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link — Comments Off on Budget debate at City Hall
23
Feb 11

Budget debate at City Hall

Cityslikr, over at All Fired Up In the Big Smoke, has clearly spent far too much time in City Hall committee rooms the past couple of months. His post predicting the events of today’s budget debate is terrifyingly clairvoyant:

Councillor Mammoliti will rise often and patronizingly tell dissenting councillors that he understands where they’re coming from (he doesn’t) and implore them to just trust him and his newest, bestest friend, the mayor. Councillor Thompson will talk and talk and talk, sounding as if he’s not totally in the mayor’s corner but will invariably vote with him every time. Fingers crossed that councillors Palacio and DiGiorgio aren’t inclined to try and match councillors Mammoliti and Thompson verbosity for verbosity as, well, actually, let them talk. We’ll need time for the occasional pee break. Councillor Milczyn will counter every criticism of the budget with examples of atrocities committed under the Miller regime.

via Buckle Up! It’s Budget Debate Time. « All Fired Up In The Big Smoke.

He knows these people far too well.

Postscript: I included his bit about Giorgio Mammoliti because he is, for my money, the most ridiculous councillor. His list of “DID YOU KNOW?” facts is staggering. Councillor Paula Fletcher gets flagged all the time for once being leader of the Manitoba Communist Party and being married to the President of the Toronto & York Region Labour Council, but DID YOU KNOW that Mammoliti used to be head of CUPE Local 767? Or that he was an MPP for Bob Rae’s NDP government? That he opposed same-sex marriage? That he changed his name from ‘George’ to ‘Giorgio’ in 2002? That, while serving on David Miller’s Executive Committee, he filed a human rights complaint against Rob Ford, and tried to get his son to run against Ford for the Ward 2 council seat? The guy’s wikipedia page is a goldmine of intrigue.

link — Comments Off on No gravy at City Hall
21
Feb 11

No gravy at City Hall

Over at the Toronto Star this morning, Robyn Doolittle takes a look at what all that “Stop the Gravy Train” rhetoric has amounted to. Spoiler alert: it’s nothing.

But when the city is $774 million short, a hundred thousand here and a million there don’t go very far to fill that hole.

It’s a lesson that Rob Ford’s team is also learning.

Insiders — ranging from members of the budget and executive committees to city financial staff — say that bubbling pot of gravy still hasn’t been found. The financial renaissance Ford campaigned on is still a few years away, they say.

via Looking for the gravy – thestar.com.

The article confirms that the mayor will be releasing a draft 2012 budget sometime this spring, which will at least give everyone a lot of time to argue about it. Apparently Caribana, TIFF, The Zoo, police funding and community grants are all on the table as ways to save money. (But not much money.)

Selling assets is an option, though Doug Ford says Toronto Hydro is not on the table. Selling the Toronto Parking Authority would be an incredibly short-sighted move (Just raise rates! That’s what the private sector would do!) but could happen.

Best part? “The goal is to be Mississauga, Doug Ford said.” They should have made that their campaign slogan.

link — Comments Off on Budget Chief Del Grande admits city has revenue problem
18
Feb 11

Budget Chief Del Grande admits city has revenue problem

The Globe & Mail’s Ana Mehler Paperny profiles budget chief Mike Del Grande, who waxes philosophically about the city’s small share of overall tax revenue:

“Out of every dollar that people pay in taxes, the city gets, I think, about six cents,” he says. “We get more than six cents when the federal government or the provincial government tosses us a bone, but the problem with tossing bones is that they’re not consistent. There’s no reliability.”

If his talk of what he calls “a new deal with cities” from the province and the feds sounds familiar, it’s because former mayor David Miller had a similar refrain. Mr. Miller argued incessantly that Toronto’s systemic funding challenges stem from senior levels of government not stepping up to the municipal funding plate. Mr. Miller campaigned tirelessly and fruitlessly for a penny of the GST.

via The quandary facing Rob Ford’s budget chief – The Globe and Mail.

Sure would have been nice for more people to acknowledge this during the election.

feature — Comments Off on Budget committee proposes three fiscal futures: doom, gloom or more doom
17
Feb 11

Budget committee proposes three fiscal futures: doom, gloom or more doom

The City has published a presentation on the 2011 Budget — credited to the Budget Committee – that was delivered at today’s meeting of the Executive Committee. It’s similar in substance, if not in tone, to the budget presentation delivered by Councillors Vaughan, McConnell and Wong-Tam a few weeks ago. (Of note: page 68 of the presentation explains that the city has a “modest level of debt” and reports the “recent loss of Personal Vehicle Tax” as an “area of concern.”)

Big news, though, comes on page 70, where three scenarios for the city’s fiscal future are laid out. They are, in summary:

  1. STATUS QUO – just keep doing what we’re doing! Don’t cut services or look at new revenues. Just keep on keepin’ on.
  2. HALF A BILLION DOLLARS IN SERVICE CUTS – If this year is any indication, that money will be found through a combination of cutting transit service, closing libraries and policy inspired by the belief that poor people are just lazy.
  3. SELL STUFF, GET THE PROVINCE TO GIVE US MONEY, SOME SERVICE CUTS – Despite repeated claims during the election that the city didn’t need provincial money, the actual need for provincial money comes up several times in this presentation. By ‘sell stuff’ I mean ‘asset monetization’, likely Toronto Hydro.

Here’s how the three scenarios break down in terms of impact on property tax rates:

Yes, the ‘Status Quo’ results in a property tax increase of 26% next year. I believe all of these scenarios continue to count on revenue from the Toronto Land Transfer Tax.

Scenario 1 — the blue line — is plainly impossible, given the public response to the service cuts proposed in this year’s budget. They still might try it, though, and be prepared for the war to end all wars at council if they do. Half-a-billion dollars in savings amounts to serious hits to things like the library, public health, housing, culture and transit.

Scenario 2 is more balanced, though the city has to be careful with the idea of ‘asset monetization.’ Selling stuff without considering the long-term implications can cause problems later on. But it relies mostly on revenue from the provincial and federal governments, which would mean lobbying hard for extra dollars. And nearly every member of Team Ford derided the previous mayor when he did just that. (Also: cutting 60 million dollars a year from revenue doesn’t put the city in a great position to argue for increased provincial and federal funding.)

So what will happen? It is hard to say. I do believe the Fords may make a hard play to cut half-a-billion from the operating budget — this may be why Doug Ford was musing about a Strong Mayor system earlier, as it would make these cuts a whole lot easier — but there’s no way council will stand for those kinds of service reductions. The province swooping is also unlikely, especially if a deficit-hawk Harris-era Progressive Conservative takes the wheel in the fall.

Which leaves us back where we started: short on revenue, short on time and — this one’s new — short on leadership.

link — Comments Off on “What’s wrong with running a city like a business?”
15
Feb 11

“What’s wrong with running a city like a business?”

Former City Councillor Brian Ashton writes an editorial for the Toronto Sun:

So what’s wrong with running a city like a business? Nothing if you don’t object to becoming a consumer and not a citizen. Nothing if the worth of your service is measured by your ability to pay and not your needs. Why not cut under-performing TTC routes while leaving those without cars to their own devices?

For many that voted to stop the gravy train, it meant eliminating waste, rejecting public sector entitlement, and limiting government expansion.

But for the Fords, it means much more.

via City Hall shakeup starts now: Ashton | Comment | Toronto Sun.

Very good points.

I continue to be baffled by those who claim Ford has any kind of a mandate to make deep cuts to city services. He doesn’t. He has a mandate to save 1.7 billion dollars from the city’s operating budget through cuts to waste and inefficiency. We’re waiting.

link — Comments Off on One Cent Now & Again: Canadian cities need sales tax revenue
14
Feb 11

One Cent Now & Again: Canadian cities need sales tax revenue

I thought the local media went a bit overboard with their coverage of Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi and his visit to Toronto last week. (It was almost Bieber-ish at times.) Still, though, I was glad to see the Nenshi speak about issues universal to Canadian municipalities.

Here’s a report from the Calgary Herlad by Jason Markusoff and Deborah Tetley, regarding Nenshi’s speech at the Canadian Club where he calls for Canadian municipalities to receive one per cent of the GST:

Revealing a potential plank of the “muscular urban agenda” he’s touted here — and floating an idea a group of Calgarians has been quietly organizing for almost a year — Nenshi said he expects the “penny tax” proposal will be controversial, but he wanted to open the discussion.

via Mayor Nenshi backs push for ‘penny tax’ to build new libraries, recreation centres.

If the call for 1% of the sales tax sounds familiar, it’s because a similar thing was called for a few years back by David Miller and the ‘One Cent Now’ campaign. There were bus ads and everything. The City of Toronto actually still owns the onecentnow.ca domain, though it recently was redirected to the city’s main website. (Here’s an archived version.)

Via Twitter, Councillor Shelley Carroll tells me that a 1% municipal sales tax would net the city approximately $450 million per year.

Glad to see the idea pop up again, though I’m not expecting Toronto’s new mayor to support Nenshi’s call. Spending problem, not a revenue problem, remember.

feature — Comments Off on A look back at Mike Del Grande and Sue-Ann Levy’s imaginary city budget
11
Feb 11

A look back at Mike Del Grande and Sue-Ann Levy’s imaginary city budget

Via a comment on BlogTO, I came across this 2007 Sue-Ann Levy column, in which she details a fun weekend she spent with Councillor Mike Del Grande, currently the city’s Budget Chief. To summarize, they got together and used their imaginations to drastically slash the city’s budget. Councillor Del Grande liked the outcome so much he archived the article on his website:

So last week Del Grande and I spent two days looking for savings and our own revenue tools to replace the $356 million anticipated from the new land transfer and vehicle ownership taxes.

We found some $440.9 million — $419.4 million from what I’ve called the Big Ticket Items like wages and benefits. There was another $21.5 million from what the socialists like to call “chicken feed” — the small yet symbolic cuts to councillor office budgets, their wage hikes and free food, the city’s grants, special events, cultural and plant watering budgets that Coun. Rob Ford raises year after year.

via The Toronto Sun: City Hall.

The 440.9 million they “found” is similar to the amount Ford pledged to cut in his first year in office. And we know how that turned out – the 2011 budget is, in fact, bigger than the 2010 budget. Same as it ever was.

It’s interesting to look at the items Levy and Del Grande put on their mythic chopping block. A bunch of it is pure fantasy. They wanted to kill the city’s 100-year-old fair wage policy. Easier said than done. They suggested freezing wages for non-unionized staff, something that was actually done under Miller, but isn’t sustainable.

Then there’s the kind of stuff that, in retrospect, feels a lot like foreshadowing. They slashed office budgets to $30K and froze council salaries. They cut the free food and coffee and slashed travel budgets. They even proposed a cut to the Tenant Defence fund. All things that have been floated by the new administration in the mayor’s office.

Incredibly, Del Grande and Levy also snuck in a cut to the lobbyist registry. Which saves very little money and seems like a real loser of a proposal. But then, who needs oversight when you’ve vowed to be awesome and make no mistakes?

The most prescient thing about this whole exercise, which was surely meant to make David Miller look like a spending-addicted tax-ocrat, is that to find their half billion dollars in ‘savings’ Del Grande and Levy had to apply a series of ‘revenue fixes.’ They account increased revenues from new condo assessments and provincial uploading. They even proposed a property tax hike of 6%.

Of course none of this matters now, because council’s right-wing has decided the city doesn’t have a revenue problem. It has a spending problem. And magic privatization fairies will solve everything.

link — Comments Off on City’s budget problems not about council meals or expenses
28
Jan 11

City’s budget problems not about council meals or expenses

Spacing has a great interview with Hugh Mackenzie, research fellow at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, regarding the city budget. He concludes:

The City’s budget problems are not about council meals or whether the expense allowance is $50,000 or $30,000. This is about big-picture political decisions made at Queen’s Park. It doesn’t matter what Rob Ford does with incidental expenditures because it won’t alter the fact that every spring there will be a jousting match over the City’s budget.

via HEADSPACE: Economist Hugh Mackenzie discusses the City’s budget « Spacing Toronto.

The whole thing is worth reading, and it serves as a nice follow-up to what I posted about earlier this week. The city’s budget problems are far more fundamental than overpaid TTC ticket takers and expense account retirement parties.

One of the most damaging things the Toronto media did over the Miller years was continually characterize council’s emphasis on securing more funding from the provincial and federal governments as “crying poor” or “going cap in hand.” By doing so they took what should have been a rallying point of an issue — giving Canadian municipalities their fair share of tax dollars so they can provide the services people rely on — and turned into a joke.

link — Comments Off on Mayor touts elimination of proposed fare increase in rare sit-down interview
28
Jan 11

Mayor touts elimination of proposed fare increase in rare sit-down interview

Making professional media outlets (especially the Star) all kinds of jealous, Excalibur — York University’s student newspaper — has posted video of their exclusive sit-down interview with Mayor Ford.

via YouTube – Excalibur interviews Rob Ford.

There’s nothing surprising here, but I do always enjoy hearing from our mayor. He admits he doesn’t know a lot about the TTC but he sure knows people want subways. He goes on about how he ‘turned around’ the Rexdale neighbourhood in his Ward, and how he will do the same for the entire city. (Presumably through high school football.) He notes, as I did below, that student groups pressured him to eliminate the vehicle registration tax.

The most interesting bit was the couple of references he makes to the proposed TTC fare increase that was famously eliminated twenty-four hours after it was announced. It’s been clear for a while that they were hoping they could play that incident of an example of Ford standing up to a city bureaucracy that doesn’t care about people. The Sun’s Sue-Ann Levy, who has long acted as a de facto extension of Ford’s communication team, confirmed as much in her post-budget column, where she wrote, “I couldn’t believe TTC Chief General Manager Gary Webster’s chutzpah in proposing a 10-cent fare hike while doing virtually nothing to improve customer service in the past year.”

It was a rare misstep from a communications team that has, on the whole, been pretty damn good. Nobody bought the story that staff proposed a surprise fare increase that was, incredibly, eliminated after less than a day of budget talks. But it’s interesting to see Ford still plying the narrative that he, against all odds, was the hero.

link — Comments Off on Holding Ford to campaign promises just makes sense
26
Jan 11

Holding Ford to campaign promises just makes sense

The Toronto Star’s Royson James, rumoured today to have multiple personalities, on the guns-ablazing counter-offensive we’re seeing from council’s left in opposition to the 2011 budget:

So when city councillors opposed to Ford go on talk radio to taunt Ford for not stopping all hiring as promised, less than two months after he became mayor, eyebrows curl upwards. Do we want an immediate slash and burn? Should Ford stop the hiring of 713 people for the TTC (116 positions were deleted, for a net increase of 597)? Are we suggesting that if Ford doesn’t make the promised changes immediately, he was obviously wrong and the staff reductions can’t be achieved?

via Ford leaves slash-and-burn prediction unfulfilled – thestar.com.

A couple of points in response to this:

First, while those in the media knew throughout Ford’s campaign that his “save money while cutting no services” rhetoric was total bullshit, that doesn’t mean his supporters were savvy enough to realize the same thing. Ford’s mandate is to save gobs of money, improve customer service and lower taxes. Put simply: anyone who tells you Ford’s victory in October means that people are expecting deep cuts to government services is lying.

Second, and with regard to the 2011 budget, the charge his opponents are laying on him isn’t so much that he hasn’t immediately fulfilled his campaign promises to cut waste and cut staff, but rather that, instead of rolling through 2011 with a small property tax increase — which he campaigned on! –, he pushed the city into an incredibly rushed and thrown-together budget process marked by ideological cuts.

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