So far at least, councillors have balked at most of the cuts the city is considering to close its annual budget shortfall. At last week’s meeting of the mayor’s executive committee, councillors decided against cutting back on grass cutting, against eliminating driveway “windrow” plowing, against cancelling late-night bus service.
Library closings: off the table. Cutting back on street sweeping: sent back to the city manager for further study. All the hard decisions have been kicked down the road at least until budget meetings later this fall.
As a result, the much-anticipated special session of city council that began on Monday is shaping up to be a massive anticlimax. As Monty Python put it: suddenly, nothing happened. “Behind a bush, on the side of the road, there was no severed arm. No dismembered trunk of a man in his late fifties. No head in a bag. Nothing. Not a sausage.”
For months, we have been told the city was on the brink of cuts that would make life barely worth living. Fierce debates raged across the city. City council held two extraordinary all-night meetings to listen to the public.
Now that we have finally come to it, council is being asked to approve cuts amounting to all of $28-million, barely a fingernail trim in a city with a budget of more than $9-billion. The mountain has laboured and brought forth a mouse.
Addressing council Monday morning, Mr. Ford did his best to ignite a proper spirit of panic in his fellow representatives, asserting that “the day of reckoning” is upon us and that only the “loony left” is standing in his way.
In fact, it is his own fumbling that has slowed the budget-cutting drive. Having failed utterly to find the “gravy” in the city budget, he hired pricey consultants to comb through city operations for services we could easily dispense with. That review found that 90 per cent of operations are “core services” that can’t be cut without compromising safety or hurting livability.
Even the remaining 10 per cent are not always easy to zap without making someone mad. Rare is the councillor who wants to stand before his constituents at election time and admit: I was the one who told the snowplows to stop clearing your driveway.
For all his bluster about impending doom, the mayor himself has stopped short of making unpopular cuts like closing libraries. He wants to consider selling the zoo and three city-owned theatres. He muses about contracting out park maintenance and cutting grants to community groups. Apart from that, he has failed to say in any detail what cuts he personally proposes to make. Instead, he scolds others on city council for lacking the spine.
Not surprisingly, the others are pushing back. On Monday, he faced the fiercest grilling of his mayoralty on the council floor. Councillors pounded him over his claim that the city faces a $774-million shortfall. City manager Joe Pennachetti conceded only a week ago that it may be more like $500-million or $600-million.
It didn’t help the mayor’s case when he insisted that the city does not need the revenue from the land transfer tax, which brought in a quarter of a billion dollars last year, when he said that robust, growing Toronto is heading in the same direction as the declining, perpetually cash-strapped state of Michigan, or when he blamed the global recession of the early 1990s on Ontario’s NDP government of the time.
Until he can mount a more convincing case for change, nothing much is likely to change at city hall. Not a sausage.
Origin
Source: Globe&Mail
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