Collection of Flood Related Material Is Ending

From the City of Windsor Newsroom
Notice to Residents

City of Windsor crews are nearing completion of the special garbage collection approved by City Council on June 7, 2010.

City crews have completed a sweep of the entire City and are responding to those homes that have registered with 311 for a special pick-up. Calls will continue to be taken by 311 for flood collection locations until 7:00 p.m. on Friday June 25.

Those residents previously registered with 311, who have not had their materials collected, are asked to please be patient and leave it at the curb.

Flood damaged material can also be disposed of at the Public Drop-Off Depot (corner of E.C. Row and Central Ave.). The Depot is OPEN Monday to Saturday from 8 am to 4:45 p.m. Normal tipping fees will apply.

We thank residents for their co-operation and patience during this time.

For information, please visit the Newsroom at www.citywindsor.ca or call 311.

Tim Horton's Free Swim

Tim Horton's is offering free swim days at locations throughout Windosr, Tecumseh and Essex County. With the hot weather we've already experienced in Windsor this summer and what may be to come, this is a great opportunity to take the whole family for an afternoon of free fun, sponsored by Tim Hortons.


Atkinson Pool
July 5 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
July 12 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
July 19 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
July 26 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 2 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 9 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 16 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 23 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 30 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
September 6 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm

Remington Booster Pool
July 5 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
July 12 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
July 19 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
July 26 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 2 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 9 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 16 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 23 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 30 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
September 6 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm

Central Pool
July 5 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
July 12 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
July 19 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
July 26 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 2 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 9 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 16 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 23 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 30 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
September 6 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm

Riverside Centennial Pool
July 5 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
July 12 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
July 19 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
July 26 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 2 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 9 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 16 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 23 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 30 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
September 6 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm

Lanspeary Pool
July 5 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
July 12 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
July 19 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
July 26 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 2 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 9 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 16 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 23 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 30 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
September 6 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm

Tecumseh Leisure Pool
June 30 1:00 pm to 3:30 pm
July 7 1:00 pm to 3:30 pm
July 14 1:00 pm to 3:30 pm
July 21 1:00 pm to 3:30 pm
July 28 1:00 pm to 3:30 pm

Mic Mac Pool
July 5 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
July 12 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
July 19 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
July 26 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 2 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 9 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 16 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 23 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
August 30 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm
September 6 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm

YMCA of Windsor and Essex County
July 1 1:00 pm to 3:30 pm
July 4 1:00 pm to 3:30 pm
August 1 1:00 pm to 3:30 pm
September 6 1:00 pm to 3:30 pm

Depopulation Plan Needed For Windsor To Survive

By Alan Halberstadt
City of Windsor Councillor
Ward 3

As a mostly bogus debate rages over an amendment to Windsor’s Official Plan to halt the sacrifice of more agricultural land to unchecked commercial developments, new descriptors are surfacing in the urban planning world.

Windsor needs to heed the examples of rustbelt American cities such as Youngstown, Ohio; Flint, Michigan and sister city Detroit. These former manufacturing beacons are undergoing painful re-inventions of themselves focused on planning strategies that debunk the long-held belief that the outward growth of cities is good.

A librarian friend recently sent me an eye-popping article from Cityscape, a US government journal of policy development and research. The document heralds the implementation of “smart decline” for cities previously enamoured with “urban sprawl” and later “smart growth.”

Justin B. Hollander at Boston’s Tufts University looks at the increasing shrinkage of Flint and Youngstown and the strategies these cities are taking to “shrink effectively.” The article considers how “depopulation” creates different physical impacts, notably housing abandonment.

Youngstown is held up as a model of depopulation planning, having shrunk from 148,000 to 74,000 since 1950, when it was a bastion of steel making. “The city came to terms with its ongoing population loss and called for a better, smaller Youngstown focusing on improving the quality of life for existing residents, rather than attempting to repopulate the city.”

In Flint, devastated by the General Motors pullout in the 1980s, Hollander studied the changing housing-unit density in core neighbourhoods.

Some neighbourhoods changed to accommodate a smaller number of occupied houses while others did not, resulting in a lower quality of life for residents left behind, triggering strategies on how to customize land uses to right-size the physical features of a neighbourhood to match its smaller population.

Strategies embraced by smart decline proponents envision the conversion of bulldozed neighbourhoods to urban farming and greening.

In Detroit, the idea of widespread sideyard acquisitions of vacant lots has been introduced to reduce housing density, a process described as “blotting.” The urban fabric changed, not by city plan or regulation, but by actions of individual landowners in expanding their lots to mirror density patterns in suburbia.

The purchase of sideyards can expand properties and accommodate nice green space, gardening and even reforestation.

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, facing the bankruptcy of his city, is moving on a controversial plan to identify blighted areas, bulldoze abandoned houses and cut off city services to neighbourhoods beyond the point of no return.

This would effectively, if not legally, shrink the traditional boundaries of Detroit, and force the state of Michigan to step in and claim a new budding greenbelt. Depopulation strategies such as this create an urban donut, featuring a shrunken core, surrounded by a buffer of green space and reclaimed agriculture. Beyond the buffer is the urban sprawl generated by “white flight” migration over the last half century.

This brings us back to Windsor. While our demographics are different, and we are not at the same stage as Youngstown, Flint or Detroit, there are troubling harbingers. Windsorites who drove to Caesars Windsor in April to see Bill Clinton might have caught a stomach-churning glimpse of urban blight east of the casino in the Glengarry Marentette district.

Twenty-year-old predictions that neighbourhoods adjacent to the casino would soon resemble Atlantic City are hauntingly coming true. A trip downtown or to Indian Road on the west side, will give you an even more gruesome picture of a city in decline.

It is time for city leaders to face facts, as Youngstown and Flint have done over the last 15 years, and accept the idea that the salad days of manufacturing wealth and rollicking urban growth are not coming back.

Instead of addressing these realities head on, Windsor City Hall is fending off demands by developers and lawyers with no civic conscience to plough up more farmers’ fields. The city’s planning department, working on a new Official Plan, has hard demographic evidence to support its position that no new greenfield lands need to be designated for commercial growth for the next five years.

A 2007 consultant study identified 1.7 million square feet of vacant commercial floor space in Windsor, 1.8 million square feet of potential additional floor space and 69.1 acres of vacant designated commercial land.

Developers and the mainstream media love to paint the planning department’s position as a “development freeze” that sends out the wrong message that Windsor is anti-business. This plays into their agenda of being able to hand-pick their own locations to build more far-flung big boxes and continue to cannibalize a core area with 20-percent vacancy rates.

When City Council debated the merits in March of requiring developers to pay for a market impact study to justify the location of large commercial development outside the current zoning designation, Michael Jagatic, the Development Chair of the downtown BIA, delivered a haymaker to the jaw of the urban sprawlers.

“Being thankful for any kind of development the city can get is like taking up smoking to lose weight,” he says.

These growth addicts, sadly including the Development Corporation and the Chamber of Commerce, dismiss the city’s offer to shop investors around to identify existing vacant sites for redevelopment, such as the former Home Depot next to Devonshire Mall.

Meanwhile, GTA municipality Markham is planning to freeze expansion onto prime farmland to establish a permanent food belt, heeding urban planning futurists who predict that only communities that can feed themselves will be sustainable.

Muddying the waters for Windsor is the last Stats Canada census in 2006, which showed a population increase of 8,000 to 216,473 from 2001. This census occurred prior to the stock market crash in 2008 and several other crippling blows tied specifically to Windsor’s economy and employment rate.

Anecdotal evidence tells us that migration out of the city has shrunk the population and a dearth of jobs has discouraged immigration. So we anxiously await the 2011 census. If that census shows depopulation, it will be evident that pulling back boundaries will be the only way for Windsor to survive.

Originally published in the May issue of BizX magazine. Reprinted with permission

HST: Complex, Intricate And Occasionally Devious

By Alan Halberstadt, Ward 3 City Councillor


When Ontario Revenue Minister John Wilkinson came to town in early March to pitch the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST), he started by noting that the Ontario Chamber of Commerce has been bugging Dalton McGuinty’s government for five years to combine the 5% federal GST with the 8% provincial PST.

“The two governments have been tripping over each other figuring how to tax the same thing twice . . . how to tax the other guy’s tax,” said the Liberal Government’s power salesman cum sacrificial lamb. Wilkinson added that the province will save half a billion dollars getting rid of its PST auditing army, failing to mention that about 1,250 revenue ministry employees will be paid as much as $45,000 each in severance packages (totaling up to $25 million) even though many of them will henceforth transfer to the federal revenue service.

This is just one of the many deceptions of this byzantine (defined as highly complex, intricate and occasionally devious) tax.

Wilkinson trumpeted the HST as one component of major tax reform that will transform Ontario into “the most competitive jurisdiction in North America.” He mentioned cuts to income tax, making Ontario “the lowest personal income tax province in Canada.”

His underlings handed out a booklet entitled Ontario’s Tax Plan For Jobs And Growth. The booklet heralded Liberal tax proposals that would eventually save business almost $4.5 billion a year from replacing the PST with the HST, $2.4 billion annually from Corporate Income Tax cuts and nearly $1.6 billion a year from eliminating the Capital Tax.

What Wilkinson didn’t emphasize, of course, was the damage to business, beholden to their consumers, to be triggered by increases to goods and services under the HST that have been exempt under the PST. Staples like gasoline, electricity and heating will be subject to an additional 8 %.

Other commodities and services previously exempt include retirement fund management fees, dry cleaning, home service calls by skilled tradesmen, landscaping, home renovations, private resale vehicles, real estate commissions, message therapy, vitamins, fitness trainers, barbers, esthetician services, funeral services, legal fees and cigarettes.

More telling for Windsor, as a border city dependant on tourism, will be 8% hikes on hotel rooms, taxis, camping sites, domestic air, rail and bus travel, green fees for golf and tickets for live theatre with 3,200 seats or less.

Due to HST rebates provided to municipalities and non profits, Windsor City Council was originally told that the impact of the harmonized tax would be a wash. Later we found out that 8 % will be applied to recreational services, costing families and individuals who use city facilities, like parents of minor hockey players and figure skaters, a total of $500,000 to $600,000 a year.

City Hall subsequently calculated that the HST will also burden municipal taxpayers with an additional $1.6-million in annual capital budget expenditures. This is primarily due to consulting and construction contract payments now subject to full HST.

Since Wilkinson mentioned that the Ontario Chamber is overjoyed that businesses will now have to deal with only one tax regime (“the 7,000 pages of PST regulations that bedeviled you at midnight,”), I called Windsor-Essex Regional Chamber of Commerce Treasurer Ed Miles to get his view.

Ed is a straight shooter and no HST cheerleader. He acknowledges that the ease of bookkeeping is friendly to businesses liberated from overzealous provincial auditors and expensive appeals.

Businesses such as restaurants and Wal-Mart who already pay 13 percent will also benefit since they will now get rebates on the 8% PST portion as well as the GST portion.

Exporters who will now get full rebates are the “big winners,” says Miles. Local businesses are “moderate winners” depending on their products and services, and consumers are “moderate losers.”

Many consumers, however, believe they are big losers. Polls have showed that 74% of Ontarians oppose the HST. If they stop spending, businesses won’t get rebates on what they don’t sell.

Wilkinson, back in March, salivated over the three phased payments equaling $1,000 to be sent to annual families with net incomes under $160,000. This is designed to smooth the transition for consumers and businesses once they feel the jolt of HST hikes on July 1. In a year’s time, so the plan goes, businesses will have realized the income tax and HST rebate savings and passed them along to pent-up consumers ready to spend.

Lower income Ontarians will benefit from a range exemptions and tax credits. For instance, seniors now receiving $240 annual GST rebates will get another $260 for the provincial portion.

McGuinty is tapping into $4.3 billion in one-time transition funding from the feds to buy off Ontario consumers. The premier, however, recently confessed to the validity of an NDP study indicating that a family earning between $70,000 and $80,000 can expect to pay $722 more a year under the new tax. These costs will be in perpetuity while the $1,000 compensation cheques are for one year only.

It all adds up to “a huge win” for the provincial treasury, says Mills, noting the sweetheart deal of letting somebody else (the feds) collect and audit bills for you. “They could easily exempt utilities (from the HST). That’s not an oversight. That’s a tax grab.”

Given Miles’ suspicions that revenues will be “even better than what they realized,” the government should reduce the HST to 12%. “They should have done the right thing and lower the rate and still be ahead at the end of the day.”

That might even stop some of Windsor’s renowned bargain hunters from parading across the border to exploit Michigan’s 6% sales tax.

The bitter reality is that McGuinty needs the money after raising government spending over his first five years in office by $27.5 billion, or 40 %. Ontario’s total debt of $213.2 billion is “a ticking time bomb,” according to CIBC. With interest rates set to rise, McGuinty faces the grim prospect of paying an additional $500 million in annual debt servicing for every 1% boost in rates.

With all the claims and counter claims flying over its worthiness, measuring the HST’s impact after a year would be a good project for vigilant provincial ombudsman Andre Morin. Perhaps that explains the recent push by the government to get rid of this thorn in the side, and speculation that lifelong Liberal Susan Whelan of Essex County would replace him.