Lake Placid's Olympic Legacy and Economic Impact

Dan Clark: Turning now to the North Country. It's been more than 40 years since the winter Olympics were held in Lake Placid in the Adirondacks. That was in 1980, but if you visit Lake Placid today, you'll find that the sites of those Olympics are still surprisingly active, and that's thanks in a large part to the state. 

That's according to a new story from NPR’s Brian Mann in the magazine, Adirondack Life that shows more than half a billion dollars in-state spending on the Olympic sites over the last six years alone. Brian joined us this week with more on that story.

Brian, thank you so much for being here. We appreciate it.

Brian Mann: Thanks for having me on.

DC: Of course. So, we're talking about a little more than half a billion dollars invested in the Olympic Regional Development Authority (ORDA) up there in Lake Placid over the last six years. It's a lot of money. I think anybody can recognize that. What has it been going toward, I guess, that would be my first question?

BM: I think the thing that shocked us when we began investigating because that was the number that got our attention is that it actually is a lot more money than that. It's already up around $700 million that's been spent on the Olympics authority, and it's gone to refurbish and to expand and improve winter sports and tourism venues mostly around Lake Placid, this village of about 2,300 people but also in the Johnsburg area of the Adirondacks and Belleayre in the Catskills, the ski area there, and the vision is that this will revitalize and kind of create a golden age for winter sports and tourism in the North Country, but what we found is that the price tag is just incredibly high. The ORDA officials themselves describe this taxpayer spending as unprecedented.

DC: So, do we know what changed there? You report in the story how there was a major uptick in spending toward ORDA up there, do we know what changed in the last six years before that to make the state start investing?

BM: It's really a shocking and kind of tectonic shift. 

What we saw for years was Albany officials complaining to ORDA when they would lose five or $10 million. That would be described as red ink. So about six years ago, the current CEO of ORDA, Mike Pratt, went to Albany with other boosters of the Olympic vision, and they convinced the Hochul administration to flip that narrative. 

We're not going to talk about losses of $5 million, let's talk about investments of a hundred, $150 million. What we find is they are now on track over the next couple of years to spend a billion dollars, and what Albany officials say is, look, we think this will create economic activity. It will attract tourists. It will be a really big boon to the North Country and also the Catskills.

What we found were some real questions about the management and the planning to make that huge investment actually pay off.

DC: Talk to me about that part. What were those questions that you found? What did you see?

BM: Well, ORDA has always had a very troubled financial history. Just before this surge of spending began, the comptroller issued a report slamming the organization for having poor planning, poor accounting procedures. It was really a deep dive on the organization's accounting and it was not pretty. 

What we found were really significant questions about whether real reforms have been made. Despite this vast surge of money, it was often difficult to find out exactly where the money would be going.

In many years, including the last couple of years, ORDA has been given huge amounts of money, more than $100 million by Albany without any really specific list of what that money would be spent on and what we just saw this last winter with the World University Games. This was the biggest winter sports event in the upstate New York in a generation, state officials spent more than half a billion dollars preparing for it. $552 million by their accounting, and what we found is that it generated only about $700,000 in actual ticket sales, and none of that money went to ORDA, and ORDA officials just couldn't really account for why they had made those decisions, why attendance was relatively poor and then why the dollars didn't come back to the state organization that really fostered the event.

DC: You know, given all that, it sounds like in the long term, we don't really know how this spending is going to impact ORDA and the region. Do people say it's at least paying off in the short term as we see these large sums of money flow into it?

BM: Look, if you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on small mountain villages, there's going to be an economic impact. There are many people who we spoke to say who say ORDA is an essential organization.

Now that the scale of spending is literally ten-fold what it used to be, what we wanted to ask is exactly that question: is there planning for how this is going to work long term? We really couldn't find that plan. ORDA officials believe they are a bigger and bigger economic engine for upstate New York. We found questions about that that clearly revenues are up, crowds are bigger, but at the same time, expenses to taxpayers also appear to be on the rise.

DC: All right, NPR's Brian Mann, great reporting. Thank you so much.

BM: Thanks for having me on.

DC: Another factor impacting all of this is climate change and how ORDA will cope with it.

You can read the full story here.