A divided Los Angeles City Council finalized a deal with organizers of the 2028 Summer Olympic Games aimed at controlling the city’s costs during the global event, amid complaints that the protections don’t go far enough.

On a 10-4 vote, the council approved the Enhanced City Resources Master Agreement, which lays out the process for the city to seek reimbursement for the services it provides during the Games.

City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo said the agreement sets up additional financial safeguards, by allowing the city to tap a $270-million contingency fund set up by LA28, the privately run Olympic organizing committee, if outstanding costs remain.

Still, some on the council warned that taxpayers could wind up on the hook for $1 billion in police and other public safety costs if LA28 incurs serious losses.

“This fails to provide any safeguards for Los Angeles taxpayers and most assuredly risks the city’s fiscal stability,” Councilmember Monica Rodriguez said after voting against the agreement. Councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez, Ysabel Jurado and Nithya Raman, who is running against Mayor Karen Bass, also were opposed.

Critics of the Games have long voiced concern about the risks that surround the event.

If LA28 incurs massive financial losses, the city would cover the first $270 million. The state would absorb the next $270 million. After that, the city’s general fund, which pays for basic services, would cover any remaining shortfall.

The city’s negotiating team said L.A.’s political leaders committed the city roughly a decade ago to serve as a financial backstop for the Games, as part of the contract that made L.A. the host city.

“We are providing you today as many protections as we can, given the reality that if it is not financially successful, it does fall onto us,” Szabo said. “So there is nothing we could propose today or tomorrow or next year that would eliminate that risk.”

The council, in a flurry of votes, sidelined proposals from Councilmembers Imelda Padilla, Hernandez and Raman that were billed as a way to reduce the risk facing the city.

LA28 spokesperson Jacie Prieto Lopez, in a statement, said the newly approved agreement delivers on the committee’s commitment to “execute a safe, secure and fiscally responsible Games that benefit Los Angeles for decades to come.”

Under the terms approved by the council, LA28 would pay the city ahead of the Games for services that are ineligible for reimbursement from the federal government, such as street sweeping and deployment of traffic officers.

The terms around police protection are more complicated.

The city would first seek reimbursement from the federal government for law enforcement services, particularly in high-security zones, Szabo said. If the government fails to cover the cost of security in those areas, the city would seek all or a portion of LA28’s contingency funds to make up difference, he said.

Last year, President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, setting aside $1 billion for state and local governments for security, planning and other costs associated with the Games.

Some council members have voiced concerns that the federal government might not follow through on its commitment, or that only a fraction of those funds would make their way to L.A., one of several Southern California communities slated to host Olympic competitions.

In April, Rodriguez sent LA28 a letter warning the city’s public safety costs could easily blow past $1 billion if there is an emergency or major weather event.

City Controller Kenneth Mejia, in an interview, said he intends to use his office to look into LA28’s finances in the run-up to the Games. He also argued that the deal to secure the Olympics was a bad one from the beginning.

“We’re already locked into a huge financial liability. This was one of our big chances to throw in protections for the city and also provide that transparency,” said Mejia, who opposed the agreement.

If LA28 makes money on the Games, the organizing committee would be barred from distributing that surplus to any organization until it has covered its financial obligations to the city, according to the terms approved Wednesday by the council.

Szabo, appearing before the council, acknowledged that the city faces a financial risk. If LA28 does experience a financial loss, it first would tap its own $330-million contingency fund, he said.

After that, LA28 and the city would have access to a second, $270-million contingency fund set up to protect taxpayers, he said.

“Is that a likely scenario? We don’t believe so,” Szabo said. “Their reports thus far have suggested that they are meeting their targets on their sponsorships and on other revenues, and we want them to continue to hit their targets.”

Those arguments haven’t satisfied an array of activists, who urged the council to rewrite the agreement.

“LA28 has no incentive to keep the city from being forced into bankruptcy,” said Chris Tyler, spokesperson for Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, a nonprofit that advocates for low-income communities in L.A.

Under a deal reached in 2021, LA28 must reimburse the city for services that go beyond what would be provided on a normal day in key parts of the city, such as Exposition Park, the Sepulveda Basin and parts of downtown L.A.

The organizing committee is obligated to create a $270-million contingency fund that can be distributed as a surplus if the Games make money or cover any losses in the event of a shortfall.

The proposal approved Wednesday calls for the five-year-old agreement to be amended to ensure that those contingency funds can be used to cover the city’s costs in the event that other funds aren’t available.

The city and LA28 were supposed to have a draft agreement on the cost recovery process completed by October. A draft document did not surface until June.

City negotiators now head into another round of talks with LA28 on the precise level of services needed at the Convention Center, Venice Beach, Dodger Stadium and other locations. Those venue agreements must be completed in July 2027.

Under the terms approved Wednesday, the two sides must reach an accord on the cost of those additional services by October 2027.

The surface of the Moon is a bleak and forbidding place that could be hiding a lot of water ice within the dusty landscape. However, most possible ice deposits don’t just stand out in an image. You need specialized mapping to find those deposits. So, scientists have devised another way to find the Moon’s frosty hidden reserves. They use seismic waves from moonquakes as locator beacons.

Geologists at the University of Maryland, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Hawai’i recently published a paper (cited below) that examines the role that seismic waves play in locating ice deposits on and in the Moon. Finding water ice is important because the users of future lunar laboratories and habitats will need a steady supply of water. In addition, ice can be used to create oxygen supplies and rocket fuels for getting around the Moon. It’s a far cheaper and more efficient source of water than bringing water and other supplies up from Earth.

A map of possible lunar water deposits around the south pole region of the Moon. Courtesy: Chandrayaan mission. Credit: ISRO.

How Did the Moon Get Water?

The origins of the lunar water caches remain something of a mystery, although the evidence points in a few directions. The most likely locations for substantial amounts of water are at the poles and other regions where some of the ice could have been delivered by comets or asteroids. There could be deposits in regions where volcanism transported water from inside the Moon to the surface, or via the solar wind or meteor showers. These bombard surface rocks, triggering chemical reactions that could release water molecules. The evidence for water is pretty substantial, based on studies of rocks brought back during the Apollo era, as well as studies made by such missions as the Chinese Chang’e 5 probe, the SOFIA project, and highly detailed images and impact modeling done by Chandrayaan scientists. It’s more likely that much of the proposed lunar water accumulated over millions or billions of years, rather than just one major delivery by a comet or asteroid impact.

Lunar water is likely some kind of briny mixture of materials from the Moon mixed with materials delivered by delivery of chondritic materials via impacts. It’s still possible that regions in the lunar interior could be warm enough to contain liquid water, although scientists need more data about the Moon’s core to prove that. Some analyses also suggest that some lunar water could date back to the time of the Moon’s formation during the impact between early Earth and a Mars-sized object. So, it’s clear that a better understanding of the nature of lunar water (as well as its locations) is in order.

These images show a very young lunar crater on the side of the moon that faces away from Earth, as viewed by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper on the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. On the left is an image showing brightness at shorter infrared wavelengths. On the right, the distribution of water-rich minerals (light blue) is shown around a small crater. Both water- and hydroxyl-rich materials were found to be associated with material ejected from the crater. Credits ISRO/NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS/Brown Univ.

Future Uses of Lunar Ice

According to Nicholas Schmerr of the University of Maryland, the Artemis missions and others will rely on lunar ice deposits, no matter where they come from. “It’s crucial to identify any materials on the moon that an astronaut can make use of while they’re up there,” said Schmerr, who co-authored the team’s study. “Since they will be limited by the few resources they brought from Earth, anything they find on the moon will help them basically live off the land, especially for longer-term missions or outposts.”

Lunar ice also provides another avenue of planetary science research. Ice in the shadowed craters may well contain undisturbed deposits of ice from comets and other events from early solar system history. “The moon witnessed some of the most critical parts of the early solar system, including how water was delivered,” Schmerr said. “Studying the ice deposited there could reveal how water spread and ultimately how Earth’s oceans formed.”

Seismic Waves and Ice

Finding ice under the surface requires new thinking about how it can be located. The lunar surface is cold and dry. From studies here on Earth, scientists know that seismic waves behave differently depending on the types of material they pass through. When a quake occurs, it sends out these mechanical waves. They travel through all the materials beneath the surface, and their velocity changes depending on what they travel through at the time. The density and elasticity of materials are important factors. The velocity of a wave will tell us how deep the quake was, essentially where it occurred.

As an example, if a wave passes through an area that has a lot of ice, the waves travel two to three times faster than they would through dirt or sand. Areas with a lot of ice mixed in also see bounce back in the waves as they interact with the stiff, dense materials. If an area on the Moon has a lot of ice underground, scientists would expect to see changes in velocity of the earthquake waves as well as any possible bounce back. According to Schmerr, bounceback would also reveal other characteristics of the hidden ice. “We can use seismic waves to not just see whether ice is present but also roughly how much of it there is,” he explained.

How to Test for Lunar Ice

It’s one thing to study earthquake waves here on the home planet, but quite another to do it on the Moon. To figure out the best way to determine lunar ice deposits, the team, led by Harrison Lisabeth of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, tried three approaches for detection. First, they took a volcanic rock from Arizona that is a close mimic of lunar rocks. If you crush that type of rock, it turns into an almost exact analog for lunar dust. They froze it and then X-rayed it to see how ice settled between dust grains. The second approach involved temperature models for the polar regions, where ancient ice deposits seem to exist undisturbed by sunlight. Finally, Schmerr ran computer simulations of minor moonquakes to see how they would interact with underground lunar ice. All three methods left very obvious signs of ice in the data.

Data from X-ray tomography of simulated lunar regolith showing a) the dry sample, b) a rendering of icy microstructures prepared with small amounts of water, c) grains with the ice removed, and d) ice with the grains removed. The ice acts like a cement in the pore spaces between the grains of dust. This test result showed how the ice could exist in the regolith of the Moon. Credit: Lisabeth, Schmerr, et al.

The results look very promising, and the research team was able to come up with some suggestions for further examinations of methods to find ice on the Moon. One approach is to study the microstructures of a wider array of lunar regolith analogs here on Earth. In addition, future computer models should take into account more accurate measurements of lunar topography. Finally, the team suggests that further seismic models and tests be made to determine more accurate locations and depths of ice.
?
The hunt for lunar ice is a very real one and future explorers will need that resource. The team points out that recent spectroscopic data suggests that there is between 100 and 400 mg/g of water in the lunar soil. The job now is to identify deposits that are reasonably minable for industrial use by Artemis and other missions. Planned robotic and crewed missions to the moon in the next decade will provide opportunities to apply the tools of terrestrial near-surface geophysics to locating crucial lunar resources. The next viable mission is the Chinese Chang’e-7 is set to go to the Moon in …. and will carry a seismometer capable of looking for ice deposits in its landing site near Shackleton Crater. The 2028 Artemis mission should also be able to set a Lunar Environmental Monitoring Station that can also perform seismic studies.

For More Information

Scientists Use Moonquakes to Locate Lunar Ice

The Seismic Signature of Lunar Ice

Water on the Moon? New Study Narrows Down the Most Likely Suspects

Water and Ices on the Moon