Stories You May Have Missed

Who can possibly cope? There are so many sources of information that it is virtually impossible to read everything. Here are some interesting items that you may have missed.

BOMB THREAT

The silence is deafening. Can you imagine what Canada’s Senator Kenny would say or Brian Masse or the DRIC people or bureaucrats and certain politicians on both sides of the border if the Ambassador Bridge was closed down for one second because of a threat.

Yet we have seen over the past couple of weeks bomb threats at both the Blue Water Bridge and at the Detroit/Windsor Tunnel where they were both closed down and not a peep from anyone.

No one is demanding that an extra bridge or two be built in Port Huron/Sarnia. No demand for a new Tunnel in Windsor (What an opportunity that Mike Hurst is passing up but he is now involved in doublestack rail tunnels).

No, only if there is an issue at the Ambassador Bridge will someone open up their mouth.

BORDER REDUNDANCY

I have to admit that if I was a Senator in Michigan, and I would have to wonder about some of the people at MDOT.

There was some discussion at the Cropsey hearings about redundancy. No, I do not mean building an entirely new Ambassador Gateway project for the DRIC bridge at a cost of a quarter of $1 billion or more in the event that the Customs area is damaged so that truckers have a four or five day problem.

There was a suggestion that they would be massive problems in the event that Ambassador Bridge was out of circulation. Of course, the MDOT people seem to have forgotten about the “floating bridge” concept that the Bridge Company presented to the House hearings which would eliminate that issue. The strong suggestion however was that a new bridge was needed for redundancy concerns.

Even though most of the long distance carriers could use the Blue Water Bridge, that fear was raised about how inconvenient that would be. More importantly, there are concerns about the 2000 or so local international trucks and the just-in-time delivery that would be hurt.

Interestingly enough, the Ambassador Bridge would be the redundancy solution for both of the bomb scares at the other crossings:

• “Windsor police were preparing to deal with possible extra truck traffic on Huron Church Road had the [Blue Water Bridge] closure lasted longer and traffic diverted to the Ambassador Bridge.”

Just so that the MDOT people understand what is going on and to provide assistance for future hearings if a question of redundancy comes up, here’s what the Blue Water Bridge says about the Ambassador Bridge:

• "C o m p e t i t i v e R i s k
  …is the risk that changes and improvements made by our competitors or by changes in government policy that might significantly affect traffic volumes.
  
  The main risks to the BWBA’s strong volume trends include:
  - Improved transportation access and additional capacity at the Ambassador Bridge" and,
  
  "Primary Competition
  
  As the fourth busiest U.S.-Canadian border crossing, the Bridge provides an efficient trade gateway between Canada and the United States. There are alternatives to the Bridge; however, other than the Windsor’s Ambassador Bridge, none is considered by the Authority to be a major competitor."

Here is what the Tunnel’s Belitsky has to say:

• “As Neal Belitsky said "If anything happened to the Ambassador Bridge, the industry is smart enough to figure out how to put their goods on smaller trucks to get it across....Right now we serve as the redundancy."

As an example “DaimlerChrysler has a special fleet of flatbed trailers that meet the tunnel’s clearances to shuttle parts between Detroit and Windsor manufacturing plants.

THERE MUST HAVE BEEN AN ELECTION COMING

I wonder if we should tell our leaders in Ottawa that Windsor has a big French speaking population. Perhaps in that case we might actually get some federal money down here as they do in Québec:

• "The Port of Montreal announces $2.5 billion investment in expansion.
  
  MONTREAL — Over $2.5 billion will be invested into improving the Port of Montreal, port authorities announced Sunday.
  
  It will be the first major expansion in two decades.
  
  Montreal port president Patrice Pelletier said funds for the expansion will come from a combination of financial reserves, loans, private investment and the federal government.
  
  Michael Fortier, minister of international trade, highlighted the importance of the port for Montreal's economy.
  
  "It's such an important player in our economy and it needs room to grow," said Fortier during a news conference.
  
  He couldn't confirm a government investment of $600 million needed by the Port for its expansion but said port authorities and the government are discussing the project."

STADIUMS, AND TUNNELS DON'T PAY

It sounds like Megaprojects run amok.

The following excerpt from the book was sent to me by a reader. I thought it was interesting not only with respect to a stadium or an arena but also with respect to the Tunnel deal:

• "There will be no plan B," promised Pittsburgh mayor Tom Murphy, just hours before the November 1997 general election. Residents in the eleven-county Pittsburgh area would soon be voting on plan A, a referendum to increase the region's sales tax to finance new stadiums for the Pittsburgh Steelers and Pittsburgh Pirates and expand the existing convention center. The referendum was crushed by an almost two-to-one margin, losing decidedly in every county. The public had spoken. Pittsburgh-area residents did not want to use public dollars for new stadiums. The message could not be clearer.
  
  Clear or not, four years later the Pirates and Steelers were playing in two new stadiums paid for primarily with public tax dollars. Despite his election-day warning, Mayor Murphy organized a plan B working group immediately after the referendum, which quickly and successfully devised a strategy to finance these new stadiums publicly without a popular vote. The total price tag of these stadiums was more than $500 million, with most of the revenues accruing to the teams...
  
  There has been an explosion in new stadium construction since the 1990s, and several things make this current boom very different from any other period in history. First, the breadth of new construction across the country and the amount of public contribution is unprecedented...and one analyst has estimated that approximately $10 billion of public money has gone to all new sports stadiums since the mid-1980s (Keating 1999). Although these stadiums are almost always officially owned by quasi-governmental stadium authorities, the revenue streams from new stadiums increasingly flow toward private pockets. So our use of the term private stadiums refers less to the nominal ownership of these facilities and more to who benefits from their publicly financed construction and operation.
  
  In trying to identify the leaders of a stadium project, we immediately examine what we call a city's "local growth coalition." At heart, a growth coalition is an institutional alliance between the local corporate community and the local government, although the specific form of government involvement may vary...
  
  The second pillar of our analytical framework concerns the strategic choices made by local growth coalitions (or other advocates) to justify why a community should spend public dollars on new stadiums. These strategies generally fall into two categories. The first claims that new stadiums will provide all sorts of tangible economic benefits to the local community. The second insists that new stadiums will benefi- cially augment the way in which a community views itself, how the community is perceived by others, and how community members get along with each other-what we call "community self-esteem" and "community collective conscience." Stadium advocates rely on both justifications and often use them simultaneously.
  
  Nevertheless, there has lately been a noticeable shift away from economic promises and toward promises of social benefits. We believe this is not just random but reflects conscious strategic decisions by stadium proponents in each city. Proponents have realized that the path to publicly financed stadiums will be less problematic if they downplay the tangible economic benefits and accentuate the intangible social goods that might accompany stadiums."

Decide for yourself if the authors are correct about how the East End arena concept was sold in Windsor and try to figure out why it changed from Eddie's election promise of a public/private partnership in the downtown at a maximum cost to taxpayers of $15 million.

Consider also how the Tunnel deal is being sold. There is supposedly a "business case" for it in which we are being led to believe that there is a financial advantage for Windsor. However we have not yet seen it. More importantly, it is being presented along the lines of keeping the Tunnel in public hands and away from those big bad Bridge Company people, protecting 5,000 commuters, needed for tourism and economic development etc. etc. etc.

In case you are interested, the authors of that study concluded:

• "of the dozens of publicly financed projects he has studied, not one has lived up to its financial promises...
  
  When you add up the tangible economic indicators—such as jobs created, tax ratables and sales revenues—it never justifies the investment of public dollars in construction, infrastructure upgrades, policing and other needs, he said. Only the team owners make out big in the end...
  
  When a stadium is torn down so a new one can be built elsewhere, you’re merely moving money from one place to another. The cash being spent at the arenas and new stores, hotels and restaurants that crop up around them is just cash not being spent on other forms of entertainment, he said.
  
  “We usually find stadiums shift spending from one part of a state to another. There’s no new income being generated,” Eckstein said.
  
  Although they’re large structures that garner lots of attention, stadiums don’t actually produce much money for their cities, he said. The public may own the majority of the buildings, but the team owners command the majority of event revenues...
  
  The key to making a stadium investment pay off is the ability to draw people from outside the pool that financed it, he said. If a county pays for an arena, then it must attract fans from beyond county lines, or there can be no net gain"