[URBAN NOTE] "How the City plans to pay for services in the future"

[rfmcdonald]

Spacing Toronto's John Lorinc gives readers more reason to despair about Toronto's municipal government funding.

The 2016 budget debate, which lands today at executive committee after doing the usual rounds, has offered up a curious mix of urgency and its opposite.

On the one hand, Mayor John Tory and city manager Peter Wallace have been warning for some time now that city council needs to adopt unspecified new revenue tools meant to address not merely normal course operating pressures but shortfalls that are looking a lot like entrenched structural deficits.

On the other, the mayor’s proposed property tax hike of just 1.3% — a figure that is slightly under the Bank of Canada rate, but doesn’t reflect rising prices of food and other imports — is lower than anything the post-amalgamation council ever approved, except for the four years (1998-2000, in the Lastman era, and 2011, year-one of Ford) which featured zero tax increases (many thanks to Western University’s Zack Taylor for the longitudinal data). Soaring real estate prices have added a $100 million windfall to the land transfer tax, and so it seems almost certain that the federal budget will bring all sorts of manna for housing and transit. The message: we can relax because David Miller’s land speculation tax is going to save us, again.

So: Bad news and good news. Pick your poison.

At the risk of hurling Spacing readers into a pit of budgetary obscurata, let me further confound this ambivalent picture with a substantial, though little noted, shift in the City’s policy for funding certain capital expenditures from the operating budget – the so-called “capital from current (CFC)” or “pay-as-you-go” line item. If you don’t pay much attention to the CFC figure, don’t feel bad. No one does.