Boris swings into action

From the Guardian:

Mayor Boris Johnson today takes the reins of the Olympic Board and intends to ram home his message of tight financial management of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Chairing the meeting, Johnson will come face to face with those he accused in the week of "failing" to have a coherent 'legacy' plan. He called previous commitments "unrealistic."

Beijing cuts
Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell, who headed former mayor Ken Livingstone's election campaign, British Olympic Association Chairman Colin Moynihan and London 2012 Organising Committee Chair Sebastian Coe will hear of cuts to planned Beijing operations.

The number of City Hall delegates flying out to Beijing for the Olympic Games will be reduced as will spending on accommodation, Johnson also plans to fly economy.

He estimates saving around £1.2 million from Livingstone's original plans for London House, a venue in Beijing intended to promote London during the Games and scrapping plans to fly out eighteen Gordon Ramsay chefs, who would have provided catering for visitors and guests.

Earlier in the year he scrapped Ken's plan to send a bus to China by road, it still cost the taxpayer almost £500,000.

The Mayor said:
"I want to ensure every aspect is kept under tight financial control. There were some pretty unrealistic things planned, which would have cost a lot of taxpayer money, but which would have had marginal value to Londoners."

The original 2012 budget of £3.4 billion has nearly tripled to £9.3 billion. (and the rest??)

Meanwhile AFP reports:

London Mayor Boris Johnson slammed organisers of the 2012 Olympics that will be held in the British capital in an interview published Tuesday, saying they were clueless about what legacy the games would leave behind.

Johnson, elected mayor on May 1, said there was no "legacy masterplan" for the Olympics venues and insisted it was pointless ploughing money into the east London site if no-one knew "what on earth we're trying to achieve".

The Conservative Party politician took over from Labour's Ken Livingstone, who spearheaded the bid to secure the games for London. He has previously expressed concern at the spiralling costs of the project.

In an interview with London's Evening Standard newspaper, Johnson said he wanted a rethink to make sure Londoners were getting value for money from the games.

"There's no point sinking all of this money into east London unless it is actually going to produce a long-term return," he said.

"What we need to have is a complete overview of what on earth we're trying to achieve on the Olympics site and what in the long term is this really all about?

"So far, there's absolutely no sign of what you would call a legacy masterplan.

"There's no sign of anybody who has looked at this and said, 'Right, this is going to be London's Hyde Park of the east, this is going to be a university site.' No one has taken it and said, 'This is the future'.

"We need to get out skates on and work out what this thing is going to be for in the long term."
Johnson said there was no "convincing" long-term future for the main stadium as a home for athletics, the design for the aquatics venue made it difficult to transform into a leisure facility, while "nobody has got a clue" what to do with the huge media centre.

The cost of staging the Olympics and the legacy of what to do with Olympic sites once the two-week jamboree is over has long troubled host cities.

The 2012 London Olympics were originally predicted to cost 3.4 billion pounds (6.7 billion dollars, 4.3 billion euros). But the budget has now soared to 9.325 billion pounds.
Johnson was elected pledging to cut tax and waste at City Hall, giving Londoners "more bang for their buck".

On April 29, an influential committee of British lawmakers accused the 2012 organisers of lacking foresight and spending money "like water".

At the same time a new chance to squander some more cash has occured to Tessa Jowell, as the committee consider the appointment of a mascot (Gamesbid.com)

Marketing Week reports that the London 2012 organizing committee is considering a public competition to design a mascot for the 2012 Summer Games because of the negative publicity surrounding the design of the London 2012 logo.

A London 2012 spokeswoman said, “a competition of some kind is an option” but a decision had not yet been made. She said London 2012 will look at plans for the mascot over the next year.
When the 2012 logo was launched last year there was a public and media backlash. The cost of the design at 400,000 pounds also caused outrage, reports Marketing Week.

Meanwhile Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell told an audience Wednesday at the CBI Business Summit that when London Mayor Boris Johnson is handed the Olympic torch at the Beijing Summer Games, levels of scrutiny towards the 2012 Games will shoot up, and she figures the media will do nothing to help.

Jowell said, “the media whacks the Olympics every day, and a large proportion of that is totally uninformed and wrong. But you have to live with that”.

But she added that public support remains high. “I think it’s because of the ambition parents have for their children and the ambitions young people have for themselves”.

She said, “the 2012 Games will be a huge challenge but the scale of ambition in this country is unprecedented. Just remember – no one thought we should bid for the Olympics. No one thought we would win. But we did”.