The last time the Utah Legislature’s Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games Coordination Committee met, the final decision on whether the state would host the 2034 Winter Games was still weeks away.
Since the International Olympic Committee vote in Paris last year on Pioneer Day that gave Utah a second Winter Games, a lot has happened, including the formation of an organizing committee with a former Utah House speaker as CEO.
Lawmakers are finally getting a chance to catch up at the first meeting of the committee in more than 14 months, set for Aug. 14 at 1 p.m. in Room 110 of the Senate Building at the Capitol.
The committee’s House chairman, Rep. Jon Hawkins, R-Pleasant Grove, said he wanted to wait a while after the privately funded organizing committee responsible for staging the $4 billion Olympics and Paralympics was put in place last February.
“We wanted to give them enough time to get their feet underneath them, to allow new leadership to come in and assess what’s going on and figure it out before we start peppering them with a bunch of questions,” Hawkins said.
Brad Wilson, who resigned from the Legislature in 2023 to run for the U.S. Senate, was chosen by legislative leaders and Gov. Spencer Cox to help lead the organizing committee with Fraser Bullock, the president and executive chair, and Steve Starks, the vice chair.
“Brad is the new CEO,” Hawkins said. “It’s a new role for him and it’s a new landscape. So we wanted to allow him time, and others, to get their feet wet and start progress on the work that they’ve got to perform.”
Bullock said for the organizing committee, “it’s been an exciting time and we have enough substance behind us now with the things that we’ve been doing that we can give them a good, full report.”
He’ll provide the update to lawmakers with Wilson and Darren Hughes, the organizing committee’s vice president of operations and planning. Their presentation will feature a timeline for Olympic and Paralympic preparations that was shared publicly with an advisory group in May.
“Part of this will be setting a foundation of bringing them up to speed relative to what’s coming next and where we are in terms of structure,” Bullock said, adding that organizers intend to “stay at a pretty high level at this point” and don’t plan to talk about finances.
What the legislative committee wants to know about the 2034 Games
Hawkins said he’s got plenty of questions for Olympic organizers.
“I want to hear information about the listening tour‚” he said, referring to the private meetings Wilson and other organizers are holding with local officials in communities that will host Olympic events. So far, there’s been stops in Ogden and the Heber Valley.
Hawkins also wants to know more about organizing committee structure, which features a number of advisory groups, including a steering committee made up of athletes as well as community, sport and business leaders.
Also of interest is “how they’re working with outside entities, like the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and the IOC to start planning,” he said. “A lot of people would say, ‘Oh, we’ve got 8 1/2 years.’ But 8 1/2 years could fly. So I want to understand where they’re at.”
Same with Utah organizers’ relationships with their counterparts at the upcoming Olympics — the 2026 Winter Games in Milan-Cortina, Italy, the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles, the 2030 Winter Games in the French Alps and the 2032 Summer Games in Brisbane, Australia.
What Hawkins said he won’t be asking about yet are the organizing committee’s finances.
Under the host contract with the IOC that was signed by the governor, Utah taxpayers are on the hook for any shortfalls, just as they were for the 2002 Winter Games that ended up leaving a sizable surplus.
There are no state or local tax dollars in the organizing committee’s $4 billion budget, largely funded through the sale of broadcast rights, sponsorships and tickets, although the federal government will oversee security and will be asked to help pay for transportation needs.
In May, organizing committee leaders disclosed they now are counting on raising $300 million in private donations, nearly double the amount in the budget. Starks said then that the increase is a hedge against financial uncertainty.
Hawkins said it’s still early to talk finances, especially since organizers can’t start raising money from domestic sponsors until after the LA Games to prevent competition with another American host for a major revenue source.
“I don’t really know that I want to look at the books, so to speak,” he said.
As for the donations that organizers are currently soliciting, Hawkins said, “I treat that as kind of private money. So that’s kind of why I don’t want to get into the finances of the whole organization.”
Are lawmakers Olympic overseers or coordinators?
The role of the legislative committee is less oversight and more coordination, he said.
“We used coordination specifically because we wanted to be able to coordinate with them on the things that they needed from a legislative standpoint,” Hawkins said, citing the need for lawmakers to be involved at the start in addressing issues like public safety at the Games.
The Legislature wants “to be able to tackle those things early so that we can get the right policy in place leading to the Olympics,” he said, adding there’s “a variety of other things like that, that we want to help coordinate, not just oversee, but coordinate and support.”
Even though the state is the guarantor of the Games, Hawkins said the organizing committee is “an independent entity. ... We want to make sure that we’re all in alignment with what’s happening with the coordination and the organization of the Games so that there are no surprises.”
No action is expected to be taken by lawmakers at the committee meeting, Hawkins said.
Bullock said organizers aren’t coming with any requests and have none planned for the 2026 Legislature. During the 2023 session, lawmakers approved legislation setting up the coordination committee and spelling out that the governor would sign the host contract.
Besides leaders of what’s formally known as the Organizing Committee for the 2034 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, lawmakers will also hear from the Utah Olympic Legacy Foundation, the nonprofit established to run venues originally built by the state for the 2002 Games.
More than $90 million has been appropriated over the years by the Legislature for improvements to those and other venues from 2002, and additional funding is expected to be sought in the next few years.