I know from personal experience that the Windsor Star and Gord Henderson are not normally representative of the general public's attitudes, but they've got that attitude nailed this time.Now - I have yet to complete any empirical studies or thorough surveys a la Ipsos Reid, but I do tend to talk to a lot of people around this city. And the vast majority of people I talk to admit incorporating a downtown university campus is a seeming no-brainer.
According to Henderson's column today (and I saw Gord taking feverish notes during Haldenby's speaking engagement, and the subsequent nauseous look on his face a few times) "The contrast between Cambridge, where people rolled up their sleeves, wrote cheques and got it done in short order, and Windsor, where the university seemingly doesn't understand the role it could and should play in this community, and where the public remains largely indifferent, is stark and painful." I must tell you that I share the same thoughts as Gord here. When I listened to Haldenby describe how enormous the impact was to the City of Cambridge (my mother is from Sheffield - very close by so I know it well) my heart began to ache.
"On Sept. 13, 2004, nine months from the start of construction, this riverfront showplace welcomed its first students. The payback, for Cambridge and the school, has been remarkable. It includes 800 new or refurbished housing units in the once-derelict core. An area where you couldn't get a cappuccino now boasts six such establishments. There's always something interesting happening downtown, courtesy of 350 creative, fun-loving minds. The boost in tax revenues exceeds the city's phased contributions. And the school, which has made headlines around the world, now attracts the nation's best talent, with applications soaring from 600 to 2,000 for 72 first-year openings. I listened to Haldenby and it made me sick with envy that our university, unlike the can-do folks at St. Clair College, can only come with lame excuses for not becoming a community partner in the revival of our dying downtown.", Henderson has every right to be concerned for Windsor.
What the University is proposing in it's new Centre For Engineering Innovation is about four times the size of the school of architecture in Cambridge. Four Times! Now take the numbers from the spin off developments credited to their downtown move, multiply it by four, and lay it over our downtown. Now you can see why the editorial board of the Star is rabidly behind this concept.
To put things in perspective, the University has stated that it is still $20 million short of the $110 million campus (U of Waterloo's architecture campus cost a total of $27 million). Whoever provides that final $20 million would have a lot of say in where the campus was located. Remember a year ago when the Star reported that "Council approves $48M arena plan: Move won't raise taxes, Postma tells voters", yet today the arena numbers have ballooned to a hefty $65.9 million.
Yup, that extra (nearly) $20 million recently tacked onto the sprawling east-end arena's budget would have done a lot of rejuvenating in our downtown.
Henderson paraphrases Haldenby by stating that "(w)ith its textile industry dead and its core area battered by floods in 1974 and ravaged by subsequent flood-control measures, Cambridge's movers and shakers spent years looking for a miracle. They kicked around proposals, ranging from an Imax theatre to a textile museum, that would have been chronic drains on the public purse."
Do we really feel that we've seen the last of the budgetary manipulations with regards to the arena? Do we really feel that we won't be propping up their annual budgets on a yearly basis resulting in "chronic drains on the public purse"? Cambridge understood the economic ramifications of all those different proposals, and obviously Windsor doesn't.
(ED: we will be posting the complete video and audio files from Professor Rick Haldenby's forum on this site very soon, so keep checking back to see if my google-fu has produced a final edit yet.)
