Bumped From The Airplane To Japan

Good old Councillor Brister. Being the loyal soldier, will not get him the endorsement of Eddie Francis for being the next Mayor of Windsor.

Eddie already suckered the Councillor formerly known as Councillor Budget into being the head of the arena committee. He will be blamed for the cost overruns, not the Mayor. But Dave doesn't see that. He is too busy putting into his scrapbook the Henderson column praising him to the high heavens when in fact he is being set up for a fall.

Here we all thought that the Ward 1 Councillor was just sticking a knife into his Wardmate, Drew Dilkens, who is chair of the International Relations Committee, about the big trip to Japan. We must have foolishly thought that Brister wanted to make sure that Dilkens will think twice about running for Mayor against him. Some are saying that Dilkens might run for Mayor if all of his possible Council opponents, including Brister, keep falling by the wayside. It's not that Dilkens wants the job. It's sort of like last man standing gets it!

Councillor Brister is after all the self proclaimed penny pincher Council. I can well understand the Councillor making a big fuss about the trip to Japan and all that it would cost except the reality is that the cost for Windsorites going is only the cost of an airplane ticket. The Host City picks up the rest of the tab.

Why not insult the Japanese, they only sent 22 people to Windsor to try and establish relationships with us. Things are so good in this City that we can afford to insult a group of people to whom relationships are important as a condition precedent for doing business. But that doesn't matter to our Councillor Scrooge.

But of course nothing is as simple as it appears at City Hall. Who was the person dumped from the trip. Six people were supposed to have gone to Japan from the City but now only five are going. This information is all buried in the Order of Business in the City Hall website and the Minutes.

Even that person was not named in the report. One had to identify him by a process of deduction and elimination. One could say that Councillor Brister is being somewhat hypocritical since he was on the Budget Operating Committee that approved the trip in the first place only a few months ago. I assume that the Mayor and the CAO were also aware and they did not oppose before either.

So what happened? What gives? My inside moles have been hard at it again and here is the scuttlebutt.

Mark Galvin whose title I think is Executive Director, Windsor Tunnel Commission on an interim basis was supposed to go on the trip but now has been bumped. One could say that he was a sacrificial lamb since after all he is a mere City Hall employee so why should he get in on the good life and get a free trip overseas. Unfortunately life is not that simple in Windsor.

Mark was scheduled to go overseas presumably because he was supposed to look at scrubbing technology in Japan. Electrostatic precipitators are well known there. As you know our Tunnel ventilation building does not have a scrubber on it so all of the Tunnel exhaust is blown out over the City. So much for our environmental green policy.

Since the Mayor and Council want a tunnelled road to the border, one would have thought that Mark's trip to Japan would be vital. After all we do not want 6 km of Tunnel dirty truck exhaust to be vented out into the City do we.

Now here is where it gets interesting. My fellow Windsor blogger, Chris Schnurr, has claimed that there is very little technology out there with respect to scrubbing. So far no one has been able to prove him wrong. I read where

• "contaminant removal technologies has been to improve in-tunnel air quality where visibility has to be maintained and access to fresh air is problematic...There is no data available which demonstrates the effectiveness of ESPs in improving external air quality in either Norway or Japan...In those rare instances where contaminant removal technologies have been used to manage external air quality, there has been no data released on the effectiveness of their use in improving external air quality."

Not what everyone here was expecting and hoping for.

Heck even Sandra has said

• "Ventilated air cannot be cleaned ... There is no scrubbing technology that would clean the ventilated air that emanates from an end-to-end tunnel.”

Eddie's working with one of the world's great tunnel experts, according to Eddie, Parsons Brinckerhoff of the Big Dig fame. What if they told him that there was no good scrubbing technology since he just met with them recently. What then would be the purpose of sending Mark to Japan and then have him come back saying scrubbing doesn't work and that truck exhaust and fumes would be dumped into Windsor neighborhoods?

It makes a mockery doesn't it of the City's position for the Senior Levels to spend $4 billion on all of this which achieves nothing. It makes a mockery of the Mayor who after all was Chair of the Tunnel Commission and should know whether there is scrubbing technology. It completely undercuts the Mayor's position on the border and would virtually now give the Ambassador Bridge Company the right to build its Enhancement Project with a connecting road that should have been built years ago.

How to solve the problem? Simple. Have Councillor Brister play his pennypinching role and have Mark be the victim who cannot go to save money in this time of economic restraint. No one would know any better. In other words, it was not dirty air that got scrubbed but Mark and the fact-finding to let us know the truth!

Now we'll never know about whether scrubbing works or not. The tunnelling myth lives on to stall things off for several more years of fighting.

If I had been asked, I would not have sent Gord Orr. He is more valuable here. It is more important that he continue doing his movie reviews with Michelle Prince on CKLW. Heavens, we would not want to miss out on that would we.

As for Dave, he will have another entry for his scrapbook.