Boston 2024 team say they'll make 'some' documents public

Boston 2024 and other Olympics bid supporters have made transparency a major part of their public messaging, but have released little information about the bid that helped them prevail over competitors before the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Ahead of a community meeting set for Wednesday, Jan. 21, officials from Boston 2024, a nonprofit headed by Suffolk Construction CEO John Fish, said they will make available their presentation to the USOC from a meeting in Redwood City last month.

"We will also make available to the public supporting documents presented to the USOC by Boston 2024," Erin Murphy, executive vice president of Boston 2024, said in a statement. "Finally, Boston 2024 will brief the media and make the presentation and documents available for the media to take with them to review."

Murphy said, "There is a limited amount of proprietary information that the USOC has asked us not to release because they believe it will put Boston and the United States at a competitive disadvantage. All supporting documents with the exception of that proprietary information will be released to the media and the public."

The group No Boston Olympics has been pushing for more transparency and calling for the release of Boston 2024's bid. Murphy added that no bid documents have been submitted to the International Olympic Committee and Boston isn't required to submit a final bid for two years.

Dan O'Connell, the president of Boston 2024 and a former official in Gov. Deval Patrick's administration, was asked in a television interview on Wednesday why the documents could not be put online.

"The documents are at this point not where we are in the iterations moving forward of where the bid's going," O'Connell said in an interview on WGBH's "Greater Boston."

"I think it's time to move forward with the real bid now and we feel that the discussions can be most productively focused on that," O'Connell added, pointing to Boston Mayor Martin Walsh's plan for nine community meetings in the city about the possibility of hosting the 2024 Summer Olympics.

O'Connell claimed that "momentum for the effort moving forward is pretty strong right now" and suggested negative public feedback is unlikely to halt the bid.

"I think there'll be a lot of comments that will lead us to modify the bid as it goes forward," O'Connell said. "We have alternative sites for almost every venue."

Topics: 


Subscribe to the Dorchester Reporter