In June 1995 the IOC voted to award the 2002 Games to Salt Lake City. That same month SLOC formally designated Park City a venue. Although Cumming had stepped down as chairman of the sports authority in October 1991, he retained close ties to Salt Lake Olympic organizers. Badami, who remained a SLOC trustee, continued his association with the Park City resort as Powdr Corp.'s chairman. Frank Joklik, a director of a mining and exploration firm controlled by Cumming's holding company, was chairman of the bid committee when Salt Lake was awarded the Games and later served as SLOC president.
Cumming, Stern, Myers and others like them are peculiar to the Salt Lake Olympics. No federal tax dollars were spent to significantly increase the long-term value of private business interests in Los Angeles, Atlanta or Lake Placid, site in 1980 of the last Winter Games held in the U.S. In fact, 21 years after those Lake Placid Games, there are no million-dollar condos surrounding the Olympic venues in New York State. No private ski resorts. No upscale restaurants. No fancy lodges.
It is no secret how Utah has reaped a bounty from the 2002 Games. "We are, without shame, using the Olympics to try to get federal funds," the head of the state's department of transportation, Tom Warne, told a reporter after a day of lobbying in Washington in 1997. "We've designed a strategy to separate Utah from the 49 other states."
Utah's five-man delegation to Capitol Hill may be small, but it is well-positioned, through committee assignments and seniority, to funnel pork back home. Representative Merrill Cook, a Republican who represented a Salt Lake City district in the late 1990s, was a member of the House Transportation Committee and used the Games as leverage to win huge increases for Utah highway and transit projects.
In 1998, for example, he helped push through a $75 million hike in federal money for Utah highways. Shifting the cost of the Games to taxpayers elsewhere was good news for Utah. "It means any talk of a tax increase at home has been laid to rest," said Cook. In what should have won him a gold medal for chutzpah, Cook told the Deseret News that he had obtained additional dollars by stressing the state's "great burden of hosting the 2002 Winter Games on America's behalf."
Over in the Senate fellow Republican Bennett, a member of the Appropriations Committee, has been even more effective in delivering federal funds, for everything from light-rail cars to the weather-forecasting unit. In a 1998 appropriations bill he wrote in language permitting the Secretary of Transportation to use discretionary funds for the Games. "If Utah hadn't had somebody on Appropriations, there is no way a lot of that would have gotten through," says one Senate staffer.
Bennett frequently bypassed the Commerce Committee, which should have had jurisdiction over Olympic funding. The practice so angered fellow Republican senator John McCain of Arizona, then chairman of the committee, that in 1998 he began asking Bennett, repeatedly, to provide Congress with an estimate of "how many of the taxpayers' dollars are going to be needed to fund the Olympics." Three years later McCain is still waiting for an answer. (Last week Bennett offered an answer of sorts, in the form of a General Accounting Office audit; see box, page 87.)
In addition to being represented on crucial committees, Utah has profited enormously from the influence exercised by Republican senator Orrin Hatch, dean of the state's congressional delegation. As one of the Senate's more senior members, Hatch, a master of legislative manipulation and backroom deal-making, has ardently advanced and protected his state's Olympic agenda.
The irony in the flow of cash to the Beehive State is that Utah's congressional delegation has a history of opposing federal spending on projects that specifically benefit other states. The delegation has even opposed federal spending on Winter Olympics when those Games were held someplace other than Utah: Former Utah congressman Koln Gunn McKay, a Democrat, not only voted against federal funds for the 1980 Lake Placid Games but also was one of only four members of the House who voted against endorsing Lake Placid as the site for the Olympics. For all it has been asking from Washington, Utah contributes less to the U.S. Treasury than most other states. In 1999 individuals and families in Utah paid on average $6,600 in income tax, well below the national average of $9,000.
Yet Utah's congressmen have delivered for their state. Many of the Olympic outlays have sailed through the House and Senate because Utah's representatives buried them in huge spending bills. Typical was an item in a 1999 measure appropriating funds for scores of projects, from renovating a Head Start facility in Alabama to constructing a center for disabled preschool children in New York City. Tucked amid page after page of tiny type was this: "$1,000,000 million [sic] to the Salt Lake City Organizing Committee for housing infrastructure improvements for the Olympics and Paralympics."
A million dollars here, a million dollars there—who will notice? Not a lot of Congressmen from the other 49 states, it seems, and certainly not the average American taxpayer.
Earl Holding is an oilman (Sinclair Oil Corp.), hotelier (Little America), ski resort proprietor (Sun Valley, Idaho), rancher and one of the country's largest landholders. He owns about 500,000 acres in Utah, Wyoming, Montana and other western states and rents, on the cheap, thousands more acres from the U.S. government for ranching. He also may be the biggest single beneficiary of Utah's landing the Olympic Games.
Beginning with his first venture, in the 1950s, a money-losing truck stop near Green River, Wyo., that he turned around, Holding has displayed a Midas touch in business dealings. One notable exception: Snowbasin, a picturesque ski area in the Wasatch Mountains 35 miles north of Salt Lake City that he bought in 1984. Long a popular destination for day trips, Snowbasin was a throwback to the time before fancy restaurants, shops and condos transformed skiing. You went to Snowbasin for one purpose: to ski. Its magnificent slope, with its breathtaking views and harrowing descent, made it a favorite of purists.
Holding had bigger plans. He wanted to expand Snowbasin into a luxurious resort that would rival Park City and Deer Valley. He envisioned palatial homes, lavish lodges, restaurants, riding trails, even a golf course, on hillsides where elk and moose roamed. There was one obstacle, though: The U.S. government owned all the land he wanted.
The U.S. Forest Service took title to the land in the 1940s after cattle ranchers nearly destroyed it through overgrazing. Erosion and landslides had dumped silt into streams, polluting tributaries supplying Ogden, 17 miles to the west. After the state condemned Ogden's water supply, the Forest Service reversed the damage. Over the decades foresters brought the mountain back to life with trees and vegetation, turning it into a mecca for outdoorsmen and wildlife. In 1985 Holding proposed a land exchange with the Forest Service, asking for 2,500 acres at the base of the mountain to develop a year-round resort. In return he would deed to the Forest Service other parcels he owned in Utah.
The Forest Service, however, opposed turning this pristine acreage into a development. Forest Service supervisor Arthur Carroll wrote Holding on May 19, 1986, "As managers of these National Forest lands, we feel it would not be prudent on our part, nor within the scope of our authority, to support the exchange of National Forest lands for commercial real estate development other than that needed to provide for downhill skiing."
The service did not entirely shut the door on an exchange. It pledged to work with Holding to negotiate a much smaller trade, of about 200 acres. That would have been more than enough for a new day lodge, restaurants and service buildings. But Holding wanted more.
Through his privately owned Sinclair, Holding countered with a proposal to develop Snowbasin as a destination resort and scaled back his request to 1,320 acres. Still, the Forest Service objected. "I cannot in good conscience dispose of public land for that purpose," Wasatch-Cache forest supervisor Dale Bosworth wrote Holding in February 1990. After more lobbying by Holding, the Forest Service agreed to increase the exchange to 700 acres. Still not enough: Holding insisted on his 1,320 acres—slightly more than two square miles.
Several years would pass before he got the opportunity he was looking for. Like Cumming and other prominent Utahans, Holding worked closely with the bid committee to bring the Olympics to Salt Lake City. He made his private jet available to the committee. Visiting IOC dignitaries stayed at his Little America Hotel while in Salt Lake.
More significant, Snowbasin was being developed as a site for skiing events, should Salt Lake win the Games. The bid committee's David Johnson wrote Marc Hodler of Switzerland, then an IOC vice president and president of the International Ski Federation, in October 1994: "Mr. Holding and his construction crews...are committed to do as much as they can before the snow flies this year in the Snowbasin area.... We are very pleased with the enthusiasm that Mr. Holding has, not only for the project at Snowbasin, but for our Olympic bid."
Three months after the IOC selected Salt Lake City to host the Olympics, Holding made his move. Except this time he bypassed the Forest Service and went directly to his friends in Congress. In September 1995 James Hansen, a Republican representative from Utah—and, fortuitously, chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Lands—introduced the Snowbasin Land Exchange Act in the House "to authorize and direct the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior to exchange 1,320 acres of federally owned land within the Wasatch National Forest...for lands of approximately equal value owned by the Sun Valley Company. It is the intent of Congress that this exchange be effected without delay."
A month later Hatch introduced virtually identical legislation in the Senate. It was only fitting that he would be Holding's sponsor. At a public meeting in Ogden in 1990, Hatch had berated the Forest Service for dragging its feet on Holding's application. Hatch reportedly summoned a regional Forest Service official, Stan Tixier, in front of the audience to put him on the spot. Tixier recalled, "Orrin said if there was a county official that supported the decision [not to make the land swap with Holding], he would like to know who he was because he wanted to kill them." Hatch went on to label the decision "dumb-assed and boneheaded" and said anyone who felt differently was a "Neanderthal."
To drum up support, the Utah congressional delegation and Salt Lake Olympic boosters warned lawmakers that two Olympic showcase events might be jeopardized if Congress didn't approve the exchange. "Snowbasin is slated to host the men's and women's downhill events as well as the Super G events for the 2002 Winter Games," Hansen told colleagues in September 1995. "This equal value exchange is necessary to accommodate those events."
SLOC chairman Joklik agreed, stressing the need to move fast. "Construction of the base facilities requires completion of the land exchange between the U.S. Forest [Service] and the owners of the resort," Joklik told a Senate subcommittee in November of the same year. "It is important to note these changes need to be in place well before 2002 to accommodate other international skiing events and to resolve any problems prior to the Olympic Games."
If Utah has the Greatest Snow on Earth, as the state brags, then this was the greatest snow job on earth. Snowbasin didn't need 1,320 acres of national forest land for the Olympics. It required perhaps 100 acres at most. That would have been plenty for day lodges, service buildings, parking lots and viewing stands. If past Olympic practice had been followed, no land swap would have been necessary at all. In 1960, when Squaw Valley, Calif., hosted the Winter Games, the Forest Service granted a special-use permit allowing the Olympics to be held on national forest land.
