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link — Comments Off on The commercial property tax question
10
Mar 11

The commercial property tax question

Writing for OpenFile, Tim Alamenciak looks at the issue of empty storefronts in the city:

Back on Queen Street East, some storefronts have been empty for years, others mere months. When Philip Traikos became the real estate agent for the whole south side stretch of stores from Woodbine Avenue to Northern Dancer Boulevard in 2008, all of them were empty except for the bank branches of TD and BMO. Since then, Living Lighting (a lighting store) and SupperWorks (a food preparation service) have moved in, among others. As to why so many spaces are still vacant, Traikos says, “that’s the million dollar question”

via Toronto’s empty storefronts a tough sell | OpenFile.

Read the comment thread as well, where there’s a good discussion of Toronto’s commercial property tax rates, including a series of posts from a very singularly-minded crusader. I didn’t know, for example, that vacant storefronts pay only half the property tax.

The city has continued the previous administration’s program to rebalance commercial tax rates with residential rates, but this is probably something that deserves more attention.

link — Comments Off on Shepherding Sheppard
08
Mar 11

Shepherding Sheppard

The Toronto Star’s Transportation Reporter Tess Kalinowski, on the new agency that will work toward making a privately-financed Sheppard subway extension a reality:

Toronto Transit Infrastructure Ltd., (formerly Toronto Transit Consultants Ltd.) will be responsible for taking the business case for the Sheppard subway before the federal government to make sure “our business model makes sense,” TTC chair Karen Stintz told the Star.

“Someone just needs to be shepherding through that process and there is nowhere in the TTC that we can do that … so this consulting company has been re-established,” she said.

via TTC revives consulting arm to oversee Sheppard subway – thestar.com.

It dawns on me that one of their first orders of business will be to search for someone — anyone! — with credibility who could produce a report claiming that the more than four billion dollars the city hopes to raise with this scheme is possible.

Norm Kelly, Doug Ford and former councillor Gordon Chong are directors. Chong wrote an editorial praising Rob Ford’s transit plan for the Toronto Star in January. (I wrote about it.)

Related to this: the Toronto Environmental Alliance has released another snazzy graphic comparing the funded portion of Transit City with proposed revisions. They, probably wisely, leave the Sheppard subway line off their map. It’s nowhere near real enough yet to include, especially compared with a Sheppard East LRT that would have been open in just three years.

Really, though, you could probably simplify the graphic even further and just write “THE MAYOR WANTS TO SPEND TWO BILLION DOLLARS NEEDLESSLY PUTTING TRANSIT UNDERGROUND JUST BECAUSE SOME DRIVERS MIGHT BE INCONVENIENCED.” Probably less attractive visually, though.

link — Comments Off on Board out, Ootes in
07
Mar 11

Board out, Ootes in

Earlier today, a new agenda item was added for this week’s council meeting. The item, MM5.7, moved by Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday and (kind of interestingly) seconded by Mary-Margaret McMahon, calls for the TCHC Board of Directors to be dissolved and replaced with a Managing Director, who is not named.

Thanks to the Globe & Mail’s Kelly Grant, we now know that Managing Director will be Case Ootes, former councillor and the man who led Rob Ford’s transition team:

The former councillor who led Mayor Rob Ford’s transition team is the administration’s choice to temporarily replace the ousted board of Toronto’s embattled public housing agency, The Globe has learned.

Case Ootes is recommended as the managing director of the Toronto Community Housing Corporation, according to a city hall source.

via Case Ootes recommended to be temporary TCHC director – The Globe and Mail.

A little digging shows that Ootes once called for the sale of all TCHC-owned single family homes (starting with three in his ward), proposing that profits from the sales go to rent subsidies and TCHC high-rise buildings. He did say at the time, though, that he was “all for not creating ghettos.” Which is, I guess, good news.

link — Comments Off on Ex-TCHC board member Mammoliti: in my defence, I skipped all the morning meetings
07
Mar 11

Ex-TCHC board member Mammoliti: in my defence, I skipped all the morning meetings

In an interview with the Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale, Giorgio Mammoliti, who sat on the TCHC Board from 2001 until recently, embarrasses the hell out of himself in a weird attempt to disassociate himself from the ongoing scandal:

“The mayor wants a change at the board,” he said, “and I agree with the mayor that there should be a change at the board. I never asked for the board to go, I just agreed with the mayor.”

via Mammoliti: I was a ‘responsible’ TCHC board member – thestar.com.

Translation: I just agree with the mayor on everything!

“A lot of this stuff that’s coming forward never even came to the board. So it’s not all the board’s responsibility,” Mammoliti said. “But — they oversee it. And when you oversee it, and there’s a change, as the mayor’s proposing to do, then that’s why I support the change.”

Translation: It wasn’t my responsibility but the mayor thinks the new board should take responsibility and I always agree with the mayor. Even though I filed a human rights complaint against him once.

This is the best part, though:

The fixtures deal, the auditor reported, was split into small increments to avoid board oversight. Mammoliti offered another reason he might never have heard about it: committees sometimes met by telephone at 8 a.m., when he was busy with his family.

“It could’ve been discussed in the morning meetings, I don’t know. I never partook in those early morning meetings because I’ve gotta take my daughter to school,” he said.

Translation: I’m not responsible for anything because the meetings were held way too early in the morning.

link — Comments Off on End of the Urban Affairs
07
Mar 11

End of the Urban Affairs

I meant to post this when it went live on Friday, but I got distracted by spreadsheets and such. At Torontoist, Steve Kupferman does a killer job telling the sad story of the Urban Affairs Library:

Toronto Public Library’s board voted to close the Urban Affairs Library at a meeting Tuesday night. They did it not because the majority of them thought shuttering the branch, located in Metro Hall, was a good idea, but because their legal counsel told them they didn’t have a choice.

via How the Urban Affairs Library Got Shut Down – Torontoist.

link — Comments Off on “Just do what Rob Ford wants and no one gets hurt”
07
Mar 11

“Just do what Rob Ford wants and no one gets hurt”

Chris Selley, in this week’s Posted Toronto Political Panel breaks down why the concept of a ‘Tea Party North’, building on the momentum of the ‘Ford Nation’, is more than a little ridiculous:

But lest we forget, we’re talking about “Ford Nation” these days because Rob “One Taxpayer” Ford, having cut taxes to his own constituents, asked the province for more taxpayer money, didn’t get it, and immediately started issuing threats. What’s the motto of this principled new organization? “Just do what Rob Ford wants and no one gets hurt”?

via Posted Toronto Political Panel: Can Ford Nation be Canada’s Tea Party? | Posted Toronto | National Post.

Jonathan Goldsbie makes a good point as well, writing that any ‘Tea Party North’-type organization will just become “a redundant clone of the already-well-established Canadian Taxpayers Federation.” The CTF, if you aren’t aware, is a boring organization led by Kevin Gaudet. Whenever a journalist needs a “Taxes are bad!” quote, they go to Gaudet.

Matt Gurney was also part of this week’s Posted Toronto Political Panel.

link — Comments Off on TCHC as an ‘ambitious property developer’
07
Mar 11

TCHC as an ‘ambitious property developer’

Writing for Spacing, John Lorinc speculates that the root of TCHC’s problems may have been that they behaved “much more like an ambitious property developer than a responsive property manager:”

Effective development, of course, demands both schmoozing and speed, so it is not a stretch to imagine that the TCHC’s senior managers — energized by an obviously challenging mission — may have become more than a little impressed by the urbane ways of the city’s building industry. After all, the perks and procurement short-cuts unearthed by the auditor-general wouldn’t be out of place in the development industry, where time-to-market is a major competitive issue.

Incent your employees to deliver projects on time and on budget? Check.

Go with a supplier that says it can get the job done faster? Check, check.

I’m not excusing the conduct, but we can’t ignore the wider context, either.

via LORINC: The Toronto Community Housing Conundrum « Spacing Toronto.

Or to put it another way: a public agency was acting too much like a private corporation. (Ignore anyone who ever uses the phrase “This would never happen in the private sector,” by the way. Everything happens in the private sector. Shitty management practices were practically invented by the private sector.)

Handing TCHC’s development work (on Regent Park and Lawrence Heights, amongst others) to another city agency is a sensible reform worth looking at.

After you read Lorinc’s piece, scroll down and check out Steve Munro’s comment as well. He reminds us that, seriously, the chocolates and pedicures and whatever else aren’t the real story here. Abuses of the city’s procurement process cost us far more, and are way less forgivable.

link — Comments Off on Ford For Canada
06
Mar 11

Ford For Canada

Robyn Doolittle:

For months, members of Ford’s former campaign staff have been quietly drawing up plans to form a right-wing advocacy group. The intention is to monetize and organize this huge ideological voting base, essentially forming a quasi Tea Party North.

It would means millions of dollars for the conservative movement, high-profile publicity for Tory-friendly issues and an energized right-wing base.

“But it won’t be called Ford Nation. It’s going to be an advocacy group for the taxpayers of Toronto. It will be something like: Respect for Taxpayers Action Group,” said Nick Kouvalis, the mayor’s former chief of staff and deputy campaign manager.

via Building Ford Nation – thestar.com.

Ah, so it’s going to be like Tea Parties without the religious, racist and homophobic parts? So you’re just going to talk about tax policy? That sounds boring.

There’s an idea. The best these guys could hope for is to become the Eastern Canada version of the Reform party, spending a decade getting nowhere until eventually withdrawing back into mainstream conservatism.

People talk about Rob Ford like he represents some kind of right-wing revolution but I have trouble seeing it. He did’t take out an incumbent mayor. The candidates he DID beat all had major problems, to the point where it was hard to find vociferous supporters who didn’t work for the Smitherman or Pantalone campaigns. And while his win was comfortable, he did not see a majority of the vote. As we learned earlier this week, his approval rating isn’t setting records either.

Unlike mainstream liberalism or conservatism, which are more flexible ideologies, you can’t push Ford’s brand of populist politics forever. Eventually people will realize that you really can’t cut taxes while simultaneously improving services. The centre isn’t going to hold on that one.

 

link — Comments Off on Should have seen the signs
06
Mar 11

Should have seen the signs

Paul Moloney writing for the Star:

Toronto’s new billboard tax has been virtually gutted after a court ruled the tax cannot be applied to thousands of existing signs out there.

The Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruling, released Thursday, limits the city to new signs but applications to put up new signs may plummet because they will be taxed while existing signs remain tax free.

via City could be out millions after court kills billboard tax – thestar.com.

Watch this story closely. Whether the city appeals the decision will reveal whether the new administration is serious about working for the people or if they’re just ideological anti-taxers looking out for the interests of big business.

Seriously, what’s the argument against a billboard tax? Either the city gets revenues or we end up with fewer billboards. It’s win/win.

link — Comments Off on Changes to paid duty program something all of council can agree on
06
Mar 11

Changes to paid duty program something all of council can agree on

Robyn Doolitte:

Unnecessarily strict rules for employing paid duty police officers are costing Toronto taxpayers as much as $2 million each year, a city audit has found.

The official findings won’t be released for weeks, but a draft copy obtained by the Star recommends reviewing some “debatable” permit criteria, particularly for road work.

via Paid duty policing costs taxpayers millions: audit report – thestar.com.

At a community meeting last month, Councillor Pam McConnell — a stalwart of council’s left — was all excited about this report by the auditor general. It’s one of those programs that I think everyone can agree is ridiculous. Hopefully someone makes a motion to restructure this program, and council will actually get a chance to agree on something for once.

 

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