Whatever Happened To The Tunnel Plaza Improvements

Another City deal in limbo somewhere in the Twilight Zone perhaps. Or did someone in this new Service Delivery Review project of the City wonder already whether the City ought to be running a border crossing and should instead start focusing on running the City!

As I speculated before, we now have confirmation that it is money that is holding up the project.

According to Public Works General Manager Dev Tyagi, and as we know, the City, Province and Federal government have a three-way deal on the Tunnel Plaza in which each government is supposed to contribute $10 million for the improvement project.

It appears now that the cost of the project is higher, although that number was not revealed. I would suspect that the number must be significantly higher than the $30 million, or else it would not have been discussed at Council. It was also not disclosed, why the costs had increased so dramatically but it is easy to speculate why.

I'll bet that it will cost a lot of money to relocate businesses away from the existing streets around the Tunnel Plaza. Won't the City have to expropriate Burger King as an example? I'm sure that they will know how to negotiate a good deal.

Moreover, it seems that this project has taken so many years to commence that the costs must have risen dramatically. Isn't the funky bus terminal, the classic example. Oooops, I forgot, according to a revisionist history that project came in under budget and on time.

We were told that there were complex negotiations being undertaken amongst the three governments and that we should not expect a resolution for quite some time. I wonder when the last time the parties got together to talk.

Perhaps as well, no one wants to admit that the Tunnel Ventialtion building is NOT scrubbed until after Schwartz does his Report. How odd that the City wants a tunnel on the DRIC road to be environmentally pure and wholesome yet pumps out dirty exhaust from its Tunnel now that covers part of the City!

The question that I have is, what does this do to the Mayor's US$75 million deal with respect to taking over the Detroit side of the Tunnel? If the Plaza cannot be improved until such time as the negotiations are concluded, then who would want to help finance Eddie's Tunnel deal? Some private equity investor would have to be foolish to do so when the costs of improvement seemed to be rising and no deal can be made yet with the Senior Levels of government.

A rather surprising comment was made by Mr. Tyagi that the City hoped that its contribution would remain the same or might even be lowered. Given the terrific relationship between Eddie and the Federal Government, do you really think that will happen? Perhaps the Province has made a deal with the Mayor with respect to contributions and the two governments believe that they can pressure the Feds to cough up more money.

Could it be that this was part of the deal among Eddie, Sandra and Dwight? Who knows, we are mere citizens, and we don't count!

I wonder, for example, if the earlier reason given about why the project was not moving forward was true. My sources told me at the time that it was the Mayor's office that put the order out to cancel the open house on the Tunnel supposedly so that the "new" Tunnel Commission members could be on board and that has never been rescheduled.

All I know is that there are more questions to ask with no one around to answer them. But it's OK, we will have a new Tunnel Corp. that Eddie heads.

Hmmm I wonder how much of this Kwame and Detroit Council know!