Is It Finally Time To Leave Town (Part II)

Yesterday I gave you a lot of facts to absorb. Let me try and put them together with my perspective so that you will understand my feelings.

I am still optimistic. There is still hope if the right person steps up. It is not rocket science to solve our ills. We just need a leader we can support and trust. He/she better come out of hiding soon. Time is needed to build up a name if one wants to take on an incumbent.

As I see it, there is a political reason for everything that is going on leading up to the 2010 municipal election and a financial reason as being the depository for Senior Level border largess.

We have this huge opportunity with the Senior Level Governments and the Ambassador Bridge Company that want to pour billions of dollars into our economy. Instead of welcoming them with open arms as any reasonable community would, our leaders are fighting them, threatening lawsuits and blocking everything that they are trying to do. They are called our "enemies."

Hmmm. Perhaps with "enemies" like these, who needs friends.

We have 4 MPPs, 2 of whom are Powerful Cabinet Ministers, offering our businesses hope in new technology to use their skills and we do not even publicize it in our main newspaper. Instead, we give all the attention to our Mayor with his one day European extravaganza. All he did was merely promise us another study by a foreign consultant and he made front page news. So much for "Buy Canadian!"

Instead of jobs and investment opportunities, we see studies, foreign consultants getting paid money that we could be using, three phase programs that take months and months and months, more dreams, more visions. That is what bothers me so much. We are hurting and our leaders really do not care. They have taken to heart what Margaret Thatcher's speechwriter said:

• "The decisions that really matter to political leaders are those to do with the getting and holding of power...What matters to them is: will I still be here after this?"

I do not have the words to describe my disgust as I see so many people suffering around me. I cannot understand how real leaders could act this way. But then I have answered my own comment. We have few of them!

Please don’t tell me that there are no free lunches for Council Members. There are, in Germany, on one day trips at taxpayer expense. Whatever happened to the startup Onion people from Germany who are going to provide all of those jobs when we imported products or was it when we exported products. The business model kept changing. It looks so much better if we have Lufthansa as a partner.

Save a penny here, spend a dollar there. And take a shot at someone who has the ability to help us out. It is the Province who brings deals and the municipality that follows up as we saw in the Sutherland deal. We cannot do it on our own. We desperately need Sandra and should be seeking her out. Instead we bite the hand that feeds us and take cheap shots at her.

Now I have become a very suspicious fellow since I have started writing this BLOG. I rarely now take anything at its face value politically in this region. I have been burned too many times.

There is too much effort into trying to salvage the Undevelopment Commission. I cannot understand this desire to keep alive the Undevelopment Commission that was costing us so much money and doing so little for us. I am sure that what the hidden agenda is will play itself out over time. We will just have to remain vigilant.

Let me speculate though. It’s always fun to be a conspiracy theorist.

I know that our Mayor wants to keep it around because he wants to put $100 million into it, now reduced to $60 million. The Warden did not seem to be too concerned about the long time that it took the Commission to find a CEO or about the job they were doing. Accordingly he must want it too:

• “Santos defended the pay given to Mancini, saying it was within the range had they hired someone outside to temporarily fill the position.
  
  He is content the commission has been working hard to find a new CEO, while also working on prospects and potential investors.”

Grace Macaluso of the Star in her A3 column put it this way:

• “In a bid to quell the revolt, Windsor Mayor Eddie Francis and County Warden Nelson Santos are attempting to install themselves on the commission's board. Political representation will make the agency accountable, they argue. But will it make it more transparent?”

If the revolt was quelled, then Mancini would still be the Chair and would be the interim CEO and on the search committee.

I hate to say it but Grace was wrong. The threesome brought out their big guns not to quell the revolt but to destroy the rebels:

• “Mayor Eddie Francis and County Warden Nelson Santos as well as acting commission CEO Remo Mancini accused the agency's critics of spreading innuendo through the news media.”

Does this mean that the three of them are working together? I have no idea.

It is interesting to me as well that the latest Star Editorial calls for the Board to resign immediately but it does not say that Mancini should go as well as the interim CEO. Remember previously that the Editorial writer had said:

• “At the same time, Mancini must make a choice: He cannot continue to be the acting CEO, at a cost of $1,200 a day, and also be on the committee that will hire his permanent replacement. There simply cannot be any perceived conflict of interest. He should understand that and decide which hat he wants to wear.”

That was clearly not a call for him to leave. In their latest editorial, the Star did not call for Mancini to be removed as the interim CEO but merely said

• “Some have suggested Alfie Morgan is the right candidate to fill that position while the CEO search is on. Professor emeritus at the Odette School of Business, Morgan was brought in by the city as acting CEO in 2004.”

Remember, the Board is still around for about another three months although they have resigned. Even on the day when he was put on the Board with a term limit, the Mayor made this strange comment:

• “But the two political leaders fear recent "negative attacks" on the commission may scare away potential economic investors.
  
  "The warden and myself are the ones often charged with what are you doing (to attract investment)," Francis told council. "We are already playing a critical role in economic development. We are involved on a number of levels of attracting investment to this community."

Everything being done is to save the Commission.

I could very well see the Mayor and Warden being the only members of the Commission either in 90 days or if the Star’s idea is followed, immediately. We just saw the success that Eddie is having as our Development Commissioner even as he undercut the reason for a Commission in the first place. A one day trip to Europe to sign an agreement is certainly head-line grabbing. Wow Eddie is a jet-setter. A real mayoral entrepreneur.

Not to worry. Mr. Mancini still could be kept on as interim CEO. But there is an alternative that works just as well.

There is a new Vice President hired very quickly as you will recall by whom we do not know and with a process that no one has yet described. He is the fallback, especially if there is the desire to have Alfie as the Temporary CEO and that does not pan out.

It would be so simple to make the argument that the Mayor and Warden, because of all of this uncertainty, should be in charge of the Commission alone. Naturally, we would need to prepare a Report to suggest what the new structure might be. Of course, it would take months to do since stakeholders such as the Chamber of Commerce or John Millson might be asked what should be done.

Again, part of the justification for keeping that Commission would be that there is a staff of the Commission that is in place and one would not want to lose them.

Of course, this Report would be prepared with all due urgency and at the same time to calm everybody down, especially investors, so that we will not lose fantastic opportunities like the Airport Hub.

But why? We know, like the other Francis stall dreams, they are not going to happen. Moreover in our desperate state, we ought to be thinking practically not dealing with this foolishness. We ought to be partnering with Sandra and the Senior Levels and the Bridge Company.

Is it all really political? It could well be because we are coming close to another municipal election. It also has to do with money, lots of money for which a home is needed.

The Eminence Greasie and the E-Team had hoped to create a political show to demonstrate that Eddie was still a Leader and to pretend that he had not failed on the DRIC Road/Greenlink matter. To be blunt, if the Chair had not talked about his $1,200 per day payment, it would all have worked. He took away from the E-Team strategy!

The strategy was a simple but effective one.

• The Undevelopment Commission would have talked about their absurd priorities for the year as they asked for the next million dollars or so in Budget monies and would have received it.
• We would have had Eddie being our Hero with “Cargo City” at the airport hoping that no one would remember the collapse of Air America at our airport.
• That would be followed shortly by the Canal vision which I believe is supposed to come out by the end of February that would revitalize the downtown.
• As the Star Story sub headline stated, that would be:
  
  “'Developing a new economy'”

What a terrific slogan that would have been for someone who might run again for a Third term in 2010. Why, we would be begging him to forget about his promise he was only going to be a two-term mayor. With his "successes, he could not leave us.

This airport hub deal might have worked too as a starter but for the closing of Air America at our airport. How many people remember that? I wonder if that is why Ms Nazzani made the comment

• “The recent closure of Air America's local operations will have no financial impact on Windsor Airport, says the airport's general manager."

I wonder then if everything is ok there why taxpayers are being asked to finance the Lufthansa subsidiary consulting agreement. Why isn't the airport paying for the services itself?

The dream has to be kept alive since it had been said previously that:

• “Much of the airport's finances remain largely dependent on Air America's business."

Seriously, what would the purpose be of sending three Members of Council overseas to spend a quarter of a million dollars on a study if the airport cannot generate enough business now. It has to be nothing more than "blue sky" distraction to pretend that the City is actually moving forward. We are big in aerospace already according to the Mayor. Why this will just make us a bigger player.

The whole strategy in fact got hijacked by the debate over the $1200 and the possible conflict of interest with the Chair being on the search committee.

The Commission has a purpose. I suspect that our Mayor wanted the Commission to appear to be arms length from him. He is probably kicking himself now because if he had been micromanaging all of this, none of this would have happened.

The Commission was important because that’s where the money would go from the County and probably the Senior Levels for Windsor being the “host community” of the border. Remember how Dwight described why the Province put in money for the Red Bull sponsorship: Windsor would be the host city for the Red Bull air race. Interesting choice of language I thought when I heard it from during Dwight's speech.

In other words, there was a real need for Eddie to have WEDC around because there was no way that the Senior Levels could pay money only to the City. Whether the sum is $100 million is that he wanted or $60 million or somewhere in between, it is still a lot of money.

Please do not ask me what that money is for. I am not that good although I have my suspicions.

The work that the Commission has done over the last two years and what it was proposing to do this year is farcical. Again, that did not matter if the purpose was to pretend to have a working Commission where money could be deposited. And who needed a real CEO if it was never really intended to be a Development Commission.

Instead, it looks like the Commission will have to disappear but that is not really all that great a loss and will be reconstituted in a fashion that is much more controlled by politicians. Why, if Eddie plays his cards right, Sandra as a business development person for the region will no longer be necessary because Eddie is going out to get those deals for us. If she can travel overseas, so can he, many times too:

• "Francis, who has travelled to meetings and tours in Frankfurt over the past year to learn more about the sector...
  
  “What we have been doing the past year was investigate, research and develop partnerships that can develop the air cargo business in the Windsor-Essex region,” Francis said."

Sandra is being cut out as well and at the same time weakened politically in case Eddie chooses to take a shot running provincially. He lives in her riding now after moving from Dwight's. He is our Mayor/lawyer/everything else you can think of along with our Development Commissioner now.

As for the Warden, he seems just to be along for the ride as I see it. Mayor McNamara I believe may have made a mistake with his letter that left the Warden no choice but to go along with what Eddie wanted. He could not be seen to be knuckling under to a potential candidate for a Liberal provincial seat.

Everything will be calmed down shortly. We will move forward on these research reports during the various phases that are necessary. Why the Canal Vision report has taken an eternity already. In fact, all of these studies will take time, stretching into 2010. We saw that happen easily with the 400 Building Audit and the road to the border stall.

Also in 2010, provided that P3 money can be found, we will see some action being started on the border road although I doubt that it will be the Delrayed road that we see today. 2010… oh my goodness…we will be close to the time of the municipal election and re-election of incumbents or at least those that followed what Eddie ordered.

The new, reconstituted Commission will be the focus of all of this terrific development work and the bank account for all the money. All will be right in the world.

I will find it all very interesting if it works out this way. I will read about it over the Internet in my new home. Just before I do my morning stroll on the beach.