All Fried Up In The Big Smoke

Less political. More fictional.

Under The Microscope

Posted on December 10, 2013 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Today the city begins the next stage of the 2014 budget with 4 days of program and service reviews. Basically a line by line breakdown of what and how City Hall is spending our money. Our hard-earned tax dollars.

The mayor, in his official capacity as visiting councillor, and his brother, the vice-chair of the budget committee, should both be present if for no other reason than to fully explain how they plan to cut the proposed staff budget in order to deliver on their 1.75% property tax increase (including a .5% for their beloved Scarborough subway). Exactly where is all this gravy that’s been leaking back onto the scene since council stripped the mayor of his power to find efficiencies and respect the taxpayers? Show us your work, gentlemen.

The chances of that happening, of course, are remote. Instead, any appearances the Fords may make will be intermittent at best with periods of heavy grandstanding. $18 million! Surely in a budget of nearly $10 billion we can find .0018 in efficiencies!

No doubt we could but the question this time around should be, should we, and if we do, how be we call them what they really are, cuts.

That’s the reality of even a 2.5% property tax increase with that half percent dedicated to the subway. Another budget below the rate of inflation, so there’s really no new money over all. Just a whole lot of robbing from Peter to pay Paul. For three years now, we’ve been running, grinding really, to a standstill. As this week will show, there really is no more meat to pick from the bones without threatening the vital organs.

Last week, deputant after deputant talked about the inadequacy of the city’s child care and nutritional programs. Our social housing portfolio has shown few signs of improvement. And transit. Well, transit.

It should be clear to anyone that we are not funding our city properly. We cannot, as some have claimed, cut back our way to prosperity. The rollback and freezing of revenues has resulted in reductions of services and programs the city provides. (Ed Keenan shows just a few of the holes Mayor Ford has shot through his laughable 2010 campaign guarantee of no service cuts.)

And hey. If that’s the city you want to live in, where it’s pretty much everybody pay as they go with everything? Have it. Come clean and be up front about it.

I do not want to pay for that.

That should be a campaign platform, frankly.

I’m Not Paying For That.

Actually, that was pretty much what we heard in 2010. I’m not paying for retirement parties, bunny suits, councillor snacks or having plants watered. All stuff that didn’t amount to jack shit except for bad optics. Getting rid of it made no dent in anyone’s tax bills but it sure felt good. We showed those fat cats.

Let’s stop pretending it did anything other than that, however.

We have stalled in our ability to meet the city’s growing needs, both in terms of population and keeping pace with operational costs. Simply put, there are more of us and the cost of providing the services and programs we want has increased. We are not improving the quality of life for the average resident in Toronto. While there are always tough choices that need to be made, proper city building isn’t a zero sum game.

That should be the theme of this week’s budget program review. How we’re making do with less and somehow expecting better. The numbers simply don’t add up. You can’t have what you’re not willing to pay for. The question going forward is what is you’re willing to pay for?

— profligately submitted by Cityslikr

Shouldn’t You Be Dead If You’re Taxed To Death?

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

With the Toronto Star’s Tess Kalinowski reporting over the weekend that the Anne Golden-led Transit Investment Strategy Advisory Panel will be recommending some sort of corporate tax as part of an overall funding plan to start building transit, I say, good. Can we now start seriously discussing our transit needs and how to pay from them? Can we? Huh? Please?

One of the sticking points so far, at least for some progressive voices on the left side of political spectrum, was the very conspicuous absence of ‘A Corporate Tax’ option in the funding columns of either the city’s Feeling Congested and Metrolinx’s discussions earlier this year on revenue streams. This was a non-starter for many who legitimately wondered why individuals alone were being asked to shoulder the cost of new transit projects that would also serve to help the needs of the business community. An oversight, let’s call it, made even more fishy since one of the biggest cheerleaders for a massive regional investment in transit infrastructure was the Toronto Board of Trade.

Hey everybody (but our members)! We’re in this together (except for our members). Dig into your pockets and pay for the transit we so desperately need!*

But now it’s there on the table, and for anyone using its previous lack of presence as an excuse not to talk or even so much as consider a discussion about taxation as a means to fund transit expansion, well, time to step out into the open. Your cover’s been blown. I commend you for putting corporate taxation back into the mix but it won’t pay for everything. Let’s start talking turkey.

I won’t get into the nitty-gritty yet as the panel’s recommendations don’t go public until Thursday but let’s just say that my hope is that this can kick start a wider discussion beyond just transit needs to reclaiming the idea of taxation from its current status as some filthy word spat out in disgust.

At last week’s budget committee deputations, retired teacher Don Quinlan referred to Toronto as ‘a rich city that doesn’t act like it.’ That’s borne out by the fact residents of this city, on average, pay below the GTA average in property taxes. When given the opportunity to relieve pressure off the property tax base with other revenue streams, i.e. the Vehicle Registration Tax, we couldn’t elect a city council fast enough to repeal it. The Land Transfer Tax remains under constant threat.

For a generation now (at least), we’ve been trying to run a city on the cheap and then find ourselves surprised at the lack of good state of repair in almost every aspect of our infrastructure. Crumbling roads. Decrepit social housing. Bursting watermains. Substandard public transit. How did this happen, we ask ourselves, and immediately begin looking around for the easiest answers that won’t cost us anything. Lazy unions. Profligate spending. Inefficient bureaucracies.

To be fair, municipalities have been largely abandoned on many of these files by senior levels of government that operate, not at all coincidentally, on a similar Taxes Are Bad approach. Shit rolls downhill, leaving governments with the least amount of financial flexibility to deal with the ugly results. This has lead to a nasty zero sum race to the bottom with city councils facing tough either/or choices between vital services and programs. Public housing or public transit? Child care or after school programs?

The grim situation, however, only gets exacerbated when we mirror such anti-tax sentiment. Clearly, many self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives believed our tax intolerance was not such that we’d mind an annual half percent property tax hike to pay for a Scarborough subway extension. So let’s keep that conversation going. What else is on our wish/to do list?

Enough already with the burden of taxation. At this point, we’re getting exactly what it is we’re willing to pay for. We either accept that and live with it without complaining or we start putting our money where our collective mouth is. Anything less than that is a shirking of our responsibility and just plain flat out freeloading.

— seriously submitted by Cityslikr

*excluding Board of Trade members

Shut It Down Frank

Posted on December 3, 2013 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

There was a certain lack of urgency in the air in committee room 1 for the public deputations ahead of the 2014 budget, both perplexing as well as unsurprising.

Clearly there’s a crush of need in many sectors of city services and programs after years of cutbacks, flat lining and neglect by all three levels of government. Where that fact was on stark display these past two days was in child care and children’s nutritional programs. Oh, and the TTC. Always the TTC.

It is astounding to me the number of people out there filling in the gaps left by governments that, regardless of political stripe, seem to believe we are taxed enough. You can’t get blood from a stone, we’re told. Don’t look at us to be the heavies here. DIY. Do it yourself.

Many do, setting up things like breakfast programs with and/or without assistance from both the public and private sectors along with a healthy dose of volunteerism. And then they manage to take the time to come down to City Hall to express (almost exclusively) a discontent, let’s call it, with the contributions city council is making. For at least some 150 people or so who signed up to make deputations over the last couple days, democracy is much more than simply voting on election day.

I’m hoping what I perceived to be the deputants’ collective tone of quiet resolve wasn’t instead resignation in the face of just 3 years of constant beat down. It might be a product of sideshow freak fatigue, civic efforts in the face of a leaderless political entity trying to get back to business as usual. Who is it I’m addressing here?

Perhaps (and I could very well be projecting my own views onto this) there’s a sense out there that this is also very much a do nothing drastic, it’s an election year budget. Don’t rock the boat with any sudden change in direction and just get on with campaigning. Grit your teeth. Grin and bear it. Register your concern but no outrage. Next year will be an entirely different year.

The lack of, I don’t know, pressing engagement also might have been the result of the prevailing attitude from the budget committee members. With the exception of Councillor Michelle Berardinetti, it felt like the whole deputation process was an imposition upon the rest of them. After quickly passing a motion to reduce speaking time to 3 minutes, they followed up with a 1 minute limit for councillor’s questions that succeeded in impeding any sort of actual dialogue between residents and their elected representatives.

Then, the committee wanted to cut short Monday’s meeting back from its 930 p.m. scheduled end to 6 p.m., effectively eliminating any possibility for those who couldn’t make it to the meeting during work hours from deputing. Councillor Berardinetti initially beat back the motion but Councillor Doug Ford managed to have it pushed through later in the afternoon. Talk about your customer service.

Say what you will about former budget chief Mike Del Grande (and we said a lot, almost none of which was positive) but he at least seemed to revel in rubbing his opponents’ nose in the fact he was in charge of the city’s purse strings. Cupcake this, widows and orphans and he’d bang the gavel with relish. I want to listen to you beg and make a point of ignoring you.

This gang (again, I exclude Councillor Berardinetti from this broadside) couldn’t even bother mustering the pretense of interest. Councillor Ford, flitting in and out of the meeting, started almost every ‘question’ to deputants with a “Do you realize that…” before launching into whatever dubious claim or numbers he thought appropriate. Private sector this, find efficiencies that. Unsurprisingly, it was the lack of outdoor skating rinks IN SCARBOROUGH that grabbed his attention the most.

As for Councillor Frances Nunziata, if there is a more contemptible, less respectful councillor currently representing residents of Toronto, their name is Mike Del Grande and, well, see above. Nunziata wears a permanent sneer and spent more time on Monday watching the clock than listening to the deputations. “Frank! Frank!” she’d snap at the committee chair when he absent-mindedly or graciously allowed deputants to wrap up beyond the 3 minute mark. Her only interaction with the speakers who’d made the effort to come out was to ask if they’d looked elsewhere for help.

h/t Paisley Rae

But there’d be problems with the deputation process even with a more crowd friendly committee. Unless you’re among the first 10 or so listed deputants, there’s too much uncertainty in your timing. People need to be assigned a block of time in which they know they’ll be speaking and the committee needs to stick to that. Otherwise, people just drift off, having to get back to work, to home, to pick up their kids from school. This usually precipitates a run of no-shows, leading to more no-shows by people who had been following along but hadn’t expected to be called on so soon.

More than that, the public needs to be invited to take part in the budget making decisions much earlier in the process. It’s hard not to conclude, as it works right now, that once we get to the staff proposed budget release it’s all a done deal. Months in the works, behind closed doors, it’s delivered up. A fait accompli. Here it is, boys and girls. What do you think of it?

In quick succession, just before Christmas, the public is offered a glimpse of what to expect, have their say over the course of a couple days, and then it’s off to council to be voted on in late-January. Thanks for playing along. See you next year.

It gives the impression that we’re offered the chance to be heard but not listened to. This budget committee, this week, simply made what was a matter of fact painfully obvious.

— openly submitted by Cityslikr