Rio backpedals on key legacy projects before Olympics

Taylor Barnes | Special for USA TODAY Sports

RIO DE JANEIRO — As International Olympic Committee inspectors arrived this week for a three-day visit ahead of the 2016 Summer Olympics here, they were likely greeted with a potent reminder of the ground the city still needs to cover: The famous stench of the Guanabara Bay that follows guests from the international airport down through the city's historical port zone.

The gray-green body of water that forms the eastern border of the city is also where Olympic sailing will be hosted in just 18 months. Biologists says it's also the final destination for the lion's share of the sewage produced by the 12 million people who call Rio's metropolitan area home.

Rio had promised in 2009 when it won the Olympic bid to clean up 80 percent of the sewage in the bay. But like several key infrastructure promises pegged to the Games, this one has been subject to backpedaling and lowered expectations from officials as the Olympics get closer.

"Of course I'd like for everything to be ready for the Olympics, but what I want is a legacy for the local population," Rio de Janeiro Governor Luiz Fernando Pezão recently told reporters when asked about the city's sewage goal. "I won't be frustrated" if that percentage isn't reached by the Games, the governor added.

When he toured the Olympic Park in December, Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes beat back against criticisms about the city's progress in constructing Olympic venues. He projected confidence about Rio's preparations for the Games, claiming that the most worrisome project in the park — a 5,000-seat velodrome — was a mere three weeks behind schedule.

But outside the Olympic Park and Deodoro sports complex, which together will host 27 Olympic disciplines, Rio officials are not so firm about key infrastructure projects that have been touted as the Games legacy for the city.

Cleaning up raw sewage

The city government says that 37.7 billion reais (about $13.7 billion) is being spent on the 2016 Games, including the amount by the organizing committee for operational costs like feeding athletes, money spent on infrastructure directly used for the Games — such as the Olympic park — and so-called legacy projects, like public transportation and sanitation investments. Of that total, the city government says that 57 percent comes from private funds.

Legacy projects are the largest share of the budget: 24.1 billion reais ($8.8 billion). In addition to the cleanup in the bay, major examples include a long-awaited metro line whose start date has been pushed back to the eve of the Games and a favela (low-income housing settlements) urban upgrading program, touted as the social legacy of the Games, that its original planners say has been largely scrapped.

Rio's efforts to clean up its polluted bay stretch back at least two decades, a period in which it has received loans from international organizations like the Inter-American Development Bank and the Japan International Cooperation Agency for the task.

While officials say that they are increasingly treating sewage that goes into the bay — Mario Andrada, a spokesperson for the Rio 2016 committee, said that the percentage of sewage that is dumped in the bay which is treated has gone from 11 percent to 50 percent since 2007 — environmentalists say anyone courageous enough to take a dip in the water can see another story.

"There are parts of the bay where you are literally inside a latrine where hundreds of thousands of people defecate daily," according to Mario Moscatelli, an independent biologist who closely monitors pollution in Rio's waterways. Moscatelli says in addition to sewage, he has documented cadavers, hospital waste, home electronics and tires in the water.

"The promises made to cariocas (a moniker for Rio's residents) and the IOC by Brazilian authorities is nothing more than environmental fraud," said Moscatelli.

An uncertain legacy

Another project that would be a major quality of life improvement for Rio residents is the 10-mile new metro line that will connect the city's west zone — the center of Olympic installations — with the touristic beachside neighborhoods of Ipanema and Leblon. That connection would make the north, south and west zones traversable by the metro system and above ground Bus Rapid Transit lanes, forming a ring around the city that nowadays often relies on slow buses in heavy rush hour traffic. The route that will be covered by the new line, which takes an average of an hour by bus, will be cut to 15 minutes.

But the new metro line suffered a serious setback last May when, as workers drilled new tunnels through a posh residential street of the Ipanema neighborhood, two large craters appeared in the street. Numerous cracks also appeared in nearby buildings. The consortium responsible for the line's construction spent six months remedying the area before it resumed excavation.

Then, in January, streams of what seemed to be concrete and cement spat upward out of the same street, reviving fears about the precariousness of the operation.

Ignez Barreto, an Ipanema resident, said that she understands that public works that benefit the population of a city cause disturbances for those who live in their way. But she said that specialists consulted by concerned residents say the consortium is digging the metro line too shallowly in a cost-cutting measure.

A spokeswoman from the consortium said the metro line had always been predicted to open in the "first semester" of 2016; however, the project managers recently announced that the line would open in July of 2016 – the month before the Games. The spokeswoman also said that the cracks in buildings are largely aesthetic issues that do not represent security risks.

Perhaps the most remarkable change of Olympic plans is the fate of a favela upgrading program, part of the mayor's promise to bring all of the city's low-income settlements up to decent urban living standards by 2020. An estimated one in five Rio residents live in favelas.

The project was a "planner's dream," said Mariana Cavalcanti, an anthropologist hired to work with an architectural firm on a series of favelas near the Olympic Park. Rather than a top-down approach to reform, the upgrading program emphasized heavy input from favela residents on their wants and needs.

"That would have been one of those rare chances to do some urban planning in this city that seems so unplanned," Cavalcanti said.

After 86 multidisciplinary teams submitted applications, 40 architectural firms were chosen in 2010, with the expectation that each would receive formal contracts shortly afterward.

"They didn't get to the actual project phase," Cavalcanti said of the first firms who carried out diagnostics of the communities and awaited their green light to go forward. Contracts were either never made or cancelled with little explanation, leaving the firms' staffs, favela residents and housing activists asking what had happened to the city's grand plan. The Rio de Janeiro city government did not respond to requests for comment about the fate of the program.

The favela upgrading program, called Morar Carioca ("Carioca Living"), is still listed on the Olympic web site maintained by the city government. Cavalcanti, however, said that the local government has taken ongoing infrastructure projects and relabeled them rather than follow through with the "planner's dream" methodology.

Asked about a recent report from a Rio university that said that Guanabara bay could indeed reach its pollution reduction goals — 10 years after the Olympics — biologist Moscatelli didn't hide his exasperation: "Brazil is the country of the future! The problem is that the future never comes."