When the Games Come to Town

The oak removal was never Arcadia's City Council's to decide. It is an administrative tree-removal permit, handled by the city's Development Services Department under the protected-tree ordinance — a staff process, not a vote. So when residents filled the chamber, they were appealing to a body that had no ballot to cast on the question in front of it.

What they got instead was procedure. Because the item wasn't agendized, the city attorney invoked the Brown Act — the state open-meeting law that bars a council from deliberating on business the public wasn't noticed about. It is a rule written to protect the public. On this night it functioned to keep the public's own representatives silent while residents pleaded.

It would be easy to read that as powerlessness, and it isn't quite. Three weeks later, on September 10, Santa Anita and the Olympic organizers paused the permit and agreed to redesign the course to spare trees; Mayor Paul Cheng said he was “encouraged.” Whatever moved them behind the scenes, the public pressure appears to have mattered — but it worked around the council, not through it. The testimony reached an applicant, because the elected body it was aimed at had nothing to decide.

That is the paradox worth naming early, because the rest of this story runs on it: the residents had influence without authority — participation without control. The useful question isn't whether local government is powerless. It is whether anyone can still tell which institution is responsible for what.

Follow the same logic to the money, and it gets larger. When Los Angeles agreed to host the 2028 Games, it agreed to be the guarantor of last resort. The city covers the first $270 million of any cost overrun; the State of California covers the next $270 million; and everything beyond that comes back to the city — a share the state's own Legislative Analyst and the city controller describe as effectively unlimited.

That $540 million cap sounds like a lot until you set it against the record: every Olympics in the Oxford Olympics Study — every Games since 1960 — has run over budget. Overruns are the rule, not the exception, so the guarantee is not hypothetical. The shape is what matters: $540 million is the capped part, and everything above it is the city's, with no ceiling. (How large a given overrun runs, and how it is comparable across Games, is its own debate; the chart below lays out the record for those who want it.)

The asymmetry is the point. A private committee, LA28, controls the major decisions that shape the Games' budget. The public is the backstop if that budget runs past its guarantees. One side holds the pen; the other holds the open-ended bill — and, as the split below shows, the side holding the pen is the one institution here that no resident can vote out.

Los Angeles has already run a smaller version. This summer eight World Cup matches played at SoFi, and the August 12 council meeting that approved the Olympic services agreement was the same one running the World Cup fan zone — the tail end of one global event and the front end of the next, folded into the ordinary business of a government elected to fix streets and permit buildings. Mayor Karen Bass promised “taxpayers will not be on the hook” even as the city has not fully disclosed what it spent. The point isn't the size of that bill; it is that mega-event obligations already run through the municipal machinery. The Olympics are the same machinery, at a far larger scale.

This is not unique to a mega-host. In Kansas City this spring, the council quietly passed an ordinance handing the city manager $400,000 for the World Cup, “recognizing that there's going to be unforeseen costs that we'll need to move quickly” to cover — a local body budgeting, in advance, for the hosting costs it can't yet foresee. One example, not a census: it is the clearest single case in the meeting record, offered to show the same machinery turning in a city that isn't Los Angeles — not to claim a national tally.

There is a real argument on the other side, and Los Angeles is the best place to make it. The 1984 Games famously turned a surplus. LA28 leans on existing venues to avoid the ruinous construction that sank other hosts — a real distinction, since the biggest overruns on record were building-heavy Games, and a city that builds almost nothing is genuinely less exposed to them. The county projects roughly $892 million in economic benefit. On this reading, the city's limited role is not a failure but a design: these are privately run events, the public's exposure is managed, and a staff-level tree permit is exactly the kind of routine decision that should not consume a City Council.

It is a fair case, and parts of it may hold. But even granting all of it — even if the Games are a triumph and a windfall — the harder question isn't whether hosting pays. It is whether the institutions that collect the benefits are the same ones carrying the risk, and whether the residents who bear the consequences have any say over the bodies that decide them. On that question the 1984 surplus is silent. And building little is not the same as spending little: security, transit, and staffing overrun too. But the sharper reply isn't about dollars at all. Even if the Games turn a profit and the guarantee is never drawn on, the arrangement is unchanged: the institution steering the budget is private and unelected, the ones backstopping it are public and on the ballot, and residents are left to work out which to hold responsible. Profitability doesn't answer that — it just means the bill never came.

The parts of a mega-event that residents can touch — the council meeting, the public comment card, the permit hearing — are real, and they matter. They are also not where the consequential choices get made.

So the people of Arcadia can fill a room, and a 17-year-old can describe climbing a tree, and the district's own representative can be gaveled into silence — and three weeks later the trees might be spared anyway, by a decision no voter was part of. You can be heard. Whether you are answered is a separate question, decided somewhere you cannot vote.