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Your tax dollars at play
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February 8, 2002: 10:42 a.m. ET
Utah got a bigger hand from federal tax dollars than past Olympic hosts.
A weekly column by Staff Writer Chris Isidore
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SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (CNN/Money) - It's been a bit more than 20 years since I was lucky enough to visit Utah's world-class ski resorts. At least my tax dollars got to come back here before I did.
The 2002 Winter Olympics have come to Salt Lake City and some of the surrounding ski areas, pouring hundreds of millions into facilities and improvements needed for the games in the next 17 days.
There have been many sources of funds for the game, but the U.S. Treasury has been one of the biggest. A General Accounting Office audit put the value of federal spending on these games at $342 million.
This audit amount was seen as vindication by defenders of the Salt Lake City games. They've been defending themselves from other, vastly more expensive counts. Sports Illustrated, which like CNN/Money is a unit of AOL Time Warner, had Donald Barlett and James Steele, two investigative reporters considered champions in their own right by their peers, probe all manner of federal spending on highways, light rail systems and other improvements that will be used by Olympic visitors.
Their count was a staggering $1.5 billion, a cost total that state and Olympic officials dismiss as wildly inflated.
"Every dollar that came into state of Utah for highways is counted in that article as an Olympic dollars," said Lane Beattie, Utah's State Olympic Officer. "That's just blatantly wrong."
Beattie says he believes the GAO report is an accurate count. But that number only looks good by comparison to higher estimates, such as the one from SI. The $342 million figure should be raising more eyebrows than it does. That's because that number is far above what the federal government spent on other games in the United States the last 22 years, even when those costs are adjusted for inflation.
Beattie puts the cost borne by Utah taxpayers at less than half of the GAO's total for federal spending - about $150 million. Utah's elected officials justify this as saying these games are America's games, not just Utah's. And they point out that corporate sources of money play a larger role in staging these games than some of the games in the past.
But it will be the Utah economy, and residents, who see whatever economic development benefits come from the games, not the tourism industry nationwide. Ski areas in Colorado, New England and elsewhere in the country could end up losing business to competitors their tax dollars helped to improve. That's one of the reasons why most of the public costs of hosting the games have generally fallen to cities and states, not the federal government.
The Lake Placid Winter Olympics of 1980 cost $179.2 million in federal tax dollars when adjusted for inflation, according to the GAO. The Summer Games in Los Angeles four years later dipped into federal coffers for only $77.9 million, even when adjusted for inflation. The 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta cost $192.7 million in today's dollars.
The bombing at the Atlanta games and the more dangerous world we live in today have increased the cost of security for this year's Olympics. That's a sad fact of life. But it's not the only increased cost for these games. In fact the federal cost of security listed in the GAO audit for Salt Lake is $184.5 million, while the cost of security at Atlanta was $101.3 million, an 83 percent increase, for sure, but only about half the increased federal money flowing into Utah.
A much bigger percentage jump is a nearly 400 percent gain in transportation improvements, improvements that will remain after the game, giving Utah resort areas advantages in attracting visitors.
Beattie likes to talk about how much economic development will come to the state after the games leave, making any public expenditure worth the taxpayers' contribution.
But this increased tourism likely won't be generated out of thin air - it'll likely come at the expense of other attractions elsewhere - quite likely elsewhere in the United States. It was nice that the rest of the country helped give a state already blessed with great snow, ski areas and natural beauty such a leg up. 
Click here to send mail to Chris Isidore
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