Tag Archives: Councillor Paula Fletcher

Governing Through Philanthropy

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Thank goodness for the quarterly councillor expense report shaming. Four times a year, those of us who spend their time City Hall gazing get served up a steaming hot bowl of indignation at the wasteful misuse of our hard earned tax dollars by our profligate local elected representatives. It most certainly beats spending time looking into anything of substance especially during these dog days of summer when absolutely nothing else is going on.

Or as the Toronto Sun likes to think of it, Christmas in August!

Even the more rational seeming of their writers, Don Peat for example, gets into torch and pitchfork mode. “New numbers revealed by the city this week show Toronto city councillors kept draining their taxpayer-funded office budgets in April, May and June,” Peat wrote this week [bolding mine]. You see what he did there? ‘Draining’ not simply spending. Like blood-sucking vampires rather than just councillors using allowable funds to go about their business of, well, being councillors. And never forget whose money that is, folks. You, the taxpayers.

The Peatster goes on to report that in total, councillors and Mayor Ford spent exactly $364,233.95 so far for the first half of 2012. Now, allow me to do some math for you here. I’m not even going to bother including the mayor’s 6 month budget parameters because that would mean I’d have to find out what that is and research isn’t something I do much of in August even though it would make my case even more.

Councillors have a yearly $30,000 office expenses budget. So (and I’m doing this part without a calculator), that would be $15,000 for half a year. There are 44 councillors. That would be 44X15000 (and I am using a calculator now). $660,000 that all the councillors could’ve spent by now. What number did you have again, Don of the Sun? $364,233.95. That’s $295,766.05 less than they could’ve spent. Or, about 55% of what they as a body were allowed to spend by this time of year. And remember, I’ve lazily included expenses from the mayor’s office so, in fact, the number would be even smaller.

Oh, the outrage!

Cue Ms. Sue-Ann Levy.

Councillors show they’re cheap

This is Ms. Levy’s métier. Her bread and butter red meat sandwich. Right in her stylistic wheel house where she doesn’t have to string together any logical reasoning. Just a laundry list of Things That Make Her Go Grrrrrr.

$10 for tickets to see Shimon Peres speak. $50 for a couple tickets to a fundraiser for the Islamic Foundation. $300 here. $350 there. A $100 donation to host a community BBQ on Earth Day by Paula (Fattie) Fletcher. What?! Physical appearance has everything to do with this.

At a ‘business meal’ with a young woman she was mentoring as part of Toronto Regional Champion Campaign Protegee Program, Councillor Karen (Skinny… why not?) Stintz even had the nerve to spend $8.31 of her office budget on a “business meal’ consisting of rooibos – aka elitist — tea, hot chocolate and a banana chocolate muffin. Sue-Ann’s got some advice for you, sweetheart. Pay for that shit yourself because…

Who the fuck knows?

It’s merely the rantings of right wing ideologue opinion-maker. Someone who’s spent, I don’t know, seven decades covering City Hall and what she admires most in our politicians is thrift. Not vision. Not compassion. Not an ability to get things done and help build a better city. But thrift. Just thrift.

Coincidentally I’m sure, the exact same prime directive of her current meal tickets, Mayor Rob Ford, his councillor-brother Doug and their deputy mayor, Doug Holyday. Cheapness is next to godliness, folks. Office budgets are nothing more than re-election slush funds. Donations essentially a bribe for votes. If constituents want to know what’s going on or have a problem, all they need is to pick the phone. You might even get yourself a house call from the mayor.

So committed to this frugal ideal, Councillor Doug (The Wealthy) Ford works gratis, giving his salary to charity and spending only out of his own pocket on essential things like the banner for his and his brother’s weight loss challenge. If only more of the well-to-do were content with just one paycheque and devoted at least some of their time to pitching in and governing, we could do away with “expenses” altogether and apply those savings to cutting our taxes even further. A healthy democracy would be restored.

Just like in the olden days.

I don’t know. Call me a spendthrift, a trough feeder but I think all this kvetching is little more than a tempest in a teapot, making a mountain out of molehill, a distraction. There are more pressing matters at hand.

Besides, I think more along the lines of free market principles on this. In the end, you always wind up getting what you pay for.

— mind on my moneyly submitted by Cityslikr

A Debate 3 Months Too Late

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Do you hear that? The low humming, ever so slight grinding buzz? That’s the sound of triumphal ideological bluster awkwardly changing gears into reverse. It’s not particularly noisy or grating. In fact, there’s something quite soothing about it. Not yogic in its serenity. More like the summer cicada song, lulling us into a soporific state of waking slumber.

A motion to defer and rethink new recreation field user fees for the yout’ of Toronto was put forth by Mayor Ford yesterday and passed unanimously as did amendments from councillors Janet Davis and Paula Fletcher, an almost unheard of case of accord at city council during the Ford era. And as welcome as the situation was – consensus, that is, not necessarily the details which deserve another post entirely – it was deadly fucking boring. Conflict sits at the heart of good drama, yes? For those of us used to some 16 months of never ending, monumental struggle, it all felt like such a drag, man.

What’s good for the city is bad for city hall watchers?

Much of the anticlimax had to do with the vote result being pretty much a foregone conclusion. The story of new fees coming down on the kiddies of the city (‘a children’s tax’, Councillor Raymond Cho called it) to use Toronto’s playing fields took on such negative resonance that even the mayor thought it to be untenable. Either untenable or just another very likely black eye loss that he didn’t need to face at the moment. So get out there ahead of the curve on this one. Respect for the taxpayers taking a backseat to the widows and orphans out there.

But quite frankly, most of the air got sucked out of chambers because councillor after councillor stood up to defend themselves for letting these user fees see this much daylight in the first place. Notionally, if you voted in favour of the 2012 budget back in January, you voted in favour of bringing in these new user fees. Many of the 39 councillors who had given the amended budget a thumbs-up wanted to clear the air as to why they did what they did. Mea culpas and/or finger pointing get a little tedious after a while.

Here’s the thing.

This has been pretty much 2 years or so in the making. If you elect somebody as mayor who spent the entire campaign claiming he could cut waste, cut spending, cut taxes without cutting services or programs or facilities, well, new user fees shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise to anyone. Add to this that after burning through a previous year’s surplus and ridding city coffers of revenue by eliminating the VRT and pronouncing loudly and relentlessly that Toronto’s fiscal foundation was crumbling, any budget proposal was going to be chock full of user fees. It’s just basic math.

Besides, with the libertarian streak that runs deep in the mayor, a You Use It, You Pay For It ethos pretty much goes without saying. Unless of course we’re talking about driving private vehicles. Then hey, it’s all for one and one for all. Mi camino es su camino, si hermano?

Yet Mayor Ford flinched on this one. Along with his brother, the deputy mayor, budget chief and all the other fiscal conservatives who screamed bloody murder back only two months ago that such profligacy at City Hall was a thing of the past. We were dangling at the end of our spendthrift rope. Financial wrack and ruin were awaiting us if we didn’t zip up our pockets and start looking after our pennies, every single dime, yaddie, yaddie, yaddie.

We’d burned down the banana stand, folks.

So we needed to step back, take some time for careful consideration and reflection. Unlike during the full court budget process press when it was all hands on deck, grab the pails and start baling because the good ship SS Toronto was sinking into a sea of red. Everybody, and we meant everybody, needed to start pulling their weight. There would be no more freeloading under this mayor’s watch.

Yesterday’s change of course altered the dire landscape, it seems. Mayor Ford claimed that there was new money from all the sweetheart labour deals he’d swung with city workers. However much that might be putting the cart before the horse, even if true, what happened to all the talk of paying down our oppressive debt with any extra cash we found under the cushions? Isn’t the $1.5 million that’s now being waived for kids to use our sports field ‘gravy’ according to the Frugal Times dictionary?

And how will this decision affect budget debates going forward from here? It’ll be difficult for the administration to cry poor when other ‘special interests’ step up, Oliver Twist like, mewling for more. Please… sir… you found $1.5 million for them. What about us?

Of course, with the mayor already heading into campaign mode, it probably means that we’ve turned the corner on this. It’ll be all good news for us from here on in. We slayed the debt dragon, folks. Broke its proverbial back. Everybody said it couldn’t be done. We did it.

Re-elect Mayor Ford in 2014.

— belatedly submitted by Cityslikr

Skirmish Won. Battle Still Ongoing. Victory From From Secure.

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(As we were in absentia for Team Ford’s waterfront retreat, we turn to colleague Sol Chrom for a summary of last week’s important but very, very fluid victory on the waterfront.)

*  *  *

If Team Ford’s Port Lands plans are truly dead, would someone mind driving a stake through them?

The plans, that is.

That’s how a tweet from Torontoist’s Hamutal Dotan is describing things, linking to a quote from Councillor Paula Fletcher.

This is a triumph for the public…This is a Toronto moment, a Jane Jacobs moment.

Can’t argue with the sentiments, but I’m inclined to agree with a comment left on the Torontoist site by one dsmithhfx:

Don’t celebrate quite yet… I don’t trust this cabal of scumbag opportunists as far as I could throw them. It’s a setback, to be sure. And much as we’d like to think of it as a turning point, the point where the wave of ignorance, resentment, stupidity, and short-term greed that the Ford approach taps into finally broke, let’s not start the happy dance just yet.

The Port Lands/Waterfront fiasco has captivated our attention for several weeks, to be sure, and we can’t underestimate its symbolic importance. But it’s also possible to think of it as this week’s Shiny ObjectTM — something thing that attracts our attention and keeps us all occupied while other things are going on.

A thoughtful essay by Dylan Reid in Spacing last week discussed the slow decline of a community through a process of dozens of little cuts. Cancel a minor program here, put less resources into something else there, cut back on the scope of something else over there. The examples Reid cites include things like litter pickup, tree planting, neighbourhood improvement programs, snow clearing, and making bylaw enforcement reactive rather than proactive. As Reid writes:

Individually, the impact of each of these is small. And it’s quite possible some of them could be reasonable proposals for a city with a screwed-up budgetary process if they were thought through properly (e.g. all parks could have citizen committees that take care of flower planting and care, if the city provides the flowers and eases up on regulation). But done all in a rush, and all together, the overall impact will be a gradual degradation in the walking environment. It will get dirtier and trickier, and many programs that make it more attractive will be abandoned. People will still be able to walk, of course. They just won’t want to walk as much, unless they have to. And since walking is how people experience their city most directly, Toronto will feel a little bit more like a city in decline — which, given the amount of building going on and people moving in, it really shouldn’t.

By themselves, these measures may not amount to much. They don’t have the impact or the visibility of the Port Lands clusterfuck, because they don’t carry the same scale or price tag. That’s why they’re mostly off the radar. Cumulatively, however, their effect on our quality of life could be just as serious. The places we love and live in, whether they’re downtown or in the suburbs, would become dirtier, more threadbare, and less welcoming.

But this is what happens when the function of government is entrusted to people with no commitment to the public sphere. I’ve already written that the current administration seems colonized by people with no interest in using the power of government to advance the common good, and the events of the past few weeks have done nothing to suggest otherwise. When you start pulling at the threads that hold a community together, you never know when the whole thing’s going to unravel.

This is not to take anything away from the the people whose efforts forced a retreat on the waterfront, of course. And the folks involved in CodeBlueTO deserve a special shout-out. Let’s just remember, though, that this is a long war that has to be fought on many fronts. These guys aren’t done yet. There’s still a long slog ahead.

— submitted by Sol Chrom

(Not only is Sol Chrom an occasional commenter here but he’s also been known to blog over at Posterous, tumblr and OpenFile.)