The Whig Standard has been running this advertisement for a special advertising section to "Celebrate the Opening" of the LVEC to be published on February 15th.

Until then, KCAL will be featuring many items you probably won't be reading in whatever The Kingston Whig-Standard prints about its pet-project.

#3. Joe deMora's "silent majority"

Flashback:

• December 16, 2003: At Council, Mayor Rosen announces the formation of a "Large Venue Entertainment Centre" (LVEC) Task Force, and KGH CEO Joe deMora is on it. The normal process for selecting individuals to serve on Council committees is to invite applications through public advertising, with individuals selected on the basis of a council vote. However, in this instance, there is no attempt at any public process accountable to elected city representatives. Instead, the Task Force consisted of members hand-picked by the mayor.

• March 21, 2004: The Mayor's Task Force releases its Report to the Mayor, which calls for, among other things, an LVEC to be built on Anglin Bay waterfront, in the current location of Kingston Marina.

• May 18th, 2004: The Whig reports the Mayor's Task-Force is in full-sell mode on TV, and quotes Joe deMora as saying:

  "It's time for the silent majority to be a little less silent," he said.

• On April 29 2005, Joe deMora is a member of the the KEDCO Board of Directors when KEDCO publishes a document titled "Economic Benefits of the LVEC", which is released just 4-days prior to a critial LVEC-related Council vote on May 3 2005.

• August 2005: Joe deMora lists himself as a Friend of the Entertainment Centre. Indeed.

• September 22, 2005: KCAL petition bearing over 3,700 names drops on Council. Instead of re-assessing all that is fundamentally wrong with the project, a backroom deal with swing-councillors just prior to the Council meeting moves the project off waterfront, to the North Block.

  See also Joe deMora in Who's Who in the Proposed North Block LVEC Project.

• November 2006: None of the LVEC's swing-councillors is re-elected.

• End of January 2008: Nine months into the LVEC's public fundraising campaign, with less than a month to go, Joe deMora is not on the public list of donors to the LVEC, and the campaign is still $1M short of its target.

See also

• Celebrate THIS! #2: The CastleGlenn traffic and parking study
• Celebrate THIS! #1: LVEC PM Don Gedge's firing kept secret for over 2-months, until after the 2006 municipal election

You are looking at the combined published calendars for January, February, and March 2008 for LVECs in Mississauga, Oshawa, Guelph, and Sault Ste-Marie.

Four comparable buildings to Kingston's LVEC, over a full three months. We've circled the non-OHL hockey events to get a sense of what else these buildings draw.

You are looking at just 17 non-hockey events in a possible 364 event-days. This includes:

• At the Hershey Centre in Mississauga, there are no publicly calendared "events" other than OHL hockey. The facility operator there is Arcturus SMG.
• In Oshawa, one concert in January, 3-days of Skate Canada synchro-skating, 3-days for the Durham region Golf Show, and one Old Timers' game in February, and one concert in March.
• Nothing is currently scheduled at the 5,100-seat Sleeman Centre in Guelph other than Guelph Storm hockey games.
• In Sault Ste. Marie, it's OHL hockey plus two concerts in January, two concerts and two-days of OHL All-Star Celebrations and "Boo Soo 2008 opening festivities" in February, and one day for Monster-Truck Madness in March.

See also:

• Combined LVEC calendars of Mississauga, Oshawa, Guelph, and Sault Ste-Marie for Q4 2007 (23 events in 368 event-days).
• Combined LVEC calendars of Mississauga, Oshawa, Guelph, and Sault Ste-Marie for Q3 2007 (14 events in 368 event-days.

In the three quarters we've been tracking this, other than OHL home-team events, we've seen just 52 non-OHL events into 1,100 potential event days.

These OHL arenas don't appear to be anything like economic players for their local communities.

Recently in the Whig: on January 25th an LVEC-related editorial titled Mayor must step it up, and today (January 29th), an article on Market Square's fundraising failure titled The well has run dry, group finds.

If we've learned anything, it's "fundraising" should never be taken at face-value.

There's more: apparently Mayor Rosen is due to fly South for a holiday shortly, just as the LVEC fundraising campaign is supposed to be winding-up.

Another question: Do "Buy Local" invocations from Kingston merchants apply to holidays, or just to other people's spending?

On January 22 2008 The Whig ran a story titled Economic forecast bleak: report.

The author, Alan Arcand of the Conference Board of Canada, forecasts a 2.1% growth rate for 2008, as compared to 2.5% in 2007. ( Note: The 2007 numbers are not finalized, and are likely subject to adjustments for months thereafter.)

The article gets interesting in its closing paragraphs.

First, there's this about Ken Wong.

Ken Wong, a professor at the Queen's School of Business, said he wasn't surprised by the results of the forecast. Indeed, some of the same predictions were made during an economic forecast luncheon held late last year by the business school.

Thanks to the previous council, which managed to get several large construction projects started, Kingston has the potential to experience much higher growth, Wong said.

"We at least have a foundation we can build on in terms of creating some economic prosperity for the city," he said. "It's not like we don't have anything we can promote."

For example, when it opens, the west-end multiplex will bring people here for hockey games. Likewise, the Kingston Regional Sports and Entertainment Centre will bring some big acts to town. "If you get great acts, you get people. If you get people, you get prosperity," Wong said.

Translation: prosperity from a dysfunctional, mostly empty, money-losing OHL arena, and prosperity from ice-pads.

Then, there's this about Jeff Garrah.

Jeff Garrah, CEO of the city's economic development organization KEDCO, said his agency plans to work closely with local agencies, such as the Downtown Kingston Business Improvement Area, the Greater Kingston Chamber of Commerce, and Kingston Accommodation Partners to help make Kingston an even more desirable place to live.

We're hearing reports now that the advanced-sales ticket selling process for the Avril Lavigne concert at the LVEC will only let people buy one ticket at a time, even for general admission tickets.

This means that to buy (say) four tickets you need to make four transactions, with four separate sets of fees, including four sets of odious ticket shipping charges.

The Whig Standard has been running this advertisement for a special advertising section to "Celebrate the Opening" of the LVEC to be published on February 15th.

Until then, KCAL will be featuring many items you probably won't be reading in whatever The Kingston Whig-Standard prints about its pet-project.

#2. The CastleGlenn traffic and parking study

Flashback:

• September 30th, 2004, the City of Kingston hires Don Gedge as LVEC Project Manager.

• On October 19th 2004, CastleGlenn Consultants are hand-picked without tender by project manager Don Gedge for their " keen understanding of the Wellington Street Corridor " to conduct the Traffic and Parking Study for the proposed LVEC on Anglin Bay.

• April 20th, 2005. CastleGlenn tables a draft of its report. The City chooses to release online only its related PowerPoint presentation, which they first convert to an Adobe PDF file. The DRAFT - Phase I: Traffic and Parking Viability Assessment Study is 2.4 Mb in size but contains just 22 kb of actual text information.

• April 21st, 2005, a story breaks in Ottawa about serious parking problems with the Ottawa Lynx baseball stadium. CastleGlenn Consultants is a consultant on that project, which involves fair weather-only events with dispersed parking with shorter outdoor walking distances than are proposed for Kingston's LVEC for winter attractions.

• April 23rd, 2005, Bruce Todd, with more than 40 years experience in traffic engineering and planning, highlights some of his measurements from the LVEC along Wellington to nearby parking lots. They clearly show erroneous distance measurements within the CastleGlenn report.

• April 24th, 2005, KCAL publishes what it believes are some other Serious Problems with the LVEC Parking and Traffic Study.

• April 25th, 2005, Bruce Todd releases a more in-depth and damning analysis of the CastleGlenn report.

• April 25th 2005, the city hosts a televised Have Your Say public meeting at City Hall.

• The next morning, less than 10-hours later, with full knowledge of the problems with the CastleGlenn Traffic and Parking study, the project is approved by Councillor Ed Smith and the LVEC Steering Committee.

  KCAL later reveals evidence to support the belief that the public meeting was evidently stacked by Kingston's BIA. Councillor Ed Smith is both a BIA board member and the chairman of the LVEC Steering Committee. He was the stager, and moderator, of a crucial public meeting and we believe that he is partly responsible for the pretense of genuine public consultation.

• April 30th, 2005, KCAL publishes more corrections to the CastleGlenn traffic and parking report.

• May 21st, 2005, members of KCAL, not the City, scan and post CastleGlenn's full Phase I Traffic and Parking Study online for citizens to download.

• In late May 2005, the serious problems with the CastleGlenn report are still not acknowledged by the City, project manager Don Gedge, Councillors, the mainstream media, or anyone working for CastleGlenn Consultants. This prompts KCAL's Bruce Todd to write a series of 14 daily letters to The Mayor and Councillors.

  No satisfactory response to Mr. Todd's letters is ever received. The first six letters were replied to by Mr. Gedge and said, in effect, "trust us". No replies were ever received to the last eight letters.

Mr Todd has, we remind you, over 40 years experience in the field of traffic engineering and planning.

• None of Kingston's print or television outlets has reported on any of the problems with CastleGlenn's April 20, 2005 Traffic and Parking report, as noted by Mr. Todd.

• Armed with this report on Traffic and Parking that we believe is fudged to justify the Anglin Bay location, Council was asked to approve the North Block location for the LVEC at the November 1st 2005 Council meeting.

Those tuning-in early to tonight's Council meeting on COGECO-TV Channel 13 were treated to Julie Brown, of CKWS-TV News, shamelessly serving-up leading powder-puff questions to LVEC project manager Lanie Hurdle and Arcturus SMG's Neil Shorthouse about our wonderful, wonderful new Sports and Entertainment Centre.

The program was "KEDCO on the Street" and lists KEDCO CEO Jeff Garrah as one of its producers.

Make no doubt: it's a blatant infomercial. Our local TV news-anchor is all-in, parroting the LVEC party-line to Kingstonians.

The Whig Standard has been running this advertisement for a "special advertising section" to "Celebrate the Opening" of the LVEC to be published on February 15th.

Until then, KCAL will be featuring many items you probably won't be reading in whatever The Kingston Whig-Standard prints about its pet-project.

#1. The firing of Project Manager Don Gedge was kept secret for over 2-months, until after the November 2006 municipal election

The LVEC's first project manager, and first-engineer on the LVEC railroad, was a man named Don Gedge.

Don Gedge was fired in October 2nd 2006, but this information was kept from the public, and from Council, until AFTER the November 2006 election where the LVEC boondoggle was, by far, the most contentious campaign issue. Mayor Harvey Rosen was narrowly re-elected.

There's more: The Kingston Supine-Standard, finally reporting the firing of Don Gedge in a story published on December 14 2006, two days after reporter Bill Hutchins broke the story in The Heritage, completely downplayed the 2-month delay in disclosure.

How's that for slimeball local politics?

The Whig's publisher at the time, Fred Laflamme, was a "founding member" of a group calling itself "Friends of the Entertainment Centre", about which we'll have lots more to say. This group thought putting the LVEC on Kingston's waterfront, clobbering a marina, part of a park, and displacing a fireboat-builder that employs 60 skilled-workers, was a fine idea.

There are a number of LVEC-related items on Council's agenda for Tuesday, January 22.

• By-law amendments to support KRSEC Transportation Operations Plan.
• Quarterly Report of the Kingston Regional Sports and Entertainment Centre.
• Kingston Regional Sports and Entertainment Centre Project Status Report - December 2007 which is mis-collated and split into two separate parts of the 62-page PDF.

  Therein:

  • No takers to run the LVEC's food services and the Sports Cafe. Arcturus/SMG therefore recommends that they manage both amenities at opening based on an event only operation.
  • About the fundraising "Campaign":

    Fundraising Campaign

    As of January 3rd, the campaign had raised $787,611 or 39.4% of the City's $2 million goal. This brings the total private sector contribution, including the $6 million from the Downtown Kingston BIA and the Kingston Accommodation Partners, for the project to $6,787,611 or 84.8% of the $8 million goal outlined financing portion of the business plan

    How's that for candy-coated bull?

    The agreement with the BIA is a 30-year unsecured sweetheart agreement that, in the end, won't see the BIA pay any more than they would be paying anyway. The agreement with KAP is also unsecured, and is contingent on the continued existence of KAP, a loose organization that could be dissolved this afternoon on almost any pretext.

    There's more:

    The campaign office set up a table at the Chamber of Commerce Holiday Mixer on December 13th at the Four Points by Sheraton Hotel. The campaign received exposure to 120 local business people, raised $205, and provided information to several potential donors.

    Considering that the Chamber of Commerce was key in selling the big-lies of "community support", "silent majority", and "Losing our chance at hosting the Memorial Cup", and considering also that Chamber of Commerce members are, on balance, no-shows in the LVEC's anemic fundraising campaign, that's just disgraceful.

In Monday's Whig Standard, in the editorial page Opinion Column, Williamsville Councillor Ed Smith pats himself on the back.

Therein,

I regret that there were some members of our community whose attacks on some council members became personal during the heated debates on some of these major projects. Such an experience does not encourage good people to enter or remain in public life. But to councillors' credit, they remained steadfast in their support for projects they believed to be in the best interests of Kingston and the people who live here, now and in the future.

Debates? What debates? Ed Smith, the LVEC's somnolent "Streering Committee" chairman, organized and chaired an apparently stacked "public consultation" meeting then, less than 10-hours later, Ed Smith forwarded apparently pre-determined recommendations to council, complete with attaboys from proponents and no mention, not a word, of the significant and widely evident opposition to the LVEC project, a mistake that cost at least $504,100, plus time wasted.

Evidently the not-so-subtle distinction between "encouraging good people to enter or remain in public life" and "coralling process-fudging lunatics and their half-baked plans" escapes Mr Smith.

Consider:

• Ed Smith's council voting record,
• For many years, Ed Smith sat in the centre of Kingston's grotesque Downtown Kingston subsidy entitlements, and
• no current councillor sits with fewer votes than Ed Smith, this by a wide margin. Mr Smith can thank vote-splitting in his district for not being frog-marched off Council during the last election.

The LVEC's ridiculously over-hyped so-called "benefits" will soon to be apparent to all and, for Mr Smith, there will be no escaping responsibility for it. Until then, high-fiving himself in The Whig is really all Mr Smith can do.

According to Pollstar, Avril Lavigne will play in the LVEC on Tuesday April 8th 2008.

This is the first and only concert booked so far that delivers on the LVEC promise that Kingston's youth won't have to travel out of town to see popular acts.

On Council's Agenda for Tuesday is a report from Staff that recommends the IBI Group to create recommendations for further development of the North Block.

It is hoped that the timing for the award of this work will position the City to be able to decide on the next steps in the redevelopment of the police building at 11 Queen Street in addition to meeting a number of other objectives related to the sustainable redevelopment of properties in the area.

It appears that waiting to see the extent of the disaster the LVEC turns out to be before frittering away any more money on the North Block was never an option.

It's pretty clear that unflattering independent assessments of prior LVEC-related reports by the IBI Group have fallen on deaf ears at City Hall.

If all this goes ahead, this could lead to a very interesting juxtaposition: when the LVEC's logistical dysfunctionalities are a reality, the firm that apparently white-washed its logistics will be presenting reports, and collecting handsome fees, for next-steps related to the LVEC's immediate surroundings.