“I Couldn’t Love Him More:” How Romney Steered a Key Olympic Project to a Friend

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/romney-kem-gardner-2002-olympics-deal

As Mitt Romney got ready to take his seat in London for the Olympics' opening ceremonies, the focus of the presidential campaign this week shifted to the candidate's time running the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City. Romney is generally recognized as the take-charge executive who turned the Games around after a massive bribery scandal. But there's another side to that record. Romney's campaigns, as we've previously reported, have taken in $1.5 million in donations from the families and business associates of two central figures in the Salt Lake scandal. And documents obtained by Mother Jones shed new light on another of the candidate's Olympic connections—his personal intervention on behalf of his closest Salt Lake friend, developer Kem Gardner, in connection with a key real-estate deal.

At issue is the Olympic Legacy Plaza, a public square in the Gateway, a massive shopping/retail/office complex that Gardner was developing at the time. The plaza features the 2002 Games' snowflake logo, a fountain, and a concrete "wall of honor" listing donors and volunteers. No other bids or sites were considered for the project, which helped Gardner secure a multimillion-dollar city tax break for building a public plaza. Romney also wrote a memo discouraging other municipalities from building competing projects, and he helped fill a Gateway housing complex with media representatives during the Games. Gardner, his family, and his business associates have since given more than $500,000 to Romney's campaigns.

"I couldn't love him more," Romney once said of Gardner, whom he's known since the two of them were prominent Church of Latter-day Saints officials in Boston—they ran the local Mormon stake, roughly the equivalent of a Catholic diocese—in the 1980s. It was Gardner, a longtime Olympic booster and chair of the 2002 Games' fundraising subcommitee, who got Romney the Salt Lake job. Over the years Gardner has also house-hunted with Romney in Utah, provided a city apartment for him to use on nights when he worked late on the Olympics, headed the Olympics Ambassadors fundraising organization at Romney's behest, and traveled with Romney and five others to the games' official torch lighting ceremonies in Athens in 2002. Gardner even employed Romney's son Josh until recently. "We talk every other day and exchange emails," he told the Idaho Statesman last year.

While the Boston Globe explored the Romney/Gardner relationship during Romney's 2002 gubernatorial campaign, Mother Jones has obtained documents that reveal just how far Romney went to secure the Olympic legacy park designation for Gardner. They include a January 12, 2000 letter from Gardner to Romney claiming that the Salt Lake City Organizing Committee (SLOC) had "initiated ongoing discussions with us concerning your interest" in a legacy plaza at Gateway, and contending that Gardner's proposal was "in response to these requests." But the next day, when Romney recommended approval of the project at an SLOC meeting, he didn't mention soliciting the proposal; instead he characterized it as "an offer that SLOC had received."