City council should consider cuts to the library system, eliminating late-night TTC buses, selling or closing the Toronto Zoo and Riverdale Farm, and cutting the number subsidized child care spaces, Toronto’s top bureaucrat says.In a report on Toronto’s “core service review” released Monday morning, city manager Joe Pennachetti also endorsed a host of other cuts and service changes proposed by consulting firm KPMG earlier in the year.
If all of them were implemented, Pennachetti wrote, the city would save $100 million in 2012.
That is far less than the $774 million Mayor Rob Ford has insisted the city needs to find to balance its budget. Even though the true budget gap is less than $500 million because of surplus funds and other revenues, the recommendations suggest that most of the shortfall will not be covered through cuts.
That is perhaps welcome news for some of Ford’s critics. But it leaves council with a daunting task during the budget process that begins in the fall, and there is no guarantee that Ford and his council allies will not propose more drastic cuts themselves.
Further, even the approval of the cuts Pennachetti has suggested would represent the abandonment of one of the central promises of Ford’s mayoral campaign: that he would find enough wasteful “gravy” to repair the city’s finances without cuts to services.
“We have a mayor who said 'Trust me, I know where the money is, we will have no cuts. These are hundreds of cuts to everything Torontonians hold sacred,” said left-leaning Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker, referring to the arts, the environment and parks.
“Every single thing that we hold sacred in this city is being ripped apart in this report by a man who promised us that there would be no cuts. So he lied to us.”
Ford did not appear at the news conference held by Pennachetti and city budget chief Councillor Mike Del Grande on Monday morning, and he has not yet issued any comments about the report.
Some of the shortfall that is not eliminated through cuts will undoubtedly be covered through increases to user fees. Consultants will also scour the city’s operations seeking internal efficiencies that will likely save additional millions.
And Pennachetti said Monday that more than 1,100 of the 17,000 city staff eligible for an offered buyout package have applied. Assuming the city grants 70 per cent of the applications — those doing duties deemed essential will be denied — the annual budget savings would be about $59 million per year, he said.
Speaking at the Scarborough Civic Centre, Pennachetti stressed to reporters that he expects additional savings will come from his directive to all departments to cut their budgets by 10 per cent.
“This is one piece of the puzzle,” he said of the cuts suggested in the Monday report; the recommendations, he said, “are not the solution” for the 2012 deficit.
In some cases, Pennachetti made firm suggestions of cuts. He was softer in other cases, suggesting only that council “consider” cuts. Del Grande acknowledged that some of the suggestions may be unpopular with councillors.
Pennachetti suggested that council consider library closures despite the widespread outcry over that suggestion. He also suggested that council consider reducing or eliminating the late-night Blue Night bus service, “or making it a premium service by raising fares”; Councillor Karen Stintz, the TTC commissioner, has said that cuts to late-night buses would be “last resort.”
Among Pennachetti’s additional suggestions:
• Eliminating the windrow-clearing program, in which snow deposited by snow plows at the end of residents’ driveways is cleared by a second plow. Councillors have long bickered over the program, which only serves North York, Etobicoke and Scarborough. Pennachetti suggested that it be replaced by a program for seniors and the disabled.
• Considering eliminating or reducing a program that provides dental care to the poor.
• Eliminating the Christmas Bureau, which helps non-city organizations, such as the Star’s Santa Claus Fund, distribute gifts to needy children.
• No longer giving out four free garbage tags.
• Eliminating community grants of less than $10,000, and to programs where the grant amounts to less than 5 per cent of the budget. This includes both small community groups and major entities like the Toronto International Film Festival, which receives an $800,000 grant — 2 per cent of a $33 million budget.
• Eliminating Community Environment Days. Mayor Rob Ford attended one last week.
• No longer picking up animals from owners who want to surrender them.
• Reducing the level of “proactive investigation and enforcement” done by licensing staff.
• Attempting to sell, lease, or come to some other new arrangement at three city arts facilities: the Sony Centre, the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts and the Toronto Centre for the Performing Arts.
• Closing the city museums with the lowest attendance.
Pennachetti also suggested no longer requiring police officers to work “paid duty” at construction sites “where possible.” The paid duty program was scrutinized by the city’s auditor earlier in the year.
Pennachetti recommended that city staff conduct further study of some of KPMG’s major suggestions. These include the idea of integrating the fire and paramedic departments and selling or transferring most of the city’s nursing homes.
Council must approve any cuts. And it is far from certain that even Ford’s executive committee will adopt all of Pennachetti’s recommendations when it meets to discuss them next Monday.
Ford has already distanced himself from Pennachetti’s suggestion on grants. On Friday morning, the Star revealed that Pennachetti’s recommendations would mean cuts of more than $6 million in annual funding to major arts organizations, including TIFF and the National Ballet of Canada.
But, in apparent bid at damage control as arts leaders started to rally against the cuts, Ford’s policy chief Mark Towhey said Friday afternoon that the mayor’s office is developing a new plan to save the grants.
Pennachetti has asked all departments to cut their budgets by 10 per cent. The police and fire departments are warning they'll have to lay off hundreds of front-line officers if they are held to those cuts.
The weekend saw several pre-emptive protests across the city against possible cuts.
“Certainly we’re nervous,” said Alexandra Mandelis, an organizer with Mothers 4 Child Care, who gathered together a handful of mothers Sunday morning for a small show of opposition to cuts to city-funded childcare. “There’s definitely a sense of fear with parents — they absolutely cannot imagine what they would do if they lost their spots.”
At Eastminster United Church, in the Toronto-Danforth ward of Councillor Paula Fletcher, more than 200 people attended a meeting hosted by Fletcher and fellow left-leaning Councillor Mary Fragedakis that was dubbed “Preserving Our Great City.”
Fletcher told the crowd she has received 2,000 letters from her constituents opposed to cuts to libraries, while local author Robert Rotenberg and library union president Maureen O’Reilly received the loudest cheers for their speeches against library closures.
“We must remain ever-vigilant,” O’Reilly said. “Our libraries are not for sale.”
Fragedakis criticized KPMG’s bottom-line focus on the costs and benefits of municipal services. “They didn’t evaluate how these cuts will affect people’s lives,” she said.
Left-leaning Councillor Janet Davis said before the release of the report that she had no idea what the report would recommend, but said it is only the first of many steps.
“In the end it won’t be the executive (committee), it won’t be the budget committee, it will be council — and the constituents they represent — who decides.”
Davis said she wants more information — such as the city’s projected 2011 budget surplus and the projected revenue from the land transfer tax — before she can make any decision on service cuts.
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Source: Toronto Star
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