All Fried Up In The Big Smoke

Less political. More fictional.

Another Gardiner East Rethink

Posted on September 8, 2015 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Remember back, oh, I don’t know, 3 months ago, when city council had that prolonged, knock `em down, drag ‘em out battle over the fate of the Gardiner east expressway? The great hybrid # 2 debate over a replacement option lots of people hated, few loved and Mayor Tory championed? Political capital spent all over the place, resulting in a close 24-21 vote that brought back memories of the Ford era with its downtown-suburban divisiveness and ultimate triumph of resentful emotionalism over sound, reasoned city building.

Well apparently, according to Jennifer Pagliario and David Rider at the Toronto Star, it all may have been for nought. Seems the mayor’s been working behind the scenes to reconfigure the design of the eastern portion of the Gardiner so that it more resembles the original hybrid option, one that city staff had rejected as technically unworkable which lead to the second hybrid proposal. Making this hybrid option 2.1? 1.2.1?

Setting aside the optics of Mayor Tory spending even more of his time out of the public eye doing city business, he’s also been quietly mulling over a 2024 Olympic bid during the summer months, you have to wonder what the hell all the fuss was about back in June? Why did the mayor come on so hard then on an issue he seems so willing to walk back on now? He waded into the debate before listening to public feedback during deputations at a Public Works and Infrastructure Committee, unequivocally planting his flag of support in the ground. He sniffed derisively at Gardiner teardown proponents as something akin to latte-sipping boulevardiers. He muzzled the city’s chief planner after she publicly disagreed with him on which option would be best.

And now he’s all willing to hunker down, even with his ‘opponents’, and bang out a compromise, a compromise that was pretty much on the table back in June?

Only someone unfamiliar with Toronto City Hall would be at all surprised that a major infrastructure project decision is undergoing reconsideration. It’s what we do. In this case it should be especially anticipated since the June vote in favour of the mayor’s option 2 jeopardized a number of other waterfront development plans, setting the city on a possible collision course with some deep-pocketed players.

None of this information is new or comes out of the blue. All of it was on the table in June. Mayor Tory brushed it aside, brusquely at times, digging in his heels and refusing to budge.

Now it’s all like, “They’ve done a lot of work to make something, as I was confident they could, much better than what appeared in some of the diagrams that took place…very significant improvement.”

As he “was confident they could.” Yet he still opted to pretty much go to war with colleagues and staff in some sort of pipe swinging, PR exercise. Power drunk gives way to sober second thought.

Ah well, at least he’s come to his senses, right? The other guy, the previous guy would’ve just hunkered down and fought any attempt to revisit the decision. Mayor Tory, after using the opportunity to prove who’s boss, quietly retreats to fix a boneheaded outcome that he had loudly pushed for months.

Progress!

I’ve given up attempting to divine tactics and motivations in how this mayor operates. It’s pretty much by the seat-of-his-pants, listening to the bad advice he’s getting or only getting bad advice. He played chief advocate for the wrong side of the Gardiner east debate out of pure political calculation. Somewhere deep in the backrooms he’s conducted his business in over the course of the last 3 months, he’s been forced to reckon with his misstep on this file, and not necessarily by his opponents on city council, I imagine. Like with the carding issue, Mayor Tory isn’t trying to do what is right or just. He’s simply following the bouncing political ball.

And now, with the Gardiner east, he’s had to go retrieve the ball he kicked into the bushes.

One of his opponents in this unnecessary fight the mayor picked, one of his appointed deputy mayors, Councillor Pam McConnell whose ward that section of expressway runs through, has obviously been part of the behind the scenes negotiations and has come to a slightly less glowing conclusion about the compromise. “Maybe it’s something everyone can live with,” she effused, if that word meant the opposite of what it does. Maybe it’s something everyone can live with.

Which, I think, pretty much sums up John Tory’s time in the mayor’s office so far. Maybe something everyone can live with. Don’t expect or demand too much. Mistakes will get made. Gaffes will happen. Some stuff will get done too. Just not too much and certainly nothing particularly exciting or groundbreaking or visionary. Just enough that maybe everyone can live with.

— still incredulously submitted by Cityslikr

Old New Is Still Bad News

Posted on July 18, 2015 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

For anybody following along with the surreal and torturous Scarborough subway debate for the past 5 years, none of this comes as any sort of surprise. The ridership numbers, the cost estimates were all highly suspect, right from the outset. Then mayor Rob Ford was the prime pusher behind the idea for a new Scarborough subway. How could the numbers be anything but questionable?

“Should there have been an extensive due-diligence process before those numbers were quoted and used publicly? Yes,” Toronto’s chief planner, Jennifer Keesmaat told the Toronto Star’s Jennifer Pagliaro. “Was there? No.”

In the post-Gary Webster era at City Hall, it’s not hard to comprehend how staff did their upmost to tell their political masters what they wanted to hear especially when it came to public transit. The former TTC General Manager was forced to walk the plank when he publically expressed an opinion in support of building LRTs instead of subways. It clearly wasn’t safe for staff to be laying their cards on the table.

With the provincial transportation body, Metrolinx, demanding an almost immediate decision from city council on how to proceed with the extension of the Bloor-Danforth subway line (a decision the province itself had its own vested opinion about), city staff had been given a couple weeks to come up with a report, a report that many councillors were going to use by any means necessary to justify their support for a subway extension into Scarborough.

If the objective here is to parse the planning analysis that was on the floor of council as being problematic, I would like to suggest: Yes. We didn’t go through a fulsome process. We were not given the opportunity to go through a fulsome process. We were not expected to go through a fulsome process because it was a politically driven process.

“A politically driven process,” according to the chief planner, that wound up inflating ridership numbers to within the acceptable range for building a subway, 14,000 at peak hours. Where that number came from, nobody quite knows. Somewhere from within the planning department, it seems. A number not “necessarily documented”, according to the city director of transportation planning, Tim Laspa, but a number “discussed in meetings.”

Not that the numbers matter now. “Irrelevant” today, says Keesmaat. Not that they ever mattered during the debate. This story’s prime villain, Scarborough councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker, says he supported the subway regardless of ridership numbers simply on a matter of “fairness”. “Scarborough should have equal access to transit with other areas.”

That’s nonsense, of course.

Scarborough would be better served, more fairly served by implementing the full LRT plan that was part of Transit City. That’s just a plain fact.

But as we’re learning more explicitly now, as many of us have known since 2010, facts have very little to do with this debate. City staff found the environment for reporting facts toxic to their careers. Facts proved to be inconvenient to mayoral ambitions and other political opportunism. Hell, facts didn’t even have to be factual.

Who knows if this news is coming in too late. Shovels are not yet in the ground but it still feels like the fix is in. What is obvious at this point, though, is it’s going to cost us a lot of money, a lot, a shit tonne of money, stretching out for decades, to go on ignoring the facts as they continue to come to light. An expensive ignoring of facts that won’t, in the end, make much more than a dent in our already woefully under-performing public transit system.

— still angrily submitted by Cityslikr

A Terrible Plan Made Even Worse

Posted on July 17, 2015 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Adding insult to injury that is the oozing sore of transit plans, the Scarborough subway, the Toronto Star’s Jennifer Pagliaro reported today that, according city council rules, the vote to revert from the already underway LRT eastern extension of the Bloor-Danforth line to a subway never should have occurred in the first place.

In the end, [Speaker] Nunziata ignored advice from city staff and ruled the motion [to re-open the LRT/subway debate] was properly before council. It passed with a 35-9 vote — opening the door for Ford and others to ultimately cancel plans for the LRT in favour of the more expensive subway option.

This, after a 24 hour scramble that had seen the speaker first stop the motion’s mover, Councillor Glenn DeBaeremaeker, from moving the motion on procedural grounds, then agreeing to rule on it later and seeking help from the mayor’s office in wording the ruling she would subsequently give that ultimately re-opened the debate.

But city clerk Watkiss told the Star the speaker is only permitted to give rulings she herself or the clerk has written. She also said the city’s procedural bylaws set out that the Speaker must give procedural reasons for her ruling.

“The [then mayor Rob Ford’s then chief of staff] Towhey ruling was not a proper procedural ruling, but a policy ruling, and the Speaker needs to give procedural rulings,” Watkiss wrote in an email. “She should not be ruling on the basis of policy as she needs to maintain a measure of independence.”

Still Speaker Nunziata’s response to that?

“Council procedures dictate that while the speaker may consult with the Clerk prior to ruling on a matter, it is ultimately the speaker who decides the way in which he/she will rule.”

Rules? M’eh. Whatever.

While it should not be overlooked that, despite the very questionable manner in which it came about, city council could’ve voted to keep the Scarborough subway debate closed, and chose instead to re-open it , overwhelmingly so, we should perhaps be even more alarmed at how easily rules and procedures at city council can be discarded and ignored.

Is that simply the price that gets paid living in a free-wheeling democracy? Our elected officials are the ultimate decision-makers and the civil service, the bureaucracy, sits in place merely to advise not instruct? When the chips are down, a true democracy cannot be hamstrung by the rules and procedures — not put in place but adjudicated by – unelected officials?

I don’t have an answer to any of these questions. It seems to me that if rules and procedures are being contravened, those in charge of upholding them, in this case the city clerk staff, should be in a position to, at the very least, make loud noises that the rules and procedures are being violated, if not stop the violations dead in their tracks. You can’t do that, Madam/Mister Speaker.

Does that overstep unspoken boundaries, undercutting the democratic process?

More clear, perhaps, is that the position of Speaker (and Deputy Speaker, natch) at city council ought not to be left in the hands of the mayor’s office to appoint. As it stands now, like chairs of standing committees, the Speaker of city council is put forward by the mayor and pretty much rubber-stamped by a city council vote. It is extremely difficult to remove them once they’re in place.

If, as the current speaker believes, it is the role of the speaker to ultimately decide “the way in which he/she will rule”, maybe their allegiance shouldn’t be owed to the one person who put them in place, the mayor, but to the wider body, city council itself. “In order to maintain a measure of independence,” as city clerk Ulli Watkiss suggested, the speaker needs to answer directly to city council not via the mayor’s office. Why not have city council truly elect a speaker (and deputy speaker, natch) rather than simply sign off on the mayor’s recommendation?

It’s hard to imagine how anyone in the position of speaker could ‘maintain a measure of independence’ while looking over their shoulder at the mayor who put them in the job, a mayor who can assume the speaker’s chair whenever the fancy strikes them. So it should come as no surprise that, in this particular case, the speaker actually went to the mayor’s office for help in writing a ruling. If your view of the job you’re doing is to act as a mouthpiece, why not get your instructions directly from the horse’s mouth?

Whose interest does the speaker of city council represent, the mayor’s office or city council itself? The answer to that will determine who you think should really be running the city.

— searchingly submitted by Cityslikr