Hoffman held purse strings for 1980 Olympics in Placid

For three years, Douglas L. Hoffman's job was to tell people no.

The Conservative congressional candidate was controller of the Lake Placid Olympic Organizing Committee, the architect of the 1980 Olympic Winter Games.

The job, as the candidate said Wednesday, was taking organizers' "extreme wish lists" and bringing them "down to reality."

"That could translate to my congressional race," Mr. Hoffman said. "Everyone wants everything they can possibly get. But in reality, we can only spend what we have."

That was not the reality in which the Lake Placid committee operated the Olympics. Three months after the games closed, the agency was $6 million in debt — an amount the Plattsburgh Press Republican once called "an enormous sum in 1980 for a village with such modest resources." It owed an estimated 1,600 creditors.

The group lobbied the federal government to bail it out. The Carter administration, which already had spent an estimated $90 million on the games, balked.

The state Legislature was more receptive. It agreed to pay off the debt in exchange for ownership of the ski jumps, the Olympic fieldhouse and the speed skating rink. Lawmakers created the Olympic Regional Development Authority just to manage the acquisitions. The authority took over all of the Olympic facilities the following year.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Hoffman has decried unchecked spending, bloated governments and mounting deficits that create higher taxes. But he said he'd support a government bailout if there were an agency under the same set of circumstances today.

Mr. Hoffman said the organizing committee employed 2,500 people at the height of the games. And ORDA had a $271 million economic impact on Clinton, Essex, Franklin and Warren counties in 2007-08, according to its own report.

"I'm not ashamed of it," he said. "The return on investment that the taxpayers got on the federal and state level is at least 30 fold, when you include the income tax, sales tax and business tax that has been generated since this investment. It's been unmatched."

That return did not come without significant upfront cost.

An August 1978 Associated Press article noted that the committee's Olympic budget had "zoomed" from $80 million to about $150 million.

"After months of rumors about mounting overruns, the Lake Placid Olympic Organizing Committee finally announced it would need an additional $18 million to $20 million from the federal government — above the $58 million already appropriated — to cover the cost overruns and other 'unanticipated' construction costs," the article said.

Mary Fiess, the article's writer, noted the administration budget had jumped from $11 million in 1976 to $20 million in 1977 and to $50 million in 1978.

Besides the federal government's $90 million investment, New York spent an additional $42 million on the Olympics, according to a March 1980 Associated Press article.

Mr. Hoffman was, at first, the only one "watchfully controlling the purse strings of the LPOOC," as a January 1978 article in Olympic Magazine said. But as the games approached, the accountant said, more than 20 people were giving input on the budget.

Committee officials had said publicly up until the games that they would run a debt-free Olympics. But this kind of promise had been made before. Montreal, which hosted the summer games four years earlier, lost an estimated $1 billion, according to a November 1978 Watertown Daily Times article.

Mr. Hoffman said the Lake Placid committee's chance for a break-even Olympics was lost about one month before the torch was lit. That's when President Jimmy Carter first threatened to have American athletes boycott the Olympics — the upcoming games in Moscow, that is.

"He didn't make it clear that he was referring to the Summer Olympics. Ticket sales stopped dead in their tracks for 21/2 weeks," Mr. Hoffman said. "If something like that hadn't happened, we certainly would have had a break-even Olympics."

A March 1980 article from the New York Times noted an organizational blunder also may have cost the agency dearly.

"The organizers had opened the games with transportation that was short of buses, drivers and dispatchers," it said. "They had to seek contracts for all three on the open market at premium prices, a contingency that, by itself, could put a huge dent in the budget."

An Associated Press article in February 1984 said "construction overruns and the cost of widening area roads" also were causes of the deficit.

Nearly 30 years later, Mr. Hoffman can argue that these reasons are all, ultimately, inconsequential.

"If you look at the blemish of the deficit coming out of the Olympics as a big negative, you're missing the whole point," he said. "That was only a speed bump to the positive aspect of creating those jobs and the infrastructure that is still driving the economy in the north country 30 years later."

He concluded: "None of us are embarrassed or ashamed about what happened. Even with what happened, we weren't a failure. We were a success."