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rfmcdonaldTorontoist's David Hains warns us.
This past Tuesday during a speech he gave at U of T’s Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance, city manager Joe Pennachetti sounded the alarm on the City’s structural funding gap. Pennachetti is the City’s top civil servant, and his warning—that the City will need $500 million more in annual funding, whether through 1 per cent of the City’s contribution to the sales tax, transfer payments from other orders of government, or the uploading of services—is urgent, serious, and deserves more attention.
Pennachetti has made this point before, but never so explicitly: he spoke of the ticking time bomb that is the City’s housing portfolio, and cautioned that if the City does not get funding from other orders of government in the next few years, the Toronto Community Housing Corporation—facing increasingly serious repair issues—might be forced to evict residents from their homes.
Toronto currently has a housing capital repair backlog of $864 million, a total that has grown by $220 million in the past three years. At current funding levels, the repair backlog will grow to $3.6 billion within 10 years. The TCHC waiting list is longer than it has ever been, with 91,000 on the waiting list for one of TCHC’s 58,000 units—and the wait usually takes between eight and 10 years.
Pennachetti also highlighted looming transit challenges: the TTC currently relies on the fare box more than does any other major North American city, and it has seen its already low subsidy decline by 14 per cent per rider during the current council term. The city manager says the organization also suffers from a lack of operational funding contributions from the provincial government. At the same time, there’s a $2.7-billion unfunded liability when it comes to state of good repair for transit—and Metrolinx estimates that the Greater Toronto and Hamilton region would need an additional $2 billion in ongoing funding just to maintain congestion at current levels.
