[URBAN NOTE] "A Dose of Fiscal Reality"

[rfmcdonald]

At his blog, James Bow makes the obvious point that Toronto mayor Rob Ford's plan to build entirely new subway lines is simply impossible, and that there will either be significant increases in city taxes and tolls or massive cutbacks.

[. . .] I’m not surprised that Ford currently enjoys a 70% approval rating. I, for one, didn’t buy the doom and gloom of the anti-Ford naysayers that Ford’s election would ruin the city on December 1, 2010. Toronto is just too resilient for that. Besides, there’s the small matter of the $300 million surplus that David Miller left behind. That money has helped fund Ford’s many fiscally irresponsible acts in 2011, including canning the Vehicle Registration Tax, blocking the TTC’s fare increase, and granting the police union a higher-than-inflation wage increase. Put simply, Ford has coasted through his first year in office thanks to David Miller’s gift. The real impact of Ford’s mayoralty hasn’t been felt by most Torontonians, and it won’t until 2012, when Rob Ford will be called upon to close the $750 million operating shortfall that’s currently on the city’s books.

Let’s see then if he’ll manage to live up to his campaign promise to cut taxes “without any service cuts” (to be fair, he later amended this with the weasel words, “without any major service cuts”). It’s easy to like Ford when he cuts a $62 million tax, but doesn’t close community library branches, pools, hockey rinks, or rush hour buses. When real service cuts come to hit the TTC, when community centres close, ice time vanishes, and pools sit empty during the hot summer months, how will people react to a city that has just become leaner and meaner, in ways that affect them personally?

It’s at this point that people will start pointing out that Ford promised that stopping the gravy train would enable the city to lower taxes while maintaining services, but the math isn’t adding up in Ford’s favour. Privatizing garbage collection for half the city will only save $8 million. Going through department budgets line by line, and going after the overspending of previous councillors, like Adam Giambrone’s $3000, will barely net more than a million. It’s all well and good to go after these efficiencies, but at the end of the day, the Ford administration is only going to have saved around $50 million. Congratulations guys; that is time well spent. But you still have $700 million to cut. You are now going to have to go after things that you previously did not label “frills”.

Signs of the coming unravelling can already be seen as Ford pushes forward his fiscally irresponsible plan to complete the Sheppard subway. Never mind that Ford is spending $4 billion to build a major piece of infrastructure that far exceeds the demand of the route it serves when an LRT line costing a quarter of that value was already funded, and would have served more of Sheppard Avenue. So dogmatic was Ford’s antipathy towards surface transit that, if reports are to be believed, he turned down a provincial offer of $2 billion towards his beloved subway, on the condition that the provincially funded Eglinton LRT be allowed to operate on the surface between Laird Drive and Kennedy station.

I can’t help but shake my head at this. That’s $2 billion turned aside because Ford wasn’t willing to widen Sheppard Avenue to put LRT vehicles in the middle. Instead, we’re left with infrastructure that’s way overbuilt, and which will be of use to far fewer people. Where’s the respect to taxpayers?

And by turning aside the $2 billion, Ford now has a $4 billion subway proposal that’s almost completely unfunded. And yet, his campaign promised that the line would open in time for the Pan-Am Games. Does that sound sensible to you? He might get money from the federal government, but the related government infrastructure program he’d access only has a budget of $1.25 billion, to be earmarked for the whole country. He’s talked about development charges, but the funds raised by these measures are woefully insufficient. Now, I’m told we’re looking at rerouting development charges around the Eglinton LRT, and possibly a fire sale of City property to try and close the gap. Not only is this fiscally irresponsible — selling the refrigerator to pay for a new mansion — it won’t close the gap.

Go, read the whole thing, and hope that Bow is wrong.