How Not To Buy Land

It is a good thing that the CUPE strike is over. The police are needed elsewhere.

There has been such a demand for luxury vehicles by Windsor Expropriation lawyers that the police are needed to direct the traffic around the car dealerships given the crush of traffic!

These lawyers have clients in the Brighton Beach area and along the DRIC corridor. They can see $$$ dancing in their heads at night for legal fees after their clients' land values have dramatically escalated after Eddie and Jeff Watson announced the obscene amount that the Feds are going to pay for the land at Brighton Beach.

Similar land in the area that the City had sold at amounts not exceeding $50K per acre was now fetching almost 7 times that amount when the Feds were buying it!

Remember when Eddie talked about the people buying land around the arena:

• "But it's better, he agreed, to have redevelopment in the Lauzon/Tecumseh area than a padlocked plant. "You want activity. You want action," said Francis. "The entire Lauzon Road corridor is going to come to life again. This just adds to and complements the activity at the WFCU Centre. Shrewd investors are already picking up properties."

I wonder how many of those really shrewd investors purchased land around Brighton Beach too. What a windfall profit they will be making. What a terrific amount of legal fees will be generated too.

Talk about the stupid way of purchasing real estate. When one accumulates property for a major project, one likes to keep the prices secret so that other landowners do not try and hold you up. Now that the price has been revealed, not only has Canada's costs increased but the Delray, Michigan costs have increased too! American attorneys will get rich as well.

I wonder if any Canadians bought in Delray. Really clever if they did.

Eddie's Office had been phoning Ottawa I am sure for the cheque handoff ceremony for a long time. No wonder though that it took place when Transport Minister Baird was out of the country in China. He was not going to take the hit for disclosing the sale price and costing the Government many millions more. That task was left to Jeff Watson who emphasized the outrageous amounts when he told everyone to hold their breaths as he quoted the number.

Poor, poor Sean O'Dell of traffic volume numbers fame. He came up with another doozer of a line that will come back to haunt him:

• "I don't think we have paid any significant premium at all."

Heck when you are wasting so many millions in a misguided effort to beat Matty Moroun, the premium is not "significant." It is a mere pittance compared with the other waste.

Ahhhh, Mini-Gord. He is learning that to get scoops, sometimes you have to front for the dumb decision and write a column that even you cannot believe that anyone will take at face value. You have to accept that you have to play the fool too in order to be given a crumb or two.

His column Thursday was priceless. Eddie owes him one now

• "Feds, city negotiate fair deal"

That this was a Francis-inspired column is obvious. Normally City outside expropriation lawyers would not talk to mere newspaper people without the express permission or at the instruction of the client. Mini-Gord was able to get the City's expropriation lawyer to give all the reasons why the City and the Feds price was so reasonable.

Yeah, right. Tell that to the landowners' lawyers as they pull out of their parking spots in their new Caddie or Lincoln or Lexus or Mercedes.

Another hilarious line, this time from Stephen Waque, the Toronto expropriation law expert hired by Windsor to negotiate the deal with the federal government:

• "a gruelling set of negotiations in which Ottawa was determined to pinch pennies."

What did you expect him to say---Baird wrote out a blank cheque.

Can you imagine though if Eddie had only hired a local lawyer who knows the area, not one who lives 4-500 KMs away. We could have had even more money given to us! $500,000 an acre or more would not have been unreasonable!

I am shocked that there was no Eddie is our hero column considering that his brilliant negotiating style earned us so much money. In fact mini-Gord's column is almost the opposite:

• "The $34 million Ottawa will pay Windsor for 94 acres of land for a new bridge plaza wasn't the huge windfall for city taxpayers it has been made out to be...
  
  Some people this week hailed the city's strategic genius for assembling the land. But the city's ownership was pure luck."

I am NOT going to fisk all of mini-Gord's column again--it could become a full-time career for someone--- but here are some comments that need mention:

• "The $34 million Ottawa will pay Windsor for 94 acres of land for a new bridge plaza wasn't the huge windfall for city taxpayers it has been made out to be." Oh yes it is!
  
• "Opponents of the Detroit River International Crossing project immediately denounced the price as obscene, an unjustifiable payoff, etc., etc." Oh yes it is.
  
• "The price it will pay to make history was relatively cheap, and the process relatively fast and simple, compared to expropriating hundreds of landowners.
  
  And Windsor taxpayers should be relieved to have a failed investment taken off the city's books." Failed investment...another one? Come on mini-Gord, that was exactly the thinking behind the Hurst/Tofflemire initiative regarding Brighton Beach years ago.
  
• "The fact the city just happened to be sitting on so much land situated in precisely the right spot for a plaza connecting an international bridge to a new highway also speeds up the process of building both by a year or more." It all just happened, never plotted in advance. Such a co-incidence. And you laugh at my conspiracy theories about the Governments working together for years to take over the Bridge Company business.! Wow, I wonder why the DRIC guys did not think of this excuse when announcing the DRIC bridge building will be delayed at least until 2015 if not later.
  
• "Waque is well-acquainted with Windsor's land values, having assembled the land expropriated for Caesars Windsor." Gosh did our Mayor at the time tell people about this deal in advance too so that the land values in the Casino area could sky-rocket for shrewd investors.
  
• "If any original owners of the land are kicking themselves today at the thought they might have hit the jackpot had they held on to their properties: Not likely." Hey, stop trying to kill the luxury auto business in Windsor!
  
• "In the end the price paid for Brighton Beach only matters to the users of the new bridge, who will pay every cent of it through tolls." Ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha. Taxpayers will have to subsidize the DRIC bridge if it is ever built and the other crossings that may go broke because of lack of traffic. Matty Moroun must hope that the Feds for the bridge and plaza and the Province for the DRIC road keep on paying these prices. No one would be able to afford to pay the tolls given the obscene amounts of money being paid out!

So how does one explain this clear mistake that will cost us as Federal taxpayers more as it goes to us as Windsor taxpayers to be squandered by our Mayor and Council. Nothing but pure politics:

• "Part of his [Eddie's] elation, no doubt, was finally having some good news to announce in the midst of a frustrating city strike."

Mini-Gord has to save Eddie's bacon and that of the Feds today by dampening the enthusiasm for this deal but then watch how down the road he will turn around and congratulate our Mayor for making the best land deal since Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan from the Indians for $24.

Hey, it just might win a seat for someone for the Conservatives here too. Take that Brian!