Mayor Rob Ford’s council opponents are daring him to lay his budget cuts on the table after the first committee to consider a KPMG report neither explicity endorsed nor rejected any of the consultant’s suggested cuts.“Until we get the mayor’s budget, this is a lot of talk,” Councillor Gord Perks told fellow public works committee members on Monday during a meeting that lasted almost eight hours and heard more than two dozen public deputations.
At the end, Ford allies voted to push forward KPMG’s controversial suggested cuts in the public works budget, but to ask city staff to find possible efficiencies to stave off reduced street-sweeping and snow-plowing, including an end to clearing of snow ridges left by plows at the end of suburban driveways. The committee also signaled it doesn’t want to end fluoridation of drinking water.
Voted down or ignored were pleas to save the city’s ambitious recycling target, annual Environment Days, a service to pick up household toxic waste, and the current “scale of bike infrastructure.”
Councillor David Shiner’s successful motion was crafted in the corner of the room with input from Ford’s policy chief, Mark Towhey.
“The mayor of Toronto has been in office almost eight months and he still hasn’t given us a clue where any of the savings that he promised us are going to come from,” Perks said after the vote. “He still hasn’t a clue about how he’s going to balance the budget . . . We’re still at sea and the mayor of Toronto still won’t tell us what he wants to do.”
The public works chair, Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, defended not explicitly rejecting or endorsing any of the consultant’s suggested cuts before sending them on to Ford’s powerful executive council, which will consider them Sept. 19 and recommend a budget to council a week later.
He and fellow executive members want “to see the complete picture, the entire landscape of what’s on the table,” from the eight KPMG reports looking at virtually all city services, he told reporters.
Earlier, asked about the deputants who poked holes in the consultant’s report and asked the committee to reject its cuts — only the elimination of fluoride found favour, with one deputant — Minnan-Wong said: “Many are spenders, not savers. They want the city to spend more and don’t have a concern for trying to reduce the cost and size of government.”
The committee rejected a motion by Councillor Mike Layton to have the medical officer of health report on the health impacts of the suggested cuts.
Minnan-Wong said that, if councillors waited for studies of the health and societal impacts of proposed cuts, “We would be here in 2020 and still waiting for reports to be written.”
Public works was the first KPMG report to be released — three more land this week — and set a pattern of finding little or no obvious fat. So far, the biggest savings identified would come from closing city-run daycares and long-term-care homes.
During deputations, Sonja Greckol of Toronto Women’s City Alliance called the KPMG report a values-laden political document dressed up as a technical report. She said that, as a non-driver, bike lanes are a core service for her.
Councillor Joe Mihevc, who is not on the public works committee, told it: “One person’s gravy is another person’s essential service.”
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Source: Toronto Star
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