Who Wouldn’t Want A Casino?

I joked about this on the Twitter last week. Probably wasn’t the first one. Definitely not the last.

But now it seems to deserve more than the 140 character treatment as, zombie-like, it’s an idea, a dumb idea, a highly unoriginal idea that just won’t die. A waterfront casino cash cow. Ching-ching!

It reminds me of one of my favourite movie lines from one of my favourite 80s movie, Prizzi’s Honor. “If Marxie Heller’s so fucking smart, how come he’s so fucking dead?”

If a casino’s so fucking smart, how come suburban councillors are so fucking dead set against having one in their ward? Never does a council or committee meeting go by when we don’t hear the whine from the likes of councillor Mammoliti or Nunziata or Ford about how downtown gets everything and the suburbs get stiffed. Hey, folks. Here’s your chance. Step right up and claim your casino.

Remember The Great Sheppard Subway Struggle of 2012? Sure you do. Scarborough councillors Ainslie, Berardinetti, Crawford, Del Grande, Kelly and Thompson all demanded that Scarborough residents get what downtown had, subways not no stinkin’ streetcars. They weren’t second class citizens. They deserved first class transit.

Well, where  are they all now? You want something downtown doesn’t have? Here, take the casino. Please. There’s some waterfront out there in your neck of the woods, isn’t there? Stick the casino there, why don’t you.

That's NIMBY not GUMBY

I heard Budget Chief Del Grande on the news this morning, suggesting that the old city of Toronto’s inability to say no is a source of the city’s money woes. Well, here you go, Mr. Budget Chief. Downtown’s finally saying no to a casino. Maybe Ward 39 would like to take it off our hands.

For the casinos biggest supporters, it’s a really good idea in someone else’s ward.

Just like transit planning. As John McGrath wrote about the commissioner of Los Angeles transit, Richard Katz’s seminar yesterday, “…everyone wants a transit solution that other people use.” Or development planning. John tweeted from today’s Toronto-East York Community Council meeting (he’s everywhere, that John McGrath): Councillor [Pam] McConnell, speaking for every deputant against height ever: “This is a beautiful design, for somewhere else.”

Everybody wants the upside — Yeah, whatever. That’s for another post — of a casino, the benefits but none of the headaches. Parking and congestion. Down-and-out gamblers. A Jeff Foxworthy crowd streaming out into the streets, looking for a post-show nosh at a Cracker Barrel.

If I wanted a fucking casino in my neighbourhood, I’d move fucking downtown!

It’s almost as if these councillors all know a casino is little more than a dog and pony show, it’s not really going to contribute much to city’s bottom line but it’s a great way to stick to downtowners. Ohhh, they’re gonna hate this! Like they did tearing up the Jarvis bike lanes, de-fancifying the Fort York bridge and making threatening noises about the Portlands.

In his Metro article today, Matt Elliott pointed out that one of the mayoral campaign platforms of Rob Ford was to give “…more power to local community councils to make neighbourhood decisions.” Instead, we’ve seen a whole lot of imposing their will upon others by Team Ford. Might I suggest that for some of the more vocal, pushy ones, they take a little more time to tend to their own garden, gussy up their own respective wards. That way, perhaps, in the future we won’t have to listen to their bellyaching, complaining how they never get anything.

How about starting with a casino?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

generously submitted by Cityslikr

Waning of the Thumb

(A repost of our Friday Torontoist piece. Title is all theirs.)

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A two day meeting dragged into three. As the third day ground to its inconclusive conclusion, participants voted to defer all remaining items to the next regularly scheduled meeting in February. Decisions put off. The business of municipal governance delayed.

Perhaps it was because council members were looking ahead to the big game, the 2012 budget battle. Beginning almost immediately, today in fact, as the Budget Committee kicks off the first of seven meetings over the course of the next eleven days, including two for public deputations, to hash out a budget for city council to consider and implement next month. That’s the big fish to fry, where energy needs to be expended. This week’s council meeting was simply the warm up session, getting loose, stretching the body into fighting shape.

Or it simply could be seen as the precursor to how things are going to happen over the next little while. A war of attrition. Gone are the early, glorious days of shock and awe that saw quick and surprisingly decisive victories for the Ford administration. The VRT gone! Councillor office budgets slashed! Transit City mauled in its infancy. The mayor is still pushing ahead but it’s now become a tough slog, a slow grind. Some of the more egregious intentions are being picked off by sniper fire, some even coming from friends and allies. His opponents’ Maginot line is still holding.

Councillor Shelley Carroll amended out the possibility of large industrial water users being given carte blanche to ignore city sewer by-laws in the Rate Supported Water and Waste Water budget. It reserved the city’s right to monitor ‘effluent’ – essentially waste water dumping – and to keep aiming for water conservation targets. The mayor found himself on the losing side of what turned out to be a drubbing on that one, abandoned even by his brother and budget chief.

Mayor Ford also took it on the chin (even if symbolically) on the Rate Supported Solid Waste Management budget when Councillor David Shiner, a usual Ford loyalist, maintained the current 44 environmental days that Public Works and Infrastructure Committee wanted to chop back to 11. Certainly, Councillor Shiner’s amendment scales back the events and doesn’t threaten the mayor’s desired 0% increase in waste collection rates. It was, however, a definitive poke in the eye of those looking to do away with remnants of green initiatives in the city.

Councillor Shiner was also front-and-centre in negotiating a compromise with noted foes of the mayor, Councillors Adam Vaughan and Mike Layton on the relocation of the youth shelter, Eva’s Phoenix. It was sitting on property Team Ford has its eyes on selling as part of the revised Fort York bridge plan. The shelter poised an obstacle in the march to ‘monetize city assets’ and in finding it a new home, Shiner brokered a deal that kept both sides, if not happy, at least content.

It could also be that what we’re witnessing is the formation of a consensus building model at city council. The hitherto unuttered word since Rob Ford took office, ‘compromise’ is becoming part of the vernacular. Many of the mayor’s most ardent opponents including Janet Davis, Joe Mihevc, Kristyn Wong-Tam, Paula Fletcher and Raymond Cho made amendments to the direction of child care services in the city. Mihevc managed to get everyone present at council except for Councillor Minnan-Wong to agree to work at not closing any day care centres until hearing what the provincial government, who has been slow and unsteady holding up its part of the funding formula, will say about the matter in next year’s budget.

Compromise may be a word the mayor has to come to terms with. Winter is indeed blowing in, issuing a serious threat to further bog down his troops and heavy artillery in the muck and goo of the 2012 budget process. (Yeah, I wasn’t going to let go of the military metaphors that easily.) Talks of cuts to services at the TTC, elimination of pools and programs, reduction in library hours, all are emboldening the opposition outside council to set up and stand their ground. Within council, allies are exerting their independence and not bending to the mayor’s bully tactics. Witness just how far the moderate, small c conservative, Councillor Chin Lee has drifted from the Ford fold.

The mayor has expended on awful lot of political capital in his first year, tilting at long standing pet peeves of his that represent the worst excesses of tax and spend governing. Non-automobile forms of transit. Community engagement and outreach. The arts. The environment. Anything that smacks of ‘nice to haves’. All before it truly gets ugly for him. When that bus doesn’t arrive for that little old lady going out grocery shopping in Scarborough. When that library is closed on Sunday for that little girl looking for some quiet study time. When the family has to go even further afield to find affordable swimming lessons.

The battles are going to get more intense over the next 6 weeks, the pushback stronger and terrain more treacherous. Already besieged, it’s hard to see how Mayor Ford can simply bludgeon ahead in that damn the torpedoes fashion that has been his governing style to date. His arsenal has been severely depleted. While hardly a spent force, Mayor Ford is not the indomitable powerhouse he was earlier this year. The one that caught everybody flat-footed, surprised and easily overwhelmed. It’s now trench warfare (you know I had to go there) and any gains will come with great cost. If he fails to adapt to the new reality, the mayor may find that the 2012 budget is the hill he will die on.

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Never A Dull Moment

Heads up all you Toronto city council watchers. If you want to witness exactly how the Mayor Ford administration dysfunctionally functions, there’s no better place to start than spending a few hours with the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee. There’s intrigue and machinations aplenty. Dastardly double-dealing. Oozing personal antipathy.

And in the end? Invariably a little more of the city has been chopped up or sold off for an ever so slight relief of our budgetary woes. All this and no cover charge to boot.

Yesterday’s gathering could’ve been so very different. There was actually serious consensus brewing, and between two committee members who couldn’t really be much further apart on the political spectrum without needing spyglasses to recognize on another. Councillor David Shiner, committee vice chair and bona fide, shark hating right winger. Last spring, if you recall, he used the committee to bring to a screeching halt the proposed Fort York bridge, citing cost overruns and it being unnecessarily ‘fancy’. This came at the expense and to the surprise of the councillor for the ward the bridge was to built in, Mike Layton, left leaning and most definitely not a member of Team Ford.

Despite this history and such stark ideological differences, these two councillors seemed to have patched things up and worked out a compromise that would see a bridge built not dissimilar to the previous one but at less cost and, more importantly, slightly smaller that opened up more land nearby to be developed. That’s an important point to keep track off as it’ll come back as part of the fitting coda of this story. That just seems to be how the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee rolls.

Now, it’s hard to see what exactly Councillor Shiner representing the administration gave up here to reach an accord on the bridge. There was no disputing the fact that one was needed for the area. The only real nod to the previous design was to ape its appearance. Everything else met Councillor Shiner’s demands: cheaper, shorter and more to city owned property to sell. Even the timeline which would not get the bridge built in time for the War of 1812 bicentennial celebrations at Fort York was just fine and dandy with him. Hard to use the word ‘compromise’ with such an agreement. Sure you can have a bridge but only to my specifications.

It’s not like the councillor went out of his way elsewhere during the meeting to extend a hand to his colleague. Shiner led the charge to defeat an item Layton put forth to exclude bikes from a bylaw restricting chaining or locking items to city property for any length of time. It was the kind of thing that might be OK downtown, Councillor Shiner suggested, but wouldn’t work in his suburban ward. A chaotic scene of bikes locked to fences and bus shelters outside the Finch subway station. And we wonder why bylaw harmonization still hasn’t happened in this post-amalgamation era.

On top of which, Councillor Shiner insisted on pushing through an item that will really only serve to harass the homeless living on our streets; a situation less endemic in his ward than it would be in Councillor Layton’s ward. Is the situation so hunky dory up in Willowdale, no problems there to solve, that councillors like David Shiner have ample time to muck about in other wards, emptily pontificating on things they have only a passing knowledge or interest in? If I understood the councillor correctly, people have no right to sleep on sidewalks if he doesn’t have the right to park his car on them. (The sidewalks, that is. Not the homeless. I think.) Yeah. It was that idiotic of a discussion.

Still, Councillors Shiner and Layton overcame their differences and put forward a motion that would see a Fort York bridge built.

And then, enter the sandman, PWI Committee Chair Denzil Minnan-Wong.

Seemingly not content with what would appear to everyone else to be a victory for his side, the councillor slithered in a two part motion that would, one, direct section 37 development fees to the building of the bridge and two, specifically targeted a property, 53 Strachan to be exact, to be used as ‘leverage’ to get the ball rolling on development in the area.

Whoa, whoa, whoa went up the cry. Where did this come from, asks Councillor Layton. Even Councillor Shiner seemed surprised by the surprise move, immediately jumping in to broker some kind of deal between his chair and Councillor Layton.

Once more, at yet another Public Works and Infrastructure Committee meeting, a non-Ford compliant councillor gets blindsided by a proposal to push and/or kill a project in their ward. No prior consultation. No attempt to involve the local representative. Nothing more than a deliberate poke in the eye. Take that, consensus.

In the ensuing brouhaha, it’s revealed that among other things at 53 Strachan there’s a youth shelter and a community garden. Councillor Minnan-Wong didn’t appear to know that but might have had he spoken first to Councillor Layton. Why he didn’t, only Councillor Minnan-Wong would know but from the back-and-forth between the two, it seems the committee chair felt Layton had gone public after an earlier meeting between them about getting the Fort Bridge motion onto the committee agenda…

Or some such petty, spiteful bullshit like that. Committee member Councillor Gord Perks suggested it was just simply another example of proving who was the boss of the committee. Marking his territory.

Not that it ultimately mattered, as the chair’s item was soundly defeated by the committee. But it managed to cast a pall on what could be considered a minor step forward out from the partisan pissing match that now passes for debate and discussion at City Hall these days. It’s almost as if the more ardent members of Team Ford are allergic to anything that smacks of compromise or cooperation. Concession and negotiation are dirty words. They have the upper hand now so giving in on anything, admitting to any sort of negotiated settlement, is a sign of weakness.

Even in the building of a bridge, they are incapable of anything other than crass politics.

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