But so flabbergasted were some at the revelations coming out of the second of two budget wrap-up sessions at City Hall Tuesday (December 13) that all they could do was shake their heads in disbelief – or was that disgust?
I think I saw a few muttering to themselves about the havoc about to be wreaked on our beloved city as a result of the mayor’s ill-thought-out directive to city departments to cut 10 per cent from their bottom line.
Those who could manage a few words used descriptors like “pitiful,” “disastrous” and “deeply disturbed.”
At one point, the back-and-forth got so testy between Budget Committee vice-chair Doug Ford and opposition councillors that chair Mike Del Grande threatened to remove them from the meeting. That was during a tiff over wading pools after Adam Vaughan and others took exception to Ford’s comments that “the burbs got nuthin’” when David Miller was running the city. So this is what the budget deliberations have come down to: petty jealousies – what Councillor Gord Perks termed “a race to the bottom.”
Perks urged – no, begged – his colleagues on the Budget Committee to “step back from the precipice” before the Fordists destroy Toronto altogether, cuz that’s where we’re headed.
Who could argue with Perks’s appraisal? Almost 60 per cent of the cuts being proposed are in low-income neighbourhoods where the poverty rate is above 25 per cent of the population – to say nothing of the complete mess being made of the transit file.
Ford and Co. have a budget plan, a ham-fisted one. What’s missing is a strategy, a long-term direction, a playbook on how to finesse the finances so services can be preserved within current budget constraints – and if there happens to be a little left over in the kitty, let’s use it to grow the city. Sound like too much to ask? It’s fundamental.
It’s been the practice of council, at least under Miller, to set service standards and make financial decisions based on those goals. Not this time around.
Instead, the Fordists have opted to use the budget as a blunt instrument, making policy decisions through it instead of “harmonizing up,” as Perks put it. Very little thought is being given to what effects they’ll have on livability. There is no line item on the Excel spreadsheets handed councillors showing the human costs of this austerity agenda.
Vaughan called it a “war on children.” Yikes. But, yes, if you can call bike lanes on Jarvis a war on the car, then it’s no stretch to say closing wading pools in the poorest neighbourhoods is a war on children.
Del Grande took exception to that “holier-than-thou” (it’s a fave formulation of his) characterization. Councillor John Parker put it more delicately, saying the approach to this year’s budget is “novel.”
“What we had in the past was a plan,” said Parker. “You can call it that if you wish, but I call it a wish list of what we’d like to spend money on. But taxpayers have told us they’ve had enough of that.” By “that,” Parker means more taxes.
Yet Ford’s budget calls for an increase in property taxes and service cuts as well as hikes in user fees.
Del Grande, on whose shoulders the budget seems to be weighing more heavily these days, judging by his more measured demeanour, added that some suggestions coming from the left are “creative.” However, he quickly caught himself in the next breath saying they don’t deal with the “philosophical” issue, by which he meant the fundamental principle of spending less, not more. And there’s the rub.
The criteria parks staff used to decide which five (out of 106) wading pools to close is absent any consideration of socio-economic factors or population growth estimates in affected areas.
The same goes for the criterion used to decide which community centres are on the chopping block. A cost-per-visit formula was used to determine which would be closed – an arbitrary measure when some of the threatened centres are still used by thousands of Torontonians.
Staff is not totally to blame here. They’ve been given the order to cut by the mayor’s office and are working within severe time constraints, some four months earlier than in the past under a new timeline imposed by the Ford administration.
Some of the financial assumptions of staff border on the reckless.
On the transit file, the $65 million in financial penalties for killing Transit City shows up nowhere in the 2012 calculations. Joe Mihevc was stunned. “I can’t see how a responsible budget process can omit those costs,” he said.
It gets worse. Staff is banking on the sale of 10 per cent of the city’s stake in Toronto Hydro, the sale of “surplus” real estate and part of this year’s $139 million surplus to cover the $700 million cost of state-of-good-repair for the TTC.
That came as news to the non-Budget Committee members on council Tuesday – especially since the sale of Hydro was rejected by the mayor’s executive only a few weeks ago. And that “surplus” real estate is a mystery. When questioned by Janet Davis, City Manager Joe Pennachetti replied that he was not in a position to say what properties are being considered for sale.
There’s more. The Memorandum of Understanding signed between Ford and the province a year ago to kill Transit City and put the Eglinton Crosstown completely underground contains a provision that calls for enhanced bus service on Finch,
But that’s not happening. In fact, bus service on Finch and throughout the city is being cut back.
Another bomb in the fine print of that MOU was dropped last week when TTC general manager Gary Webster revealed that the province committed to more operational funding for the TTC in that document. So where’s the money and why isn’t it being factored into the current budget numbers?
The Ford administration has set up the narrative of this budget as one of stark choices. Already, the trade-offs have begun – a program here for a few bucks from the Environment Office, for example.
There’s no need to cut the crap out of services, to take away kids’ programs or make seniors who use community centres suffer. There’s money in that cash cow known as the Parking Authority. And let’s not forget the projected $139 million surplus, which has been stashed in a reserve fund for capital projects. Now we’re told that figure will actually be higher, since it only represents the surplus for the first two quarters of 2012.
Maybe there’s something to the speculation that the Fordists are stashing cash while planning a big sell-off of city-owned land to fund a tax cut just in time for the next municipal election in 2014. Crazy, huh?
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