Ford still befuddled with budget

After many weeks of wrangling over the core service review and with many more debates to come, Mayor Rob Ford took the opportunity yesterday to reinforce his position on the city’s fiscal crisis.

And his position will come as no surprise.

Toronto cannot reach its full potential until it gets its debt situation under control, Mr. Ford told the crowd, invited by the Empire Club of Canada, at an event sponsored by the National Post.

“The sad truth is that we are losing the ability to make our own decisions,” Mr. Ford warned the audience at Toronto’s Royal York Hotel. According to the Mayor, years of balancing the books only with unexpected windfalls and one-time revenues have left Toronto with $4-billion in debt, plans to borrow an additional $2-billion and annual debt-servicing costs that will climb 50%, to more than $600-million, by 2014. That mounting figure, says the Mayor, combined with the city’s structural deficit, leaves Toronto unable to make long-term plans and invest in its future. The city’s efforts are perpetually focused on staying solvent for the next 12 months.

There’s truth to that, and the Mayor is right to want a more orderly, long-term budgeting process at City Hall. But the Mayor seems befuddled as to what to actually do about the problem. He insists that new taxes aren’t the answer, and freely “guarantees” and “promises” to get the city back onto a solid fiscal foundation. “Stay the course,” he pleads.

Sure. But which course? The administration has hardly set out a firm position and stuck unwaveringly to it. Notably absent from the Mayor’s speech was any reference to “gravy,” or pledges to rectify Toronto’s structural imbalance by painlessly eliminating bureaucratic waste. Instead, there are dire warnings of needing to rationalize the city’s work force, lamentations that the city added employees after amalgamation, instead of shedding them as private companies would do after a merger, and the Mayor’s oft-repeated warning that only a 34% property tax hike could generate the $774-million needed to plug 2012’s projected budgetary shortfall.

It would be easier to honour the Mayor’s request that we all stay the course if he was able to stay the course — any course — himself. But given the bewildering array of proposed remedies to Toronto’s admitted fiscal crisis that the Mayor and his allies have promulgated, it’s hard to know which course, exactly, the city’s citizens are supposed to stay on.

It’s not hard to see where the Mayor would like to focus his attention — shrinking the size of the city’s workforce. He boasted of the 1,000 city workers who have accepted his buyout offer (a one-time cost, says the Mayor, of $41-million, but one that will save the city more than $60-million in wage and benefit costs annually, going forward). And he hammered away at the 37:1 ratio — based on average city worker salaries and average property tax bills, it takes 37 home owners to pay for a single City of Toronto employee.

That is a staggering figure, and Mayor Ford was at his old best when he spoke about the unsustainable growth of a public-sector workforce that requires more than three dozen residential property tax bills to sustain each position. When he was talking about the pressure the civil service puts on the taxpayer, he sounded like his former confident self, railing against waste and promising to respect the customer.

It was a welcome breath of passion in a speech that started on an awkward note, when the Mayor pledged to be as successful in fixing the city’s finances as the Blue Jays were at winning championships in the early 1990s. (Memo to the Mayor: Major League Baseball almost destroyed itself with the strike shortly thereafter, and the Jays haven’t come close to winning much of anything since. And, really, as a general principle, when seeking to evoke a successful future, it might be best to leave Toronto’s sports teams out of things entirely.)

So while the Mayor might not have a plan, he certainly seems to have a preference. Those positions he couldn’t cut with a buyout package may soon be up for rougher treatment.

Origin
Source: National Post