The City of Vancouver has gone on the defensive to battle suggestions the Olympic Village will saddle city taxpayers with a legacy of debt.
The village was once touted by the mayor as the city's prized jewel, but officials spent nearly two hours with reporters on Tuesday going over detailed and never-before released figures to explain the project's financial losses.
It was a tightly-managed meeting that started with a news release inviting media to city hall "due to misinformation published" in local media. It also prohibited journalists from posting information online or to social media during the briefing.
When the technical portion was over, city manager Penny Ballem asserted the project is not a boondoggle.
"There is a minimal loss by the taxpayers and we have written down this whole situation by $48 million and we believe that we will recover everything that we were due but $48 million on our financial books," she said.
The project, built to house athletes during the 2010 Winter Games, has been a tender spot for years.
Leading up to the Games, the city was first forced to save the project when the original lender stopped funding the developer. Rescue was warranted again last fall, with the city calling in a receiver because Millennium Development couldn't make the sales to pay the city back. Officials went after assets of the brothers behind the company, but weren't able to recover as much as they'd hoped.
Still trying to turn things around, the city mounted a new marketing campaign in February to change the village's ghost-town image, aiming to sell off the hundreds of remaining luxury condominiums and recoup the massive loans. Sales picked up in a flash, with 118 being nabbed in a matter of days. Then last month it was revealed the owners of 62 pre-sale units have filed lawsuits to get out of their contracts.
The city called the meeting Tuesday after news reports this week presented the cost to taxpayers as much higher than the city acknowledged.
Ballem flatly rejected that taxpayers are on the hook for the additional $200 million the city had expected as revenue for the cost of the land.
"On the city's books and in our financial statements and in our financial worth, we never actually said that we would get that money, that was aspirational," she said, noting the purchase price of the land when the city bought it was $27 million.
The city now owes $515 million to its own creditors, while stating the project's current market value is $545 million. Officials said the loss will be absorbed by the city's real-estate holdings arm, called the Property Endowment Fund, which has an approximate current market value of $3.5 billion.
"I think all and all we have come out much better than we could have done," Ballem said. "That's good news for the citizens of Vancouver."
City Coun. Suzanne Anton, who was a proponent of the project leading up to the Games but now takes a critical tone, said after the meeting she still believes the cash needs to be better accounted for.
"The cost of the land is always under question here," she said, noting in her view that $87 million is outstanding. "The fact of the matter is the $200 million which was to be received for the land was reinvested into the roads, the parks, the community centre and so on. That hasn't been recovered.
"That's still a debt to the city."
Of the 1,108 total condos, 252 are owned by the city in a 50-50 split of social housing and market rentals, while the receiver owns 119 more rental units.
The marketer has said he believes he can sell all of the units in two years.
