On a warm June evening, more than 3,000 people gathered on Olympia’s waterfront.
Children wearing jerseys from countries around the world kicked soccer balls across Port Plaza while families unfolded lawn chairs they had carried from home. Every time the United States found the back of the net, cheers echoed across Budd Inlet.
For a few hours, Port Plaza wasn’t just another waterfront park.
It became Thurston County’s front-row seat to the largest sporting event on Earth.
I didn’t grow up as a soccer fan.
I grew up playing football. Friday nights under the lights taught me about teamwork, discipline, perseverance, and community. Soccer simply wasn’t part of my world.
That changed when my stepson fell in love with the game.
As parents often do, I found myself learning through his eyes. I started watching matches with him, learning the rules, appreciating the strategy, and witnessing the incredible passion that billions of people around the world have for what they call the beautiful game.
You don’t have to be a lifelong soccer fan to appreciate what the FIFA World Cup represents. It is the largest sporting event on Earth, and this year, for the first time in a generation, it was coming to our backyard.
Thinking Bigger
Nearly two years ago, leaders from Thurston County, Olympia, Lacey, Tumwater, the Port of Olympia, Experience Olympia & Beyond, and numerous community partners began asking a simple question:
How do we make sure Thurston County is part of this once-in-a-generation moment?
The easy answer would have been to do nothing. After all, Seattle was the host city. People could simply drive north.
Instead, our region asked a different question: How do we bring some of that excitement here?
That question eventually became the Olympia-Lacey FIFA World Cup Fan Zone.
What Most People Never See
One thing I’ve learned in public service is that people usually see the last five percent of a project.
They see the ribbon cutting, opening day, and the first long line.
What they don’t see are the hundreds of meetings, planning sessions, budget discussions, permit reviews, fundraising efforts, sponsorship conversations, security planning, volunteer recruitment, and partnership building that make an event like this possible.
The Fan Zone didn’t appear overnight. It was the product of nearly two years of collaboration because local leaders believed our community deserved to participate in something much bigger than ourselves.
Government Didn’t Produce the Fan Zone
I’ve seen some confusion about who actually hosted the event.
The county didn’t. Neither did Olympia, Lacey, Tumwater, or the Port of Olympia.
Local governments simply aren’t equipped to produce festivals of this scale. We don’t have event planners, vendor coordinators, production crews, or the staff necessary to manage an experience like this.
What we can do is build partnerships.
Following the tremendous success of the Governor’s Ball, leaders from Olympia, Thurston County, Lacey, and Tumwater approached the Thurston County Chamber of Commerce and asked whether they would be willing to organize an official FIFA Fan Zone for our region.
The Thurston County Chamber of Commerce, Experience Olympia & Beyond, and an incredible coalition of public and private partners assembled the funding, coordinated the logistics, recruited vendors, managed security, and transformed Olympia’s waterfront into something our community had never experienced before.
That’s exactly what good public-private partnerships look like.
Government provides the vision. Community organizations provide the expertise. Neither succeeds nearly as well without the other.
Let’s Talk About the Funding
Perhaps the biggest misconception I’ve seen involves the money.
Some have suggested that public dollars used for the Fan Zone should have instead gone toward housing, roads, or public safety.
That isn’t how this funding works.
Much of the public investment came from lodging tax revenues, sometimes called hotel-motel taxes.
These are taxes paid by visitors staying in hotels, motels, vacation rentals, and other overnight accommodations. If you’re reading this and you’re a Thurston County resident, chances are you didn’t pay this tax. Our visitors did. By state law, those dollars can only be used to promote tourism and bring more visitors to our region. They can’t simply be shifted over to fund deputies, pave roads, or address housing.
The idea is actually pretty simple.
Visitors stay in our hotels and pay a small lodging tax. Those dollars are then reinvested into tourism: marketing our region, supporting festivals and events, and creating experiences that encourage even more visitors to come here.
Those visitors eat at our restaurants, shop in our stores, buy fuel, visit local attractions, and often book another night in a hotel. Local businesses benefit. Local workers benefit. Local governments collect additional sales tax revenue that helps pay for essential public services.
Those revenues support everything from parks to public safety to infrastructure. Tourism isn’t separate from our local economy. It helps sustain it.
It’s a cycle of economic investment designed to grow our local economy.
If we don’t use those dollars to promote tourism, then we’re failing to accomplish the very purpose for which they were collected.
Was It Worth It?
That’s the question we should be asking.
Not whether there were long lines on opening day.
Not whether admission should have been free.
Not whether security checkpoints moved fast enough.
Those are all fair conversations.
Some readers may still believe admission should have been free. Others may conclude they would have organized the event differently.
Those are perfectly legitimate opinions. Reasonable people can disagree about ticket prices, logistics, or programming.
My point isn’t that every decision was perfect. My point is that we should judge the investment by whether it accomplished its purpose.
Instead, we should ask:
Did it bring people to Thurston County?
Did it support local businesses?
Did it generate overnight stays?
Did it showcase our community?
Early indications suggest the answer is yes.
Experience Olympia & Beyond recently shared preliminary results from a cooperative Expedia tourism campaign tied to the World Cup.
Even at the midpoint of the campaign, it had already generated approximately 2,250 hotel room nights and more than $327,000 in hotel revenue throughout Olympia, Lacey, and Tumwater.
That’s before considering restaurant sales, retail shopping, fuel purchases, entertainment spending, and the countless dollars that continue circulating throughout our local economy. That is exactly what lodging tax dollars are intended to accomplish.
