All Fried Up In The Big Smoke

Less political. More fictional.

Strictly For Wonks

Posted on April 9, 2013 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Yes, it is as dry as all those words on their own might suggest. Put together? Well, the Sahara fucking desert.

Yet, this committee deals with the nuts and bolts of how City Hall functions both inside its curved walls and outside. Why, just yesterday the agenda was full of such diverse items as property tax shirkers and parking ticket miscreants to building a bike station at City Hall and TTC pension plan mergers. Most of it isn’t headline grabbing stuff but it’s all got to get done for the place and the institution to function properly.

Or, in short, from the city website: This committee has a focus of government assets and resources, with a mandate to monitor, and make recommendations on the administrative operations of the City.

From a City Hall watcher’s perspective, this Government Management Committee got council chambers and committee rooms wi-fied up and there’s talk of installing more electrical outlets for ease of keeping computing devices charged. It just pushed for extending live streaming of all committee and community council meetings before 2014. And word is, they’re pondering granting media accreditation to council social media types which, from our very subjective viewpoint would render the process meaningless. I mean, come on. It’s bloggers we’re talking about. Those people are hacks.

As committee chair, Councillor Paul Ainslie was quick off the mark to embrace many of the electoral and civic reforms that came out of Dave Meslin’s The 4^th Wall project including looking at using ranked ballots in municipal elections. Clicking through the committee’s agenda over the last little while, it’s hard to tell exactly where those items are sitting right now and it’d be nice to know that they haven’t simply been buried. But I’ll give Councillor Ainslie the benefit of the doubt because, well, he seems like a sensible guy who knows better than to get on Meslin’s bad side.

Councillor Ainslie also seems to run an affable meeting. He doesn’t huff and puff, is courteous with staff, fellow committee members and deputants. If I were writing copy I’d say something like Committee Chair Ainslie makes boring Government Management stuff fun! Maybe even with two exclamation marks.

He does get some help from Councillor Doug Ford in the fun department, although the mayor’s brother does provide a different sort of fun. More of the laughing at than laughing with kind of fun. In many ways, the Government Management Committee is the reason the councillor came to City Hall. To Lean Six Sigma his ass all over procurement practices and squeeze out every ounce of gravy he can find.

The committee also offers up Councillor Ford the opportunity to rail about out of control spending like the budget of the Nathan Phillips Square revitalization. Or the construction of a bike station at City Hall in place of perfectly unused parking spots, complete with, and get this…”Vince! You gotta come here, they’re building showers!” Showers! For bikers! Can you get any gravier than that?

But with the chair siding with the lefties on the committee, councillors Mary Fragedakis and Pam McConnell, Councillor Ford and his buddy Vince (Crisanti) did not win the day. That may have to wait until the one missing committee member, Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, returns from the DL. His presence at the meetings must change the dynamics somewhat.

Would I recommend a visit to the Government Management Committee to take in the proceedings?

I don’t know. Did I mention it covers a lot of dry terrain? You have to really love watching people cross their t’s and dot their i’s to get caught up in the action of a Government Management Committee meeting.

Theirs are many of the thankless tasks that must get done, and very much subject to the whims of the much higher profile Budget Committee. (Given the overlap of many of the items, it would’ve made perfect sense for Councillor Ainslie to seamlessly transition into the role of budget chief. Alas.) Government Management Committee might not be the place to start your journey through the committee meetings but be secure in the knowledge that six councillors are dedicating their time to getting `er done.

— appreciatively submitted by Cityslikr

Mayor Obvious

Posted on January 31, 2013 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

So late yesterday afternoon Mayor Ford called a press conference outside his office. Hmmm. Big news perhaps? A new budget chief? A confab with the incoming premier about transit strategies? His Super Bowl pick?

As per usual with this mayoralty, there was to be nothing as mundane as all that.

“Ooh, we are going IN the mayor’s office,” the Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale tweeted. “This is not common.”

Along with the gathered press, TTC chair Karen Stintz had dropped by to see what the mayor had to say. This is not all that unusual at City Hall. Councillors frequently hang back and listen to their colleagues’ scrums with the press, many times with the intention of adding a counterpoint when the cameras and mics turn in their direction.

What transpired yesterday however was unusual.

“Ford’s aide tries to bar Karen Stintz and her assistant from his office,” Dale tweets. “’Mayor’s protocol.’ She just confidently walks past him.”

A short time later, Dale continues:

“Stintz to Ford aide Earl Provost, loudly: ‘What am I doing? I just want to hear what the mayor has to say. I don’t hear from him directly.’”

By all accounts from those present, Mayor Ford eventually appeared with nothing much to say, made a pointed reference to the TTC’s sole-sourced deal, announced he disagrees with three previous mayors who just came out against a casino in Toronto, took some questions and exited. Done in a matter of minutes. Just like that.

NOW magazine’s Ben Spurr basically summed it up: “So that was odd. Mayor calls scrum, has no prepared statement, cuts off questions after 2.5 minutes.”

The antics and naked machinations would be laughably cute if they were coming from a six year-old but from the mayor of Toronto?

I mean, C’MON!

All week we’ve been hearing from the mayor and his brother about the sole sourced deal the TTC commission signed off on with current operators, Gateway Newstands, to extend their contract on concession stands throughout the system. “This is what happens from a person in my opinion that has never run a business in the entire lives chairing the TTC,” Councillor Ford bleated. “What happened last week was absolutely appalling if you ask me,” the mayor said. “It’s absolutely an embarrassment.”

He went on to say he’d called the TTC chair to get to the bottom of things. She responded that she’d returned the call and left a message but hadn’t heard back from the mayor. No, she didn’t. Yes, he did. No, he didn’t. Yes, she did.

So like anyone with acute leadership skills would do at this point, Mayor Ford slaps together a press conference just in time for the evening news with the sole intent to publicly blast away at a colleague who also could be a rival for his job next year. Except she shows up to hear what he has to say, kind of cramping his style. So, he doesn’t say much. Certainly nothing that everyone hasn’t already heard from him.

It’s so much easier to lob grenades at people from the comfort of your own cloistered radio show.

So much for Mayor Ford being humbled by his recent adventure in the courtroom. He’s seized onto an issue that breaks down easily into campaign catch-phrases. Sole sourced deal. Another Tuggs? Corruption and skullduggery. Deliberately creating a rift in perhaps the single most important aspect of the city’s business – transit – at a critical juncture when everyone else is preparing to talk about how to finance a much needed regional expansion solely for his own political future.

That’s cancerous governance, pure and simple.

It seems Mayor Ford knows no other way to conduct himself.

If we haven’t already, we just need to accept that fact and push on without him.

— onward-ho-ly submitted by Cityslikr

Denzil The Despicable

Posted on January 13, 2013 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

I’ve got to give credit where credit’s due, and hand it to Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong.

As loathsome a politician as I think he is — How to measure Political Loathsomeness? Take a politician’s positive contributions and divide them by their negative impact. – the man is nothing else if not a brazen piece of work. And when all is said and done, he is nothing else.

Lost amidst this week’s budget and casino kerfuffles, caught dead to rights trying to smother in its infancy a Mayor David Miller council endorsed environmental assessment of the eastern end of the Gardiner Expressway, the dude not only didn’t deny it, he mustered a reasonable facsimile of outrage at the time and cost it would take to restart the EA and allow it to play out to its conclusion. “Six to nine years?!” he thundered at city staff at last Monday’s Budget Committee meeting. “Fifteen million dollars?! Fifteen million dollars!?”

Yeah, seriously.

“Denzil Minnan-Wong says it was his original intention to kill the Gardiner EA,” NOW magazine’s Ben Spurr tweeted, “but he then decided to shelve the letter about it.”

Just like that, the councillor as chair of the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee simply disregarded the will of city council and set a new course for transportation spending all on his own. Of course, a skilled politician never leaves his ass totally exposed. ‘A number of parties’ were involved in the decision to shelve the EA, Councillor Minnan-Wong later clarified.

“It was suggested by the public service and Waterfront Toronto, and the mayor’s office agreed to it as well as the chair of public works,” he said, according to Elizabeth Church of the Globe and Mail. “My intention when I asked for the letter was to bring it forward to executive to kill it. We had a number of discussions about this and it was decided to put it on the back burner.”

A number of discussions with everybody but city council, it seems. And now that the EA is on the verge of being revived, ‘the chair of public works’ as the councillor refers to himself in the 3^rd person is indignant at such a waste of time and money. “It’s like a bad horror movie,” he says, as if he’s simply just some passive audience member.

Follow the bouncing ball on this. (From the 2013 Capital Budget Briefing Note, Page 2, bolding mine).

On September 16, 2010, the Gardiner EA Steering Committee, co-chaired by the former Deputy City Manager whose responsibilities include Waterfront Revitalization, and the President and Chief Executive Officer of Waterfront Toronto, agreed that minimal work would proceed on the EA in order to manage study costs until the new administration and Council could be properly briefed.
In mid-November, 2010, the Steering Committee co-chairs jointly agreed to delay the next step in the EA, which was release of the design concepts, pending direction from the new Council and administration. About $3.28 million of the total $7.69 million budget had been spent.
On March 2, 2011, the former Deputy City Manager whose responsibilities include Waterfront Revitalization was requested by the Chair of Public Works and Infrastructure Committee to draft a letter for him to table at Executive Committee requesting a report on the contractual, financial, regulatory, process and other implications of cancelling or modifying the Gardiner EA study.
On March 31, 2011, the Waterfront Secretariat, in consultation with City Planning and Transportation Services, provided the Chair with the draft letter for him to table at Executive Committee. The letter was not subsequently tabled at Executive Committee.

Given the time frame of this, early on in 2011, Mayor Ford was at the height of his power wielding at city council. His Public Works and Infrastructure Chair in all likelihood could’ve brought the EA back to council and officially put it out of its misery. Instead, he sneakily knocked it off desk, out of sight against the wall, suggesting one of two things, perhaps a combination of both. A shocking lack of political acuity or a full sense of just how flimsy a construct the notion of a Ford Nation really was. They gleefully came out of the gate manhandling all the easy pickin’s: the VRT, councillor office budgets but steadfastly ignored the more contentious issues which might threaten their support.

Like offing the Gardiner EA.

It’s conceivable that had it not been quietly suppressed, the EA might’ve been completed by now. Council could proceed with the 2013 capital budget, knowing the best course of action to take in regards to repairing, rehabilitating or replacing the Gardiner. Instead, they’ll be pressed into deciding whether or not to waste money maintaining a section of it, pending the completion of the ill-advised delayed EA.

And is the man responsible for the delay repentant? Hardly. He carries on as if he had nothing to do with it, as if it was just another example of the bumbling ineffectiveness of a government he so despises.

He’s got moxie, I’ll give him that.

What he doesn’t have is any sense of city building. Denzil the Destroyer. He serves to tear things up. Not so much a public servant as he is a public nuisance.

Yet he continues to be elected to office, since 1997, returned 3 times although it is worth noting his share of votes shrinks every time his constituents go to the ballot box. In 2003 when the city went to one councillor/one ward, he scooped up 70.0% of Ward 34 votes. In 2006, 60.7%. In 2010, 53.4%. (Interesting comparison: Councillor Minnan-Wong’s Don Valley East council mate, Shelley Carroll has watched her percentages climb from 36.6% in 2003 to 57.7% in 2010.)

So maybe we should take heart. It seems the more the people of Ward 34 see of their councillor, the less they like him. As a high profile member of Team Ford, there’s never been more attention on him than there is now. We should take every opportunity to shine the spotlight on him and his antics, in the hopes of finally ridding the city of Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong’s destructive approach to governance.

— fingers crossedly submitted by Cityslikr