The Really Cheap Border Road Solution Is Coming

I just cannot figure out any more all of the strange goings on in the border file. Listen to this clip from our new Minister of International Trade and Investment, our own Sandra Pupatello. It is from an EH News interview last Thursday.

How about the big headline in the Star on Friday “Granholm defends DRIC.” Yet when you read the story she is not really mentioned. I think she was still in Japan on a jobs-finding trip for Michigan. (Can you imagine the Gov and Sandra fighting over jobs from the same Japanese companies. I want the broadcast rights for that!). The Star story was really nothing more than what had been written in the Detroit media already so what was the big deal.

But life is not so simple in the border file. There are fun and games going on in the Michigan Legislature that could dramatically impact DRIC, even kill it. Their supporters are out in full force to preserve DRIC and at the same time, smear the Bridge Company!

Sandra’s outburst was bizarre. She tried somehow to tell us that the DRIC road would live or die based on what happened in Michigan! We need a road to the border and have been promised one for years. It is an ONTARIO issue (with Government of Canada financing help) that has absolutely nothing to do with Michigan. If you look at the DRIC road, it is nothing more than Windsor’s WALTS road that the Bridge Company proved could be built to its location. DRIC jumped on the routing as well as did Sam Schwartz. What has it got to do with the USA?

Her comment was so out of left field that I had to try and figure out what she meant by it!

The most obvious explanation, especially when you tie in the Star story is that Sandra is helping out the Governor, MDOT, and Democratic Representatives Tobocman and Gonzales pressure the Michigan Republican Senators and other Congressional Reps who are anti-DRIC and therefore they must smeared as be pro-Ambassador Bridge (rather than pro-taxpayer).

Does Senator Cropsey really want to be the guy blamed if the process is stalled?

• “It's become outlandish that anybody would be putting politics ahead of the economy on this, whether in Michigan or Ontario," Tobocman said.”

Um? What exactly is the Representative doing himself with his smear job in the Detroit and now Windsor media.

You do have to give me credit for one thing, dear reader. I did predict in my BLOG that Congresswoman Candice Miller would be smeared too:

• “Unfortunately, Congresswoman Candice Miller has not learned her lesson and undoubtedly she will be the next target.”

Her crime was:

• “Miller sent off a Aug. 25 letter to MDOT director Kirk Steudle saying she does not support the DRIC process, noting a new crossing would hurt revenues on existing crossings.”

But that was too simple an explanation. There had to be a lot more to it than meets the eye or otherwise it would not make a good Windsor border conspiracy theory. In Windsor, nothing is ever obvious and nothing means what someone says it means.

After thinking about it, I concluded that Sandra was the stand-in for our Minister of Finance, Windsor’s own Spanky, Dwight Duncan. If the Finance Minister said what I am about to reveal, the Stock Exchanges around the world could collapse quicker than another investment house going bankrupt. If Sandra says it, who cares.

Ontario absolutely requires that Michigan be blamed for the death of DRIC. As I have said before, Ontario and Canada had no intention of ever building the DRIC Road. Do you think that they were really that crazy to spend around $1.5 billion, 10 times the cost of any other road project in Ontario? Ontario does not have the money to do so. Our economy is in a mess.

Can you imagine though if the Finance Minister admitted that Ontario could not afford this road? Wall Street and Bay Street would tremble! Remember what I Blogged previously the Province’s poor investing:

• “Ontario's subprime hit worse than forecast
  Public is out 7% more than minister's estimate
  
  The province is taking a writedown of $106.8 million – about 7 per cent higher than Finance Minister Dwight Duncan forecast in his fall economic statement when opposition parties accused him of "rolling the dice" with taxpayers' money.”

As I also said:

• “Why give the fancy DRIC road the nod when a "cheap" at grade road can be justified at this time as an "intermediate" solution to the Ambassador Bridge Enhancement Project.”

If the Senate language is used in Michigan, then Sandra can shout and scream that they are stalling everything over there and therefore we cannot build the DRIC road.

Clearly though we have to build something. How about this as an interim solution: upgrading EC Row from four lanes to up to 10 lanes because there is room for that, adding a Lauzon Parkway extension from Highway 401 to the Expressway and then building a Francis condemned “cheap” at-grade solution along Huron Church Road.

My, my, my. Doesn’t this look like something that the Joint Management Committee proposed back in 2002? That was an interim solution too to be built until the Binational/DRIC process was concluded. What is intriguing as well is that Border Infrastructure Fund money is around and already allocated. Interestingly that program was extended without very much fanfare. Now you know why. Now you also know why Eddie made a big deal in the press the other day and at Council about where the BIF money went. That was Eddie signalling that the money was going to be used for these projects.

So that is it. Story finished. Not if you are an avid BLOG reader. You know that there has to be more and there is.

You don’t really expect a DRIC supporter to be blamed do you? After all, about $60 million has been spent on both sides of the river on this extravaganza. People’s necks and careers have to be protected. Moreover, how would one answer the outrage of Windsorites who have come to expect Greenlink but instead are getting what was proposed almost a decade ago.

The answer is so simple that it is laughable. Eddie is no longer concerned about the waste of millions of dollars on fees for the Tunnel deal because now Mayor Cockrel wants to keep it in "public hands." That is all that Eddie was trying to do he claims at this cost of taxpayer money. He was protecting us and the 5000 commuters from the Big, Bad Bridge Company who might have cemented up the US side of the Tunnel. If they were the bogeyman at the Tunnel, then they can't they be the bogeyman of the DRIC bridge too.

Accordingly, after the Bridge Company sues, the Governments will be "forced" to build this interim solution in Ontario until such time as the lawsuit is resolved or settled. Of course, the interim solution really is the long-term solution but we poor taxpayers are not supposed to have the brains to figure that out.

Expect the Governments to do all kinds of strange things to try to get the Bridge Company to sue them. Why else would the Democrats be fighting so hard not to accept the language in the Transportation budget that they accepted only a year ago. If the Democratic language is accepted, I assume that the thinking is that it will force the Bridge Company to sue.

This sounds preposterous but actually it is quite ingenious. The DRIC supporters keep repeating that traffic will pick up and will meet the DRIC projections. Of course, everyone knows by now that those traffic projections are unrealistic. That has to be why the US DEIS stated that the new DRIC bridge would take away so much traffic from the other crossings. The Governments were desperate to show P3 investors that the new bridge was economic and would give them a positive rate of return.

The dilemma then is how do you build a DRIC bridge when there is no traffic. The answer is to get the Bridge Company to sue so that nothing will happen for at least a decade. In this way, the Bridge Company is blamed and they will be attacked for trying to keep a stranglehold over the border. 10 more years of smears ought to teach them a lesson don't you think. At the same time nothing gets done, while traffic improves as the economy hopefully gets better.

At some point in time a settlement is achieved and then down the road after some reasonable period, the new and improved DRIC is launched and the charade starts again.

Think I’m kidding? Just go back in history and look at the fight that the Bridge Company had with respect to its ownership of the Bridge in the first place. There were lawsuits in both Canada and the United States that ultimately resulted in a settlement. It took years and years of litigation for that to happen. But it really did not end the matter. Bill C-3 was introduced as a key piece of legislation in Canada to try to control the Bridge Company and it was nothing more than FIRA in disguise. The old attempt to force out the Bridge Company was back.

Lesson learned and to be applied again today by DRIC supporters.

What about the poor economies of Canada and the United States? Won’t they suffer? Hardly. The Bridge Company is handling traffic very well thank you at the existing crossing and they keep on improving things especially as new technologies are introduced. But here is the important point that Senator Cropsey told us about in his Detroit Free Press article:

• "If DRIC cannot accurately predict traffic levels from 2004-08, then its 30-year projections are completely baseless. Even with these inflated traffic projections, MDOT testified before my committee that a new span would not be needed until between 2025-35. This gives us plenty of time to address border bridge capacity in the future if the situation warrants it."

It is incomprehensible to me that MDOT would concede this unless they already knew that we do not need another bridge and that no one would invest in a P3 project in Windsor/Detroit. Perhaps they were told that by the Australians P3 people that they met as disclosed in Senator Cropsey’s hearings.

So that is our future I think. At least another decade of turmoil in Windsor. End of story, right. Oh come now, don't you think there is more. Of course there is. We got an intriguing but cryptic hint from Senator Cropsey in the Star story:

• "He claims agreements from previous decades -- that precede the DRIC study -- called for joint completion of the state's ongoing $230-million gateway project in Detroit to improve access to Moroun's bridge, completion of the twin span and improvements to Huron Church Road."

What is that all about? No wonder that the Bridge Company was to ready to invest $500 million into their project. They were not going to do something without knowing that they were going to get their Enhancement Project completed.

I will be interested in knowing when someone will tell us what that is all about. And then there is this Memorandum of Understanding that I found on the Internet that should shake a view people up on both sides of the river. Oh well, that is for another BLOG.