Orange County’s Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to establish a committee dedicated to preparing the county for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, with competition already locked in at two venues inside county lines.
The board created the LA 28 Olympic Preparedness Committee and tapped Supervisors Katrina Foley and Vicente Sarmiento to lead it. The decision came with a candid acknowledgment: county officials know they’ve been slow off the mark. Orange County has two confirmed Olympic venues, surfing competitions near San Clemente and volleyball at the Honda Center in Anaheim, and until now it didn’t have a coordinated plan to think through what that actually means financially or logistically.
Foley was blunt about it. “Right now, Orange County doesn’t really have a seat at the table, so we felt like we needed to get going,” she told LAist. “We did miss that opportunity in 1984, and we don’t want that to happen again.”
That’s a real gap. The Games will bring roughly 3 million visitors into the Los Angeles region, and Orange County is poised to absorb a significant share of that traffic whether it’s ready or not.
The LA28 organizing committee carries the financial responsibility for running the Olympics itself, so county government won’t be writing checks to stage events. But Foley was clear that associated costs, things like transportation upgrades, security coordination, and community programming, do fall on local governments, and the new committee’s first job is to figure out what that bill looks like. She didn’t have a number. Neither did Sarmiento. That’s partly why the committee exists.
“We’ll be trying to anticipate and predict what the cost would be,” Sarmiento said. He also signaled that the committee intends to pursue state and federal funding to offset whatever the county owes. “It will be a long list,” he said, adding that asking hard questions now is the only way to avoid scrambling closer to 2028.
In Anaheim, city officials are running a parallel analysis. Mike Lyster, the city’s chief communications officer, said the financial picture for the volleyball tournament at the Honda Center isn’t fully drawn yet. The city has managed major events before, but the Olympics carry a different operational weight. “The Olympics do bring some added dimension with international visitors and other considerations,” Lyster said. “We’ll be trying to anticipate and predict what the cost would be,” he said, echoing the county’s position. He was direct that the work’s still in progress.
Orange County’s role in the 28 Games appears to be bigger than the two venue addresses suggest. Foley said Italy plans to use Cal State Fullerton as its national team training base, and UC Irvine will function as an official Olympic Village. Dana Point Harbor is also part of the mix. Foley has her own vision for what the coastline can become. “We’re going to create what I’m calling a seaside Olympic Village, not an official village of the Olympics, but official for Orange County,” Foley said.
She’s also pushing the committee to think past competition schedules. “This isn’t just about the Olympics in 2028,” she said. The infrastructure built, the relationships formed with international delegations, and the branding Orange County earns from hosting could carry economic weight for years past the closing ceremony.
Caltrans is among the agencies the committee will need to coordinate with as it maps out transportation challenges. The county’s freeways already strain under ordinary summer traffic, and the Games will compress visitor volume in ways that require planning at the regional scale.
The supervisors didn’t pass a budget Tuesday. No staffing plan, no timeline for the committee’s first report. What they did was start the clock. Sarmiento framed it simply: the county can’t afford to reach 2027 still asking basic questions. The committee’s early work will be building that question list, identifying funding sources, and pulling together the agencies, from cities to Caltrans to the LA28 organizing committee, that will need to move together.
Orange County went into 1984 without a plan. It’s got two years to prove 2028 turns out differently.