Windsor Airport: “Air Cargo City” So Far A Lot Of Hot Air
Besieged taxpayers should wonder what is becoming of the grandiose plan to transform Windsor Airport into an international cargo handling centre of excellence.
That was the vision, as far back as March of 2009, more than eight years ago, when the Windsor Star ran a front-page photo of a beaming Mayor Eddie Francis standing alongside a newly built runway at Windsor International Airport.
At 9,000 feet long and 200 feet wide, the mega tarmac can accommodate the Russian built Antonov, the world’s largest cargo plane. Leveraging senior government stimulus money, tens of millions of dollars have been spent on airport improvements such as the monster runway and taxiways.
Francis convinced the majority of Windsor City Council (when I was a skeptical member) and the provincial government to fund $530,000 for two feasibility studies by Lufthansa Consulting of Frankfurt, Germany.
In early 2010, the compliant consultants concluded, not surprisingly, that we should go for it. In the midst of a punishing economic downturn, the Cargo Hub was held up as the carrot to develop a new economy for Windsor that one day could be known as “Air Cargo City” as Francis coined it.
The Mayor ramped up the hype by touting the establishment of a pre-clearance handling centre for perishable goods providing optimum storage areas for all needs of airlines, forwarders, importers and exporters while concentrating all inspections and border process under one roof including U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the United States Department of Agriculture.
At a press conference in August of 2010, Francis and then Airport President Federica Nazzani predicted Windsor could become home to a multi-modal freight logistics hub that, by 2012, could employ 350 full-time workers on site and 100 additional workers offsite.
Fast forward to late 2013, when a press conference attended by gushing dignitaries — Canada’s Minister of State Gary Goodyear, University of Windsor President, Alan Wildeman and Francis — revealed the federal government and the City of Windsor were investing some $24 million to create cargo handling and research facilities at the University of Windsor and the airport.
The city parlayed $12.6 million from the Southwestern Ontario Economic Development Agency (FedDev Ontario) to construct three state-of-the-art buildings inside the northwest edge of airport lands.
The university also pried an additional $7.3 million loose from FedDev to establish the Institute for Border Logistics and Security (IBLS), which included a 10,000 square foot building at 3475 Wheelton Drive, to serve as a headquarters and house researchers to work with importers and exporters on real-world project testing.
In November of 2013, City Council agreed to waive property taxes for 10 years on the 35,000 square foot anchor building across the street from IBLS. That cinched the deal to build an extravagant loading and staging structure to be leased to FedEx Express for 30 years, starting at a measly $4 per square foot.
FedEx, which relocated from a 32,000 square foot building less than a mile away on Rhodes Drive, was also enticed by getting use of 3.6 acres of airport land for $1 a year.
The third building, next to the IBLS headquarters, is 27,000 square feet and was erected with the hope that FedEx’s world-wide profile would attract a cluster of logistics firms and create hundreds, perhaps thousands of jobs to offset those lost in the manufacturing industry.
So here we are in the fall of 2017, and it’s time to take stock. A good indicator of how successful the cargo hub has been so far can be gleaned by how many photo op press conferences have been called lately about these projects.
The answer is none, not since Wildeman announced the appointment of heralded logistics expert Laurie Tannous as CEO of IBLS in January of 2015.
FedEx moved into its new digs some time in 2016 without fanfare. It transferred 51 jobs from the old building.
Try to ask any of the principles (at this writing they hadn’t returned my phone calls) how things are going since then and you hear “nothing but crickets”. That includes Airport CE0 Carolyn Brown.
I know a few things. Nothing has become of the Francis dream to locate all inspection and border processes under one roof at Windsor Airport, although Bill C23, an act respecting pre-clearance of persons and goods in Canada and the United States has received second reading by the House of Commons.
Windsor would conceivably be a long shot candidate for one of those locations, although it’s hard to imagine isolationist Donald Trump, the U.S. President, agreeing to the consolidation of border inspections on Canadian soil.
Far from the glamorous image of “flying trucks” in and out of Windsor Airport, FedEx’s air freight destined for Canada is currently flown from its North American headquarters in Memphis to Willow Run Airport in Ypsilanti, where it is loaded onto trucks and driven across the border to Windsor and other Canadian cities.The vision of Windsor Airport as a multi-modal centre has been relegated to a surface transportation mode of trucks only. The view from Wheelton Drive indicates the spanking new, tax-free FedEx operation is quite busy, but the company, which is experiencing reorganization turmoil, is not commenting on a number of my questions, including the quantity of perishable goods it is handling, and the number of jobs beyond the original 51 it has created.
In September of 2015, I learned in my Freedom of Information request, that there are no job guarantees in the city’s contract with FedEx and/or penalties if job creation targets are not met.
Communications Specialist James Anderson, speaking from corporation headquarters in Toronto, said that information is proprietary, although he promised that FedEx will invite me to a public event probably after the Christmas holidays.
Meanwhile, I have learned that IBLS, the brainchild of Francis and Wildeman, has experienced hiccups since it was established in late 2013 as a twin to the Cross-Border Institute (CBI), a research team at the university. Directed by Bill Anderson, CBI is conducting extensive data research tracking a billion GPS truck records, radar sensors and traffic.
The research is being used to train and enable small and medium-sized businesses on practical testing of new technologies to help them contain costs on predictable delivery times.
IBLS was set up as a faculty of the university to accommodate real-world testing of cross-border logistics and security, supply-chain expertise and related technology development.
These projects will directly create an estimated 105 jobs, according to a joint press release from the Government of Canada and FedDev Ontario, in the fall of 2013.
“This initiative will also include the construction of a multi-modal cargo terminal that will support the development of a Windsor/Detroit logistics corridor that has the potential to create thousands of jobs in the long term.”
In fact, there is only one employee at IBLS. Her name is Susan Anzolin, who was named Executive Director when the Institute quietly became a department of the WindsorEssex Economic Development Corporation (WE EDC) in January of 2017.
As for Tannous, she apparently never left her position at Farrow Logistics as VP of Government Relations and remains a special advisor to the Cross-Border Institute, where she recently spoke at a free trade conference.
When I inquired about the sketchy departure from IBLS, Anderson did not return my calls and Tannous sent me the following email: “My apologies I am travelling and have limited access. Happy to be involved in future articles.”
Anzolin is a Windsor native who worked for years for the federal government, including 10 years in Ottawa with the Privy Council. She was with FedDev Ontario in Kitchener and pushed for the approval of the Windsor logistics grant.
She took the IBLS job, offered by Mayor Drew Dilkens, after she came back to Windsor last year on unpaid leave from the feds to care for her ailing mother. She is working diligently on turning what has been an expensive white elephant into a useful centre of expertise in border logistics and security for dozens of local custom brokerage and warehousing firms.
IBLS became a WE EDC department 10 months after the federal government withdrew its operational funding to the university, about three years after a plan was supposed to be in place for the institute to be financially self-sufficient.
Anzolin has been busy developing leasing agreements to generate revenue from potential users of the building and drawing up a budget that would pay her salary, which is now covered by WE EDC.
She is operating for the time being on a shoestring budget and laughs about decorating the building with her own plants and paintings.
“It’s a great time to be head of this organization,” she says expressing confidence that she can use her experience and contacts to attract business and tenants to the IBLS, which offers a board room, fully accessible space for training workshops on border readiness, short term office space for start-up logistic companies and a truck bay available to private-sector companies to test new technologies and conduct demonstration projects.
“It’s a great facility . . . everybody who comes into the building is quite impressed,” says Anzolin, noting it has the capability of hosting multiple events at the same time.
WE EDC has also been helpful in identifying events and users, which bore fruit with the recent hosting of two seminars in partnership with the Ontario Ministry of International Trade.
“We have not done a great deal in the way of marketing (IBLS),” says Lana Drouillard, Director of Marketing and Communications at WE EDC. That will change, she says, as the institute plans to promote and educate small and medium-sized businesses on the benefits of the recent federal designation of the region as a Foreign Trade Zone.
Anzolin is building partnerships with numerous members of the Windsor Transportation Club. She is on the local NAFTA working group and her 2017 planner includes workshops, meetings and demonstrations on electronic logging devices under trucks, and automated vehicles.
Anzolin and Drouillard note four new logistics businesses have opened their doors since January 2017 and several others are interested in establishing a presence in the region.
They claim “advanced discussions” are underway to lease the vacant 27,000 square foot building next door to IBLS, to the private sector. That building has office space and four truck bays.
“It’s a work in progress,” enthuses Anzolin. “We’re not bursting at the seams but the doors are open. I’m here and trying to work with others. It’s a start-up really. I’m trying to work out what the issues are.”
“We’re doing the right things, it might be a little slow,” says Drouillard. But Anzolin adds, “And we’re not alone.”