Thoughts and Opinions On Today's Important Issues

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Your Tax Dollars At Work

What a fabulous offer to lease if you want to take over some of the City's space in the Canderel building

I can just see tenants in existing buildings downtown trying to break their leases to get space on the river in this Triple A building. And they get to eat at the Keg too

Wow, $10 dollars per square foot for the best building in town...a give-away I am told by a poor private enterprise developer who has to compete with your tax dollars at work. PLUS to help set things up, $20 per square foot for buildout costs. I also heard from a real estate agent that this lease rate is negotiable too but he did not know by how much. I wonder if all of Council agreed to these rates IN CAMERA.

Perhaps Chrysler might expand their operations and take over the space if they do not move to Toronto first. I wonder if Wipro would be interested since they have space there too if anyone even knows they exist. Wipro is, after all, only one of the largest IT companies in the world and moved to Canderel to be close to their US client in Detroit! [Economic Development Windsor never met them for the longest time I believe. I was asked to help try and set up a meeting between them as a matter of fact!] When I first met their GM when they came to Windsor, they were thinking of expanding here in the future too to provide back-up for overseas clients.

I guess it just means that every landlord who has vacant space downtown will have to drop their rents to compete with this magnificent deal. Shhhhheeeeeeesh, if the rents go lower, we may even see the office vacancy rates drop as landlords are forced to almost give away rental space to meet the taxpayers' competition!

Increased occupancy downtown.....Another victory for City Hall! We have to fill up that Keg Restaurant somehow don't we

This fabulous deal forces private rates down. It is an obvious side-effect of what the City is doing but does not seem to be concerned about. Better to get it "off the books" than to care about taxpayers. Sounds like the Mady Garage fiasco doesn't it where his company had to compete with the cheap parking rates of the City-owned garages and went into receivership (and the City lost millions as well since it was a partner in the garage) .

Of course, the City will continue to take a big loss every month even if the space is rented out since we have to pay the difference between the actual lease cost and the sublease rate but who will complain. I do not know the City lease rate but wasn't it around $20 or more per sqaure foot? Eddie will take the credit for the sublease of the space and the real estate agent will smile since I thought that Council agreed to pay double the commissions.

Give away the property at a low price and pay double the commissions too. Now that is smart business isn't it by our Donald Trump wannabees on Council.

Taxpayers are out money but we are making the best out of a bad deal right. Off the radar, no longer an election issue. No wonder we have to deprive Senior Citizens at Huron Lodge of $1,000 of Tylenol tablets and let them have dirty sheets! Another checkmark for the Mayor's Report Card!

As someone else might say with a contrarian view----if you have to offer that building at $10 per square foot, it just illustrates how SICK the Windsor economy really is!