All Fried Up In The Big Smoke

Less political. More fictional.

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

Welcome To The Hot Seat, Mr. Budget Chief

Posted on September 4, 2013 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Anybody else pause a moment reading the Toronto Sun’s Don Peat write that our budget chief, Councillor Frank Di Giorgio, suggests the process of balancing the 2014 operating budget might ‘require a few miracles’? The man in charge of the $10 billion (more or less) purse strings casts an eye heavenward in hopes of some divine intervention to make sure revenues match expenditures because actual math might not do the trick this time round. Fingers crossed. Say your prayers. Hope there’s a rabbit to pull out of the fiscal hat.

I’m sure it was just an expression and the budget chief isn’t really that concerned. He has no choice but to balance the budget. The province mandates that he does so. It could even be he’s simply ramping up the concern, clearing the way for either service cuts or tax increases as necessary in order to meet the zero bottom line. He won’t be the first budget chief to do so.

But it could also be that Councillor Di Giorgio, in his first kick at the can as budget chief, is now staring into the hard reality of Mayor Ford’s voodoo economic model for running the finances of the city. Cut revenues, cut the gravy but whatever you do don’t cut services the public actually wants. Those are much tougher numbers to crunch. And if all that easy waste wasn’t nearly as prevalent as the mayor claimed?

Well, that’s enough to make any budget chief look for a little guidance from the big guy upstairs.

The almost impossible task the budget chief faces was made glaringly apparent at yesterday’s budget committee meeting. City staff reported a $58+ million projected surplus after the 2^nd quarter of 2013, made up largely of bigger than expected revenues from the Land Transfer Tax and money saved from unfilled staff vacancies, now in excess of 2500 positions including in vital departments like Human Resources, Planning, Health and IT. In order to keep the city in the black, it seems, the budget chief is going to have to keep that tax revenue coming in and maintain a freeze on making new hires.

The problem arises, however, when his boss wants to reduce that particular tax by 10% and preserve the façade of putting customer service first and foremost which entails keeping departments properly staffed up. Cut revenue and increase costs. It’s a difficult equation to keep in balance. Less money in + more money out = the same 0 it has to be every year.

To be fair to this administration, not filling staff vacancies – ‘gapping’, to use the euphemism — didn’t start in 2010. It has been an ongoing issue for some time now as an unobtrusive way to keep costs contained that isn’t immediately felt by the general public. A slight delay here. An unreturned call there. An accumulation of neglect owing to fewer and fewer bodies present to do the jobs that need getting done. Kicking the can down the road, essentially, in the name of fiscal prudence.

Things become acute however when such gapping is combined with a downward pressure on revenues. Never mind hiring to fill in the gaps. The gaps just get bigger, deeper.

Under questioning from councillors, City Manager Joe Pennachetti admitted that maybe they had cut a little too much in the Human Resources department at City Hall over the last few years. So there aren’t enough people to hire other people in other departments. The gaps just get bigger, deeper.

Team Ford stalwart and budget committee member Councillor Frances Nunziata tried to suggest that many of these unfilled vacancies were unnecessary management positions that didn’t affect front line services. The city manager gently disagreed, saying the bulk of the vacancies were front line workers. He will deliver a report to next month’s meeting setting out the numbers in more detail.

But it’s hard to believe that the 36 vacancies in the planning department, say, are unnecessary management type positions. The understaffing in that vital department has long been decried, going back to at least the Miller years if not before but it’s staggering to think that it’s continuing all during the building boom that the city has been experiencing, not to mention the fact that we’re also reviewing our Official Plan… with a depleted planning department.

The city manager did point out that Toronto isn’t the only municipality experiencing problems hiring qualified people to fill its bureaucratic ranks. Competition is tight from competing cities as well as the private sector. It’s not as easy as just topping up your human resources department and telling them to go out and get hiring.

It’s going to take opening the wallets up and creating a desirable work place environment in order to successfully recruit candidates here. Both conditions seem to be the exact opposite of how the current administration operates. Dedicated to the best customer service that the money we refuse to spend can buy.

If that unworkable kind of Dr. Doolittle, push me-pull me approach wasn’t evident to the budget chief before yesterday’s meeting, it certainly should be now. How he’s going to straddle that divide, God only knows. So far, there’s no indication the budget chief does.

— celestially submitted by Cityslikr

Music To A Councillor’s Ears

Posted on April 28, 2013 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Tell the truth.

Have you ever heard of a CBA before? Community Benefits Agreement. Apparently, they’re all the rage in other places.

This from a handout I picked up at the Community Benefits Mount Dennis Weston public forum on Friday:

A community benefit agreement or CBA is a contract negotiated between a developer or public agency and a community that outlines the benefits the community will receive from the development in return for community support of the proposed project. Benefits can range from guarantees of local hiring and training to a Project Labour Agreement to community-space allocations and funs for community programmes.

When big development projects like the Staples Centre in Los Angeles, the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and the Vancouver Island Highway came to life from the planning stages, representatives from impacted communities stepped forward to start negotiating for things like living wage agreements and apprenticeship programs. Big development projects, you say? Toronto’s got development projects. Where are our CBAs?

The Community Benefits group is trying to get that on the table as construction for the Eglinton LRT kicks into gear. (Never mind that the PanAm Games are just a little over two years from now.) On the former Kodak lands in Mount Dennis, Metrolinx is set to build a maintenance and storage facility. Aggressive pursuit of a CBA would greatly help the area economically. An area in need of an economic boost.

Yet, on Friday evening the audience is told only six people in the entire city are working on the CBA angle. Six people. $8.4 billion is going into LRT lines in Toronto. How much in getting ready for the PanAm Games? And six people are trying to kickstart the idea of Community Benefits Agreements?

Our mayor expends what little energy he actually expends on his job talking up the economic upsides of a possible waterfront casino or island airport runway extension (while talking down new taxes that would directly lead to more jobs building transit). Why is he not tubthumbing about CBAs on projects that are already up and going? Fighting for fantasy jobs when there are real ones right here already to be had?

And Councillor Frances Nunziata whose ward the Kodak lands are in, one of the most economically disadvantaged wards in the city, where is she on CBAs? Why is she spending her time cheerleading Mayor Ford’s phantasmagorical pursuits rather than acting as a conduit between her community’s economic interests and Metrolinx on a development running right through her ward?

Councillor Nunziata is one of the biggest complainers at City Hall. Never does she miss an opportunity to point out how deprived and in need her Ward 11 is. An area of the city she has represented one way or another since 1988, it should be noted. Surely to christ she must be one of the six people in Toronto working away on Community Benefits Agreements for the Eglinton LRT construction. If she isn’t, why isn’t she?

The councillor made the briefest of appearances at Friday’s public forum. Shook a few hands. Stood in front of a camera. But was gone before the discussion got started.

A discussion that included Patricia Castellanos, the Deputy Director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, who was instrumental in forging a CBA on the Staples Centre development. Ms. Castellanos praised the municipal politicians in Los Angeles she worked with, calling them enlightened on the topic of CBAs and very helpful in getting them finalized. She said that many of the councillors she worked with were embarrassed with high employment rates in their districts, so were driven to find ways to provide jobs and benefit their communities.

Maybe the first step residents of Mount Dennis Weston and Ward 11 need to take is to elect municipal politicians who will actually care about such local concerns as employment, training and poverty. Some new blood willing to learn about alternative approaches to community building like CBAs. Enlightened politicians embarrassed about unemployment and poverty rates in their ward, and prepared to do something about them other than just to use them as a cudgel to make divisive noises.

— helpfully submitted by Cityslikr