Greenlink: Living And Dying In Windsor
You see, dear reader, all of the letters and postcards sent in previously to DRIC are worth nothing today. All of those people at the Teshuba meeting who were taught how to write letters to the Premier were writing about old Greenlink proposals, not the newest one. DRIC can now legitimately ignore them thanks to the City!
It is not the letter writers fault; no one told them about the latest and greatest Greenlink solution, another compromise. Mind you, I don’t understand how anyone can compromise on quality of life and health of children other than our Council. Of course the time spent at the Teshuba meeting was all wasted but now the residents are literate and learned how to write a letter.
I am sure you read about this in the Star:
- “In Estrin's documents, the city also presents a "modified GreenLink" for consideration which costs $144 million more than the parkway, or $1.76 billion. It combines and shortens the tunnel options from the city's original plan by a total of one kilometre.
The modified GreenLink provides five tunnels covering 2,830 metres, consisting of three longer tunnels (1020 metres, 750 metres and 700 metres) and two short tunnels (240 metres and 120 metres).
Longer tunnels are very much needed to provide protection in key neighbourhoods, while also providing usable green space above, the city says. The tunnels must remain long enough so the openings where emissions emerge are not a factor because of distance.”
I am not certain now which generation this Greenlink is. However, my understanding is that the DRIC people are not going to deal with this proposal either. They figure that if they maintain their silence, Eddie will keep compromising because he cannot be blamed for a failure until such time as he compromises to an at-grade solution.
Some of you may wonder how Eddie can keep his mouth shut on Greenlink and yet at the same time present this supposedly damaging report prepared by David Estrin and a team of consultants, another one of whom is foreign, sorry Junior.
It is so obvious that it is an easy answer for me to give. I am sure that Eddie explained it to Minister Baird when they met so that he would not get perturbed. Here is how DRIC’s work was described:
- “A Cascade of Errors" the city's submission -- obtained Saturday by The Star -- points to what Estrin believes is an array of problems and oversights during the EA process conducted by provincial team members of the Detroit River International Crossing study group.”
Give me a break. It is a report “hundreds of pages of documents” in length. There were “a half-dozen air, health, economic and planning consultants retained by city council. “ This report must have cost taxpayers many hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare.
If it is really as bad as the Mayor and Council say that it is, one would expect a massive lawsuit to be started already. After all, we saw this scare statistic from a new New York expert. I guess there are no Canadians that are capable of giving such an opinion. I wonder if the Mayor met him on his last trip to New York as well:
- “A health impact assessment provided by George Thurston, an environmental medicine professor at New York School of Medicine, accuses DRIC of ignoring the negative impacts of pollutants within the plan's green space.
Pollution levels in some cases will be so high that the risk of a heart attack may increase by 563 per cent in just two hours of exposure, he said.
"This is not the place that people should choose to exercise," he says.
Long-term and short-term human health impacts of the parkway overall will include increased risk of asthma attacks, emergency room visits and hospitalization, and a higher risk of premature death from strokes, heart attacks and other causes, Thurston said.”
And what do our caring leaders suggest---starting legal action? Nope:
- “It calls for immediate mediation to be completed within 21 days after an agreed-upon mediator is appointed.
The focus of the mediator, according to the city, would be to mitigate access road deficiencies through strategic tunnelling with an understanding the cost of doing so be no greater than $200 million more than the parkway's current estimated $1.6-billion construction cost.”
DRIC and the Senior Levels have not listened to anything that the City has said supposedly and the Mayor wants to have mediation and on his terms too. Obviously, this is doomed to failure as well. There is no clearer proof that our Mayor has no guts to sue than this:
- "We want a solution everyone can live with and move on. This request for a mediator is further demonstration Windsor is exhausting every opportunity to arrive at a solution and avoid unnecessary legal action."
Moreover, the Star claimed:
- "The city’s border legal expert David Estrin and his hired consultants countered with one final blitz to trash the parkway plan."
The final blitz? Frankly, I am exhausted by Eddie exhausting every opportunity. I can just hear Eddie telling the Minister what his approach is and the Minister telling him
- “That’s a good fellow.”
If you will remember, the Tunnel Commission meeting was postponed last week so that Council could receive a border update. The meeting started at 3 p.m. rather than the previously scheduled 4:30 p.m. I can understand why now.
Some of you I believe may think that my title of this BLOG was sensationalist, the kind of thing that some of those tabloid magazines and newspapers would write to attract readership. How wrong you are.
I would suspect that the Councillors saw Greenlink LITE for the very first time at that meeting. Some might say that it was presented to them in the very last minute right before the DRIC deadline so that no changes could be made.
That is easy to say but I think there is a different explanation. I believe that it was not presented to Council previously because the consequences are so severe that many of the Councillors would have been in a state of shock if that had been presented to them before. They might have suffered a nervous breakdown worrying about residents of the City.
Obviously, we do not have the gory details of Greenlink LITE except from what we can read in the Star story. We were given new Schwunnel lengths but not told where the changes were made. I looked at the old Greenlink Schwunnels and made a comparison with the new numbers and here is what I found:
1020M Bellewood Estates------same length 1020
230M Pulford-------has it disappeared?
1220M Oakwood----has it been shortened to 750M?
240M St Clair College------same length 240M
1000M Mt.Carmel/Villa Paradiso ----has it been shortened to 700M?
120M Howard------same length 120M
Total length of the Schwunnels has been reduced by 1000M from 3,830M to 2,830M.
There must have been stunned silence when Greenlink LITE was introduced--a 25% reduction. So much for the first "full tunnelling" demand. It was a joke! I wonder if Mr. Estrin did the introduction or whether it was the Mayor.
It is vital for those residents of the area of the City to know where those thousand meters were removed without their knowledge or consent and to understand exactly what the consequences are to them. The City’s foreign consultant made it clear for:
- “babies, children, pregnant mothers, grandparents and people with pre-existing medical conditions…
Long-term and short-term human health impacts of the parkway overall will include increased risk of asthma attacks, emergency room visits and hospitalization, and a higher risk of premature death from strokes, heart attacks and other causes, Thurston said.”
Can you imagine the pressure now on City Councillors. In effect, they are choosing with Greenlink LITE who may suffer in the future. It is all on their shoulders now. They must live with this decision for the rest of their lives. What a huge responsibility. Did they sign on for this when they ran for office? Which neighbour would they condemn to pain and suffering?
One could probably have heard a pin drop in the meeting room until one of the Councillors jumped up, and I bet you know which one I mean, and said that he/she had analyzed the report in the few minutes that it had been given to them and the answer was what was also reported by the foreign consultant in the Star story:
- “This is not the place that people should choose to exercise."
In passing, I wonder then if, as part of the City budget, the City will subsidize residents to go to a private club to exercise instead since they cannot exercise on the Green spaces.
I would bet that there was a huge sigh of relief when that answer came out. Don't exercise there---What a brilliant resolution. No need to be concerned about health of residents now.
- “Of course, they forget to mention what our Champion, MOE’s Dr. Diamond said about trucks moving constantly
“During normal traffic movement (no delays), the average increase in particulate matter adjacent to the road was minimal.”
More importantly forget to tell us about the changes in diesel fuel and diesel engine technology which will drastically reduce emissions such that the health concern is no longer there.
As the DRIC wrote also:
“The fact is, getting rid of traffic lights will eliminate stop-and-go traffic and reduce emissions. New cleaner fuel rules and (truck) engine technologies are also reducing pollution from tailpipe emissions."
Just like in the movies, picture the Councillors high-fiving, shouting and screaming and shaking each other’s hands and slapping each other on the back and hugging since the crisis was over. There really was no crisis but the public will think there is one so they have no consequences as they keep on demanding more from the Senior Levels.
However, dear reader, you probably figured all that out by yourself. You did not need me to tell you that. However, here is what you probably did not understand about the Meeting. The REAL REASON for the session. Naturally, the revelation comes at the end of the Star Story:
- “An economic consultant's findings said the DRIC plan will leave the city with a direct tax revenue loss of about $1.5 million annually because of expropriated business and homes.
Projected forward 20 years, this is a "present value" economic cost to the City of Windsor of $30 million dollars.”
$30 million rang a bell in my mind and so I went to my database and out popped the following from a year ago:
- “State of the City Address
Mayor Eddie Francis
That’s why today, I’m proposing a five-point plan that will help create the jobs we need.
I call it our Jobs Today Program…
Jobs Today is an initial proposal. A set of initiatives to help our Economic Development Commission. To help our community attract jobs. To keep jobs…
The first part of this program, is a new Economic Development Investment Fund. A fund that will provide direct investment into smart projects that leverage our local strengths, and create jobs..
How will we finance an Economic Development Investment Fund of our own?
By leveraging money from the new National Community Development Fund, recently established by the federal government, to be administered by the provinces.
And by taking the bold step of putting municipal dollars on the table, to make the promise of these new jobs a reality…
I will also be asking City Council to make a historic, one-time $30 million dollar investment from existing sources to kick-start this fund…
We will also be inviting Essex County to consider supporting this initiative, and to stand with us as partners committed to an investment in the future of this region.
In all, we have the potential to build a $100 million Economic Development Investment Fund.
If approved, our Fund will be allocated on a project by project basis, subject to detailed business plans. These business plans will need to build in criteria and safeguards similar to existing provincial and federal programs.
Proposed projects must be new initiatives, not already announced or planned, and must also help achieve the strategic priorities within the sectors developed by the Economic Development Commission at its recent summit.”
Do you get it now, dear reader? It is what I have been saying for so long. We are coming down to the short strokes so each of the parties is setting out what it wants.
Out of all those hundreds of pages of the Report, the Star reported and focused on the economic loss, which amount is exactly the same as the Mayor wanted for his Jobs Today fund for the City, an amount that the City does not have. That is an extra that our Mayor may be demanding on top of what he expects the Senior Levels to pour in since Windsor is the “host City” for the border. After all, that is what Dwight called the $3.2 million for the Red Bull sponsorship.
It all comes to this in my opinion:
- Full tunneling and Greenlink have been used to stall off the border file with the full complicity of the Senior Levels until 2010, a time when the Senior Levels expected they would have the money to build the DRIC project
- Greenlink is dead
- Host City funds would come in from the Senior Levels at the appropriate time
- Those funds were supposed to go to the Undevelopment Commission, an organization that Eddie is desperately trying to salvage
- The $30 million for the DRIC economic loss and the $30 million for the Jobs Today City contribution just give it all away.
Now you know why my headline was not sensationalist. Now you know how we have been played for all these years. We are no different than the people in Delray, Michigan in the eyes of the politicians. Now you know what it is all about.
PS. If you have any doubts about what I am saying, unless the Star story was incorrect, then please explain why the Star republished the mediation story late yesterday afternoon, dropping the reference to the $30M! They knew that they gave it away.
posted by JoeBlog at 12:05 a.m.
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