Ford For Toronto A Broken City, A New Mayor, Crazy Antics

John Lorinc with Spacing:

An eagle-eyed Spacing reader wrote this week to point out that Mayor Rob Ford and his chief bean counter Mike Del Grande are relying on a $25 million draw against the city’s reserves to help balance the 2011 budget with no property tax increase.

Anyone who’s hung around the giant clam in recent years knows that when Ford and his merry band of waste-busters were in opposition, they railed loudly and often about the perils of reserve raids.

via LORINC: Even the right will raid the reserves « Spacing Toronto.

Miller did this too often as well, but then I don’t recall him both eliminating revenue sources and raiding reserves in the same year. To make an analogy: the 2011 budget is a bit like quitting your job then immediately spending a big chunk of your savings.

(For the record, I hate analogies like that. City finances are not the same as personal finances for about a billion reasons.)

The Posted Toronto Political Panel is quite interesting this week. Jonathan Goldsbie makes a similar point to the one I made below regarding people who blindly criticize city spending: “No more abstractions: name names, please.” Chris Selley works the middle, though still seems way too eager to accept TTC service cuts even after the TTC has admitted they may have goofed on the numbers. I did appreciate this: “demanding nothing be cut would be completely in keeping with Ford’s campaign promises.” Others seem to have missed that in no way did Toronto vote for a government that delivers fewer services.

New panelist Matt Gurney, on the other hand, has himself pegged:

I’d probably blow up Housing, which is due for a reckoning (what it gets reduced to, though, is anyone’s guess). I hate to be a right-wing bogeyman, but since I’m not tying my hopes for a majority to Quebec, I’d go after the culture spending and job creation programs, too — if we’re a world-class city, we can sustain a diverse culture and economy without the government being involved (the horror). And I’m all for privatizing and contracting out, obviously. Man, I’m such a cliché.

via Posted Toronto Political Panel: Solving Rob Ford’s budget dilemma | Posted Toronto | National Post.

Cliché indeed.

Rob Granatstein with The Sun makes the same point that lots of people made this past week — that the 2011 budget is nothing, and the real test comes in 2012 — but puts a bit of a conservative spin on it:

By 2014, Toronto won’t have any wiggle room to borrow any more, at its current pace. Someone has to get a handle on how this city spends.

So, starting the day after the 2011 budget is passed, work on 2012 begins.

Who knows what the 2011 surplus will be? But it’s hard to believe Ford will have $346 million in found money to play with.

Again, this budget is not truly Rob Ford’s. The 2012 budget will be his and a major test of our new mayor.

The interesting days are far from over.

via Mayor’s fight still to come: Granatstein | Rob Granatstein | Columnists | Comment | Toronto Sun.

“Someone has to get a handle on how the city spends” is the same kind of simplistic bullshit we were fed throughout the election. Honestly, I think it’s time to start demanding that people who grouse about city spending and the increases over the past seven years actually speak in specifics. Name the departments that should be cut and the services that should be reduced. It’s become increasingly clear this past week that there are not easily accessible gravy deposits at City Hall.

Earlier in his editorial, Granatstein writes that Ford “demanded the city stop going cap-in-hand to the province and the feds.” I agree with him that this was not the year for city council to be asking for increased funds from senior governments, but to simply gloss over the issue of intergovernmental relations — the dismissive ‘cap-in-hand’ phrase comes up way too often in the media — is a mistake. One of the critical roles the Mayor of Toronto must play is as an advocate for this city with the provincial and federal governments.

The National Post’s Natalie Alcoba must have brought a tape recorder to today’s budget meeting, because she’s got a great transcript of Doug Ford’s rant, aimed squarely at left-leaning councillors:

And for my colleagues to get up and do their political grandstanding, as I said, when they were in charge for the last seven years wasting money day in and day out and putting … in debt, and paying $446-million on interest, that we could be reallocating some of that to the police, in support of the police, I find appalling. And it’s been going on all week. Another colleague was comparing the librarians, that they should be at the same level as the police. That’s the mindset that we have here. Spend, spend, spend. Tax, tax, tax. Zero accountability. We’re in the position that because of the spending that has happened in the last seven years…

via ‘There is a procedure for being offended’: Councillors spar in committee meeting | Posted Toronto | National Post.

Aw, it’s so hard to be a law-and-order politician and a government shrinker when people won’t stop whining about their libraries.

You promised to cut gravy, not programs, councillor. People are just trying to hold you to your word.

Robyn Doolittle covers the proposed user fee increases in this year’s budget — none of which seem overly controversial — and closes was this quote from the deputy mayor:

Deputy mayor Doug Holyday said he’s not happy with the fee hikes, but they may be inevitable.

“We’re trying to not put additional costs on taxpayers, but it may take a year or two or three to get things under control. We’re playing the hand we were dealt.”

via User fee hikes could raise cost of fun and fidelity – thestar.com.

Very disingenuous. The hand they were dealt was a good one: surplus money. The city essentially could take one of two paths. The first would be to plow most of the surplus into reserves and debt payments, then raising fees/taxes and finding efficiencies — and making some cuts — to fill this year’s budget hole. The second would be more pragmatic: using some of the surplus to balance this year’s operating budget but still adding to reserves and debt payment. Both strategies assume a small property tax increase for 2011.

The Ford administration took the bizarre third path, freezing property taxes (which is essentially a cut), throwing the entire surplus at this year’s operating budget and then raising a bunch of user fees and cutting services to make things balance.