “Traditionally what’s happened in major games in Canada is that everyone has had to hope there’s a surplus and then whatever that surplus is goes into some sort of endowment and whatever it is generates benefits that are only determined after the Games. But we’ve been proactive. In our operations budget there will be a specific line that is an amount of money that will be invested to ensure that we generate enough interest on an annual basis to cover any shortfalls with the new facilities we build, in particular Commonwealth Park”.
Commonwealth Park would be built on land owned by the military in Shannon Park in north-end Dartmouth reports the Chronicle Herald. It would include an outdoor stadium aquatics centre, field house and athletes’ village.
The bid committee finished working on its budget last week and the documents have been forwarded to the municipal, provincial and federal governments for their approval, said the newspaper.
The estimated cost of hosting the Games ranges from about $800 million to $1 billion. The federal government has committed up to $400 million or 35 per cent of the cost of the Games, with the balance coming from the province, the municipality and the private sector.
