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LA City Council: LA28 misled the city on tickets, other issues

April 14, 2026

LSO ANGELES — Months of the Los Angeles City Council’s frustration with LA28 boiled over during a committee meeting Monday morning with one council member saying he doesn’t trust the local organizing committee for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games and its board of directors. And council members maintained they had been misled on ticketing and accused LA28 of trying to make an “end run” around city requirements for hiring local businesses for the Games.

Council members directed pointed criticism toward LA28 officials for a lack of transparency on the organization’s finances, its failure to reach an enhanced services agreement with the city, repeatedly disregarding to city council members’ concerns about the funding, planning and implementation of the Games and their security, and how LA28 is receiving in ticket surcharge fees during the nearly two hour meeting of the council’s ad hoc committee on the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

“You don’t understand you’re not a nonprofit,” council member Hugo Soto-Martínez, referring to the LA 28’s status as an 0rganization exempt From income tax, told LA 28 CEO Reynold Hoover. “We are. The city of LA is the financial backstop to everything that you are doing, and I don’t think that has resinated or permeated to you or to this whole board that I just frankly don’t trust. When we have all these Maga Republicans sitting on that board, you’re not coming here, giving us confidence that you’re doing the right thing for the city of LA.”Hoover did not respond.

Council member Katy Young Yaroslavsky grilled Hoover on ticketing, saying that LA 28 had previously misled the council and pressing him on how much of a 24 percent surcharge on tickets is going back to LA 28.

“We had a lot of conversation about putting $1 a ticket tax on the ballot this June, and we declined to do that after having a conversation with you all about how important it was that you keep the tickets affordable,” Young Yaroslavsky said. “The tickets are not affordable. The 24 percent surcharge is not affordable, and $1 which would have actually helped us do some of the things that we know we need to do to get ourselves ready in the city the Olympics feels like a drop in the bucket compared to 24 pecent surcharge when we’re talking even about a $28 ticket, of which there were hardly any left when it was when I got lucky enough to get in there, there was hardly anything that was affordable, and then you had the 24% surcharge. I’m thinking, why didn’t we do the dollar tax? And it’s not too late, colleagues, for us to do that, because there’s going to be a secondary market for all of these tickets. And so I want to know what percentage of that 24 percent is coming back to LA 28 because I feel like we were misled when we were having conversations about that ticket tax.”

“I don’t know,” Hoover said, adding that he would have to get back to the council member.

But much of the meeting centered on council members criticism of LA 28 for what the council described as a lack of guarantees that businesses in the city will receive contracts with LA 28 for Games related services.

LA 28 has committed to awarding 75 percent of Games related contracts to local businesses and 25 percent to small businesses. But “local” includes a five-county area in Southern California while the council want LA 28 to prioritize businesses with the city.

“Basically, what she laid out and defended is a system where no LA, you could have a scenario where no LA business does any business with LA28 out of the over $4 billion, not in a verifiable way,” council president Marqueece Harris-Dawson told Hoover and LA28 chief operating officer John Harper. “I mean, you just said, ‘Well, I don’t want to have a tier, because I want competition, and then I don’t even want them to be required to have certification, because that might be difficult.’ What that can add up to, to someone just reading the plan, is you don’t do any business with anybody in LA. And I know that’s not your intent, but that’s what you have written down. That’s what you’ve defended this morning.”

Hoover defended LA28’s proposals regarding hiring local and small businesses, saying the organization has a responsibility to deliver fiscally responsible Games.

Hoover spent much of his opening statement stressing what he called the ability of the Olympics to bring people together and the success of LA28’s ticket sales so far.

Orange County Register

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LA City Council: LA28 misled the city on tickets, other issues

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