By Chris Tyler, Communications Manager
August 14, 2026
This week, almost nine years to the day L.A. City Council closed a bad deal with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in exchange for hosting rights to the 2028 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, Council approved the Enhanced City Resources Master Agreement (ECRMA). This agreement, negotiated between the City of Los Angeles and the Olympics Games organizing committee, LA28, outlines how the city will be repaid for services like traffic control and trash collection carried out in support of the Games. The agreement will also serve as a model for individual Venue Service Agreements, which will continue to be negotiated through the summer of 2027.
Under this revised ECRMA, some safeguards were installed to ensure that L.A. City retains access to LA28’s contingency funds in the event of budgetary shortfalls. Significantly, these contingency funds can be used to finance the robust and invasive security infrastructure that, although technically outside the fiscal purview of LA28, is a costly component of hosting. Security costs are estimated to be at least $1.15 billion, and could easily come in at over $2 billion. The city is relying almost entirely on federal funding for reimbursement, while the federal government has thus far only pledged a total of $1 billion in funding, as part of 2025’s Big Beautiful Bill.
One fundamental and potentially fatal risk remains at the core of this contract: the City of Los Angeles and its residents are still the financial backstop for the 2028 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. This means that we, the taxpayers, are on the hook for any losses and/or budgetary overruns incurred if and when LA28 does not bring in enough revenue to cover expenses. Once LA28’s more than $600 million in contingency funds are depleted, it’s possible that the City of L.A. will be forced to write ourselves a check for money we’re owed—something the City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo described as the “worst possible outcome financially.” During Wednesday’s Council meeting, he remarked that “the worst scenario is where the Games end and the City has to write the check from its general fund to cover deficits from LA28. To us, that is an unacceptable scenario.”
Although the budget for LA28’s spending has risen since 2017 from $5.3 billion to over $7.1 billion today, no one really knows how accurate those projections are. As detailed in our report, Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t: The Risks to L.A. of Hosting or Withdrawing from the 2028 Olympics, “LA28 has done a poor job of transparency with its budgets: As late as its 2024 annual report (issued in 2025), the committee still issued only general overall line item cost and revenue projections with no breakdown by project, and no further details of how the projections were made. Moreover, LA28’s cost and revenue numbers each added up to identical figures, a suspiciously convenient finding that allowed LA28 to declare that the Games would result in ‘no fiscal impact.’”
Because LA28 itself remains opaque and unaccountable, we at SAJE have reason to believe that, should the 2028 Games end up with the same level of cost overruns as other recent Olympics, this number could balloon to $12 billion or more. When all is said and done, L.A. taxpayers could end up having to cover $6.6 billion or more in Olympic-related costs.
This alarming lack of detail about LA28’s budget makes it especially strange (or, perhaps, telling) that a contract amendment introduced by Councilmember Hernandez was unceremoniously kicked back to the Olympic ad hoc committee, despite the councilmember motioning for an immediate vote. Councilmember Hernandez’s amendment proposed that LA28 “shall establish and maintain a reasonable accounting and document preservation system that enables the City to readily perform an assessment, audit, examination, investigation, or review (collectively, an ‘Audit’) pursuant to this section.” Specifically, this motion would have given the City Controller and other duly authorized representatives access to LA28’s books, records, documents, and other evidentiary materials in order to assert real-time financial oversight of the costly and potentially disastrous Olympic organizing process.
Critics of the amendment claimed this could create too many “distractions” for the LA28 team as they plan the event. But as CAO Szabo himself reminded us near the end of the proceedings, “we don’t have operational control over LA28, over how they’re spending their funds. We don’t have any budget authority.” If our only capacity to audit LA28 activates after the Games end—and the organization has already spent our money—it’s very possible the zero-cost event we were promised will end up being anything but.
Cancellation would come with its own risks and potential costs, but, at this point, what doesn’t? And when we start to factor in the prodigious human price of the Olympics—displacement, sweeps, the incursion of federal police on our streets and within our communities—we may well find that cancellation is actually the most cost-effective path forward of all.
