What Did Tuesday Really Accomplish

I am quite surprised that we have not yet seen a Windsor Star Editorial gushing over the Mayor's achievements at the Joint Councils meeting in Detroit. Who knows, there might be a big splashy page of good stuff praising Eddie and Council on Saturday that the Star subscribers can look at many times over the week-end and savour.

Or it may be that the Star understands that the meeting was not such a success at all after what Dave Battagello told them in the privacy of their Board room. The Editorial Board would have to assess the good and the ugly before rendering a decision. I hope that the Board understands that the meeting should be allowed to fade into the past quickly and quietly.

I have thought about the session for the past few days and have tried to figure out what happened. The one thing I can say with some certainty is that the major Detroit newspapers ignored it. I do not recall seeing a single solitary word about it in the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press. I also do not recall seeing anything in Crains Detroit which I am told is the major business journal on the other side. The Detroit Zoo got more coverage than did our zoo! It seemed to be a non-story not worthy of much attention.

I must admit that as a first meeting between Councils in a very long time I expected to hear generalities about how our two regions must work together as we did with the Super Bowl, how important we are to each other, we need to work together for prosperity etc etc etc. I expected it to be a "touchy-feely" type meeting that would lead to more detailed talks about the key matters involving the region. I did not expect to hear a sales pitch.

Instead I saw an agenda designed in effect to discredit the Ambassador Bridge Co both in respect to their old deal with Detroit (and any new one if they dared defy Windsor) and with respect to a new border crossing. It really was strange; it was not Windsor Council speaking but the Windsor Tunnel Commission and the City of Windsor as border crossing proponents! Remember I discussed this before "Windsor Mayors' Conflict Of Interest" on October 25, 2005.

I asked then:

• "In other words, is there an inherent Conflict of Interest built in when the Mayor and Councillors are both a Tunnel Commission Chair or member and when they are also a member of City Council. On the one hand the Mayor can say from a Windsor-wide perspective : "We see the tunnel as a public utility while the DCTC sees it more as a profit-generating private operation." On the other hand when the Bridge takes away Tunnel traffic, he says as a true competitor "our traffic has gone to the bridge and we have to do a better job of convincing people that the tunnel should be their crossing of choice."

Did the session accomplish Windsor's objective? To be direct, it did not. What it achieved in my opinion is almost the exact opposite of what Windsor wanted. It gave the Bridge Co. more credibility.

I would suspect that a lot of what was said on Tuesday at the Joint Councils meeting was said already by the Ambassador Bridge Co's reps to the Detroit Councillors. I am sure that they took everything said by the Bridge Co. with a grain of salt since they have a self-interest. But when Windsor confirms what the Bridge Co. must have said, if you were a Detroit Councillor wouldn't you have a different perspective. Perhaps the Bridge Co. does know what it is talking about after all.

Take the perfect example, truck back-ups on Huron Church Road. What did the Bridge Co. say---the problem was lack of proper Customs staffing since the bridge was operating at just over 50% capacity. Of course we all knew that was their self-interested and biased point of view talking. They could not possibly be right

Who believed them? Then September 11 happened and made the problem extreme. Do we have the problem now---nope. As Eddie has said when he talked about the 25,000 seat stadium, the border is not a problem for us. How did it get solved...a few booths fully staffed with Customs agents. The Bridge Co. was proven correct.

Jump forward to Tuesday again. What did Detroit Councillors have confirmed by Windsor:

1. The purpose of the meeting was to allow Windsor to take over the Tunnel in whole or in part with Detroit and to beat the Bridge Co's offer.
2. Windsor is perpetuating the myth of a border crisis and that is hurting the region
3. It is really only because of the Bridge Co's better deal that the financial inequality between Windsor and Detroit became so visible
4. Notwithstanding the supposed reasons for the differences, the bottom line is that Windsor receives $6million per year in Tunnel revenues while Detroit only receives $600,000
5. Although Windsor and its region has 1/10th the size of the regional population of Detroit (500,000 to 5,000,000), Windsor wants more than its proportional share of revenues (eg at least a 50-50 split)
6. If Windsor did make an initial offer to Detroit, (and I do not know if it did since nothing about it is on the public record over here) the Bridge Co's offer was superior. If true, then who was it that was actually trying to take advantage of Detroit's weakened financial position?
7. The issue is the Windsor road system to the border
8. Windsor has not put any money into its border road system while Detroit has put in almost $200 million
9. Windsor has suffered no disruption in the Community in the same way that Detroit did in the building of the Ambassador Gateway and does not want any disruption now either.
10. Windsor has had available almost $300 million for its roads for years and still cannot figure out what to do. (Councillor Brister's macho remark was not mentioned I noticed "the city could be forced to sue the government and tie up the border plan in the courts if route concerns are not addressed.")
11. Preservation of Sandwich could mean the destruction of Delray IF no S-bridge or diagonal bridge is built (at a huge additional cost)
12. Is Windsor favouring the Mich-Can group since its name was mentioned so often and was that a signal to Detroit

Of course a lot of things were not mentioned that I am certain that the Bridge Co. reps will say to Detroit Councillors about the border over the next few weeks. I would suspect that the hearing they will receive will be a lot more attentive thanks to the gross miscalculation of how this meeting was structured.

In the end, however, it will be the undertone of the meeting that will hurt Windsor the most. It was not one of our shining moments. We needed to tone down the rhetoric and instead...