LESS than a month before World Youth Day, the State Government has yet to finalise an agreement with the Catholic Church on what taxpayers will pay to stage it. Despite years of negotiations with the church, the crucial agreement detailing who is liable for what remains unsigned, leaving taxpayers potentially exposed to cost blowouts or revenue shortfalls.
More than three years after Sydney won the rights to host World Youth Day, the Premier's Department has refused to release a document "setting out the commitments of the NSW Government" to World Youth Day because it underpins a proposed formal agreement between the church and the Government which is at a "sensitive stage of negotiation".
The impasse, revealed in response to a Herald freedom of information request, is the latest sign of financial tensions between the church, the Government, the City of Sydney and the Australian Jockey Club.
As the Government solved one dispute last night by agreeing to pay a $150,000 bond so the church can use Hyde Park, another emerged when the AJC complained that church contractors had damaged its main dirt training track by digging two trenches for water and sewerage pipes contrary to instruction, creating an uneven surface potentially dangerous to horses.
The club is discussing with the designer and builder of the track what remedial work will be needed. Early estimates suggest that recompacting the surface could cost more than $200,000.
But a World Youth Day spokesman denied its contractors had defied instructions. "A trench 35 centimetres deep and 40 centimetres wide has been dug, as agreed previously by all parties, including the AJC ...
"The racing and training facilities at Randwick Racecourse will be returned in original condition by the agreed date of 23 August."
Before the State Government's agreement last night to pay a $150,000 bond to secure the use of Hyde Park, City of Sydney council had threatened to cancel a meeting with the church planned for today and refuse to give it access to the park unless the money appeared in the council's bank account.
Kristina Keneally, the Government's spokeswoman for World Youth Day, released a statement at 5pm saying the World Youth Day Co-ordination Authority would pay the bond and promised there would be no extra cost to taxpayers.
City of Sydney's acting chief executive, Garry Harding, said: "There is no question that many of the grassed areas of Hyde Park will need to be returfed after this event."
A church spokesman, Jim Hanna, said World Youth Day organisers planned to start erecting confessional booths and merchandise tents in Hyde Park on Monday.
Mr Hanna conceded the formal agreement between the church and the State Government was still not complete, though there been progress in recent weeks.
"We have reached agreement on all the substantive issues with the NSW Government, as we expected to," he said. It was a matter of "dotting i's and crossing t's".
He could not guarantee the agreement would be finalised before the event began.
The Premier's Department says in a letter dated last month that there is a document "setting out the World Youth Day commitments of the NSW Government and WYD 2008 (the church's organising committee) dated June 18, 2007", but that it has not been finalised.
"The document sets out the principles underpinning a proposed formal agreement between the Catholic Church and the NSW Government that is currently at a sensitive stage of negotiation."
The Government refused access to the document, and said that to release it now "could jeopardise the finalisation of the agreement".
A spokeswoman for the World Youth Day Co-ordination Authority said last night that although details of the agreement had not been finalised, "key elements have been settled" and "principles about the costs have been resolved".
"It is not unusual, with large scale events, that components of the agreements between parties are fine-tuned right up until event time," she said.
Organisers say World Youth Day will attract more visitors to Sydney than any event apart from the 2000 Olympic Games.
In the case of the Olympics, however, the host city contract was signed seven years before the Games began.
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