All Fried Up In The Big Smoke

Less political. More fictional.

A Mayor In Major Minor

Posted on October 2, 2012 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Today marks the start of what is, I believe, the 4000^th city council meeting Mayor Rob Ford has presided over since taking office back in 2010. (I use the mayor’s own arithmetical tools to arrive at that number.) Looking through the meeting’s agenda the thing that immediately jumps out at me is the complete and utter lack of positive input coming from the mayor and his Executive Committee. It’s almost as if he’s mayor in title only.

Where are the major initiatives? The bold going-forwards that will set out directions to deal with the city’s pressing problems? Mayor Ford? Oh right. It’s high school football season.

Anyone else? Councillor Ford? Deputy Mayor? QB Mammoliti? Anyone, anyone? Bueller?

Instead, this is what’s shaping up to be the defining moment of this week’s council meeting. “When Toronto city council kicks off its fall session this week,” Kelly Grant wrote in the Globe and Mail yesterday, “Mayor Rob Ford will have a real shot at a real win on a real issue. If the mayor’s allies succeed in postponing or reversing a plastic-bag ban that Mr. Ford has derided as ‘outright stupid,’ he will have something to celebrate after this summer’s gaffes.”

That, folks, is what you call setting the bar really, really low.

Reversing a vote which was the result of a vote that should’ve never happened in the first place as the key to rebuilding Mayor Ford’s relevance? Halting a ban on single-use plastic bags after successfully nixing the 5 cent fee that had been imposed and which many major retailers still charge can really be classified as ‘a real win on a real issue’? What next, maestro? Watch as our mayor drinks a glass of water while his dummy talks.

Read a list of the examples Mayor Ford will cite as his administration’s major accomplishments to date – cutting councillors’ office budgets, removing the VRT, contracting out waste collection, getting the TTC deemed an essential service, setting city workers’ contracts and avoiding any threat of a strike for 4 years – a pattern emerges. Under the guise of restoring fiscal sanity and respecting the taxpayers, it’s all been about cutting, reducing, eliminating. Getting government out of the business of governing.

I Cut, Therefore I Am.

Of course, none of this comes as much of surprise to anyone who watched Rob Ford during the decade he spent as a city councillor or crunched the numbers he casually tossed around as part of his mayoral election campaign platform. However else he tried to couch it in terms palatable enough to lure a plurality of Toronto voters to back him in 2010, it was always just about less. Less government. Less spending. Less taxes.

Then he ran smack dab into the hard, cold reality of municipal governance as set out in KPMG’s Core Services Review. It wasn’t really all that gravy laden down at City Hall. Efficiencies could be found certainly but nowhere near enough to offset the loss in revenues that Mayor Ford demanded in tax cuts and freezes. No matter how many different ways you tried to do the math, the answer was always the same.

Now comes the report from the outgoing Deputy City Manager and CFO, Cam Weldon, outlining a transit funding strategy. Requested in March by city council, it is chock full of ideas on revenue generation to pay for the massive investment in public transit that the city and region must undertake, and undertake ASAP. ‘Revenue generation’ you say? You mean, taxes!

Yep. It’s going to take a whole lot more than reversing the plastic bag ban for Mayor Ford to become relevant again. Transit is but the tip of the iceberg of infrastructure investment cities are facing. Ducking your head and clutching your wallet is no longer a viable option. More is the new less, and being the mayor of small things won’t be worth one lousy nickel.

— generously submitted by Cityslikr

Crisis? What Crisis?

Posted on May 17, 2012 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

It was surprisingly calm, Joe Pennachetti’s talk yesterday afternoon at the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance. Serene, even. Reflections on Toronto’s Fiscal Health and the Decade Ahead: A Discussion with the City Manager. Toronto’s Fiscal Health? I mean, isn’t that sort of an oxymoron?

Nope, according to our City Manager we’re doing just fine, thank you very much. Still got that Double A credit rating. Our debt, hardly runaway, will peak at about 10% of our assets in 2015, a financial situation most of us personally would consider top notch. “We have a very healthy financial city at this point of time,” Pennachetti stated.

It belied the hysteria and apocalyptic noise we were subject to during last year’s budget process. And the year before that. And during the 2010 municipal campaign.

Come to think of it, Pennachetti’s presentation quietly pulled the carpet out from the raison d’être of the Rob Ford mayoralty. We have a spending problem, folks, not a revenue problem. Time to tighten our belts and Stop the Gravy Train.

(Are you as bored reading that as I am writing it?)

Now to be sure, the city manager was not averse to finding efficiencies, trimming whatever fat there was to be trimmed. The KPMG Core Services Review was his idea. Long overdue in fact. He thought it should’ve been carried out over two years not one (another sign there was never any need to hit the panic button the mayor and his allies so wanted push). Pennachetti was also onboard for the aggressive negotiating tactic we saw with the city’s workers earlier this year. Like the Deputy Mayor, he felt the city needed more control over scheduling and back end things like benefits.

Here’s the thing. If I heard the numbers right, the Core Services Review netted the city a savings of about $24 million. The labour savings? About $20 million. That’s on an operating budget north of $9 billion. Or about .5%.

I know everyone has different lines they draw. Count the pennies and the pounds take care of themselves. What’s 44 million when you’re talking billions? But a million here and a million there eventually adds up, etc., etc.

The point I’m trying to make here is those are numbers that don’t correspond to the tumult we witnessed arriving at them. No one’s suggesting finding $44 million in savings wasn’t valuable but was it worth the cost, not just in terms of money but the psychological and political warfare that preceded it? Forty-four million is simply a far cry from last October when the mayor in a speech to the Empire Club warned, Toronto’s financial foundation is crumbling. If we don’t fix the foundation now, our dreams for the future will collapse.

Mr. Pennachetti did want the assembled crowd to know that the $774 million number being thrown around at the beginning of last year’s budget debate as a spectre of this crumbling financial foundation was real. Yeah Joe, nobody ever disputed the veracity of that amount as an opening pressure. There was just a whole lot of disingenuousness in using it as the amount that needed to be cut from the budget, the shortfall needing to be made up. The number was nothing more than a scare tactic used by those wanting to cut more, to cut deeper.

Admittedly, it’s not all chocolate and roses. There are a couple ‘smoking guns’ as Pennachetti referred to them that the city needs to deal with to maintain the current fiscal balance. One is the ever increasing chunk of the budgetary pie taken by emergency services (TPS, EMS and fire department) and the TTC. The other is social housing, especially the eye-popping outlay of cash needed for the repair backlog at the TCHC, roughly three-quarters of a billion dollars.

But as the city manager pointed out, these are things we won’t be able to efficientize™ (Lucas Costello) or rationalize under control. In fact, in one moment of surprising frankness, Pennachetti expressed doubt there was more than $100 million in service efficiencies left to be found in the budget. There would be no cutting our way to a brighter, more prosperous future.

Which is where the 2013 budget debate (coming soon to the airwaves near you) is going to get really interesting. With precious left to cut, the city will be facing the need to approach balancing the budget in two ways Mayor Ford abhors. Going cap in hand to the senior levels or, as some might refer to it, hitting up a couple of fucking deadbeats for the money they owe us. Or we’re going to have to look at generating more revenue, ie raising taxes.

Consider these numbers.

If the province finally re-uploaded the cost of social housing and their half of the TTC operating budget — two things they used to be able to find the money to do – that would free up $550 million for the city which is nearly $100 million more than the estimated opening pressure for 2013. We would then start the debate in positive rather than negative territory. Any talk of cutting services, shuttering programs, finding efficiencies, layoffs would be moot.

That’s not going to happen, of course. Somehow we have found ourselves, alone in the developed world, in a position where senior levels of government contribute precious little to the well-being of their municipalities. They seem to believe that we’re not their problem and serve as little more than piggy banks, sending off money and getting nothing near the value for it.

That leaves us with no alternative but to look at different ways to generate revenue. Yes, raising taxes. This runs contrary to the mayor’s view that we don’t have a revenue problem but, let’s face it, that was an empty rhetorical tic from the get-go. Nothing more than wishful thinking on the part of a sizeable majority of Torontonians who let themselves be convinced that we were overburdened with taxation and under-serviced.

(Interesting observation from the city manager yesterday who said that if we took a picture of an average street corner, we could see at least 20 services the city provides us. Check out slide 4 of yesterday’s presentation to see just all the things you receive in return for the local taxes you pay.)

While the last two budget cycles have been all about austerity and cutting, there is very little left to excise — outside of perhaps the police services which is another topic the mayor will likely be unwilling to broach — without causing serious, irreparable pain that starts diminishing the quality of life in Toronto. It’s now time to start talking about building and growing and figuring out exactly how to pay for it. That’ll include some unpleasant words Mayor Ford doesn’t like to hear but it’s the direction he’s unwittingly taken us in.

— supertramply submitted by Cityslikr

Tough Choices

Posted on January 17, 2012 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

It seems like just yesterday when we put Budget 2011 to bed, safe in the knowledge that we’d have a respite before its younger sibling… Budget 2012, we’ll call her… made an appearance. But then, KPMG’s Core Services Review kicked off and it seemed as if all we ever talked about was Budget 2012, Budget 2012, Budget 2012. Remember? She was going to be a beast. $774 million of unmitigated disaster if not properly housebroken. There were all night deputations, and then more deputations. Toronto just couldn’t get enough of Budget 2012 talk.

And now here we are. Sometime by late this week, Thursday very likely, we will officially be in 2012, budgetarily speaking. They do grow up so fast, don’t they?

We already know that in whatever form the budget emerges after running the city council gauntlet beginning this morning, it won’t be as draconian or Dickensian as the one initially floated by the mayor’s office. The public pushback saw to that. The non-ideologues in and around Team Ford blanched, deciding it might be political suicide to be seen going after children so directly. So things like nutritional programs were spared as were libraries, sort of, although how exactly the TPL is going to cut its budget by a full 10% without closing branches or reducing hours is a bit of a mystery. The math if fuzzy but comfy enough for centre-right councillors like Jaye Robinson to abide.

After that certainty – that the budget won’t be as nasty as it could’ve been – it’s anybody’s guess how it’ll all turn out. What we do know is, at least from the perspective of those in favour of a more cut-y, less revenue generating-y budget, whatever form Budget 2012 takes it will all be because of David Miller. The last of his administration’s surpluses – one time savings, I should say – spent, the only thing left for him to contribute is being the scapegoat.

To whit, half-wit, the Toronto Sun’s Sue-Ann Levy yesterday: Blame Miller for city’s mess! [Exclamation point added. I mean, how could they run that headline without an exclamation mark?] It’s not so much a new column as it is a Best of Sue-Ann compilation of favourite catchphrases (“Socialist Silly Hall”), numbers and percentages devoid of any context whatsoever ($400 billion! 250%!!) and long since dead horses, dug up to beat on the decomposed remains (yep, the St. Clair right of way.) Two budgets on, when push comes to shove, and supporters of the mayor are still burning David Miller effigies.

Stopping the buck by passing the buck. As if an increase in spending is the anomaly for a city that continues to grow. As if infrastructure needs only exist in the mind of spendthrift governments. As if a vibrant and dynamic public transit isn’t necessary for a 21^st-century big city.

The fate of Budget 2012 will ultimately come down to whose version of being tough prevails. The mayor, the budget chief and all those who fall in line behind them will try and convince enough of the council colleagues that being tough means saying no, and saying no often, to those they perceive as ‘special interests’. Unions, low income children, artsy-fartsy artists, the homeless and the marginalized. They’ve all been coddled too long and with too much of our hard earned dollars. Enough is enough.

The other side, the ‘silly socialists’ will try to convince a majority of councillors that being tough means standing firm in the face of adversity and not tossing the weakest of us overboard in order to keep afloat. Being tough means not resorting to fatuous scaremongering (Greece! Spain!) as some form of meaningful debate. Being tough means dealing with the hand that’s dealt you by the other levels of government – times are tough; you’re on your own – and not shirking your own duty to those who elected you to represent them.

Being tough is about crafting a budget that delivers both the most benefit and least amount of pain to the greatest number of people and not simply piecing together 23 votes by any means necessary. Regardless of your opinion of the former mayor, David Miller is not any part of that equation. This week is all about Mayor Rob Ford and the kind of tough he really is.

— …but sensitively submitted by Cityslikr