Meanwhile, in other city news, Toronto’s operating budget for 2014 is being finalized for presentation to city council in January.
Whenever a public body makes decisions about spending $9.5 billion in a year — an amazingly large amount in the hands of city council — there are bound to be contentious political issues. About 40 per cent of the revenue for this budget comes from property taxes, 20 per cent from provincial government transfers, 17 per cent from fees and the rest from a variety of sources.
Most people agree that we need the city to be run as efficiently as possible, making the best possible use of the money available to provide good services. But when staff are being constantly nagged to do more with less and are annually subjected to smaller budgets, two things happen: the smart people leave for more interesting work environments and creativity and innovation decline.
That describes Toronto city hall. Spending on services run directly by the city is down this year for the third year in a row even though inflation and the Consumer Price Index continue to climb. The Wellesley Institute says that to fund the same level of city services as in 2011, another $365 million is needed for 2014, and that doesn’t account for population growth. (Of course, spending is up $30 million for police to almost $960 million, confirming the rule that says, while other city services are starved, the police service is fattened.) It’s false economy to keep cutting this way. Little good can be expected from a beleaguered group of civil servants. We get what we pay for.
I would love to see some councillors come forward with a plan to create in Toronto the best group of municipal civil servants on the continent. Our city was served by such a stellar group in the 1970s, and that was a time of innovation, creativity, community engagement, invigorating debate and city services admired widely and copied broadly by others. The mayor and council demanded good staff, and council was willing to commit the funds to hire new people and try new methods of service delivery and ways to engage the public.
Those skills at city hall were noticed by others, and senior staff were often lured away by other municipalities, by developers or by remunerative consulting work. But the excellence of the staffing lasted for almost two decades until the six years of cuts by Mayor Mel Lastman and the last three years of cuts.
Implementing a plan to renew city staffing to better serve the city would initially cost money, and sadly, that’s a problem for the current council. The assumption is that taxes must be kept as low as possible, and there’s even some opposition to the 2.5 per cent residential tax rate increase proposed for 2014, about $64 per household.
But looking around, it is clear there’s tax room in our city. Toronto’s property tax rate for 2013 was the lowest of any of the two dozen municipalities in the GTA. The average property tax on a housing unit in Toronto in 2013 was $3,274, in Mississauga $4,059, in Markham $4,895, in Oakville $5,047, in Richmond Hill $5,468.
The average tax paid in the GTA was $4,370, or a third more than in Toronto. If councillors tried to find a more middle ground on residential property taxes close to the GTA average, they could have close to $400 million more to spend each year.
There’s no need to get there all at once: council could set that as a goal for the next few years and edge there slowly. New staffing could use some of this money. So could new programs to address social and recreation programs for youth, nutrition programs for kids living in poverty and the repair of the 25,000 social housing units owned by the city. I believe that, if city council had a solid plan for a renewed staff and new program directions, the public would respond favourably to increased public spending and a higher tax rate.
We could decide to carry on with relentless downsizing of services, but remaining on the current course leads Toronto into a future to be feared rather than admired.
My wish for the new year is that council would embrace a new direction.
Post City Magazines’ columnist John Sewell is a former mayor of Toronto and the author of a number of urban planning books.
