[URBAN NOTE] "Can City Council avoid the white elephant in the room?"

[rfmcdonald]

I think John Lorinc is entirely correct in arguing that Toronto needs some sort of viable mechanism to tax and spend more rationally and consistently.

Indeed, should we even entertain an abstract discussion about new revenue tools without simultaneously considering what happens if our local representatives take all that dough and squander it on white elephant projects, like a one-stop subway boondoggle that will cost as much as the 25-stop Crosstown LRT?

After all, if council imposes all sorts of fees and taxes, but then can’t demonstrate some kind of return, very broadly defined, but not measured in terms of short-term electoral gain, residents will be not only more hesitant to support such measures in the future, but may be inclined to back future mayoral candidates who run on a promise to repeal said tools.

I fully realize I am posing an almost impossible problem here. A lot of people think about the proposed Scarborough subway extension scheme, and its first cousin, the Univeristy-Spadina-York subway extension up to the Arctic circle, and come to the obvious conclusion that such projects are politically-motivated money pits that will create scant economic, environmental, or social pay off in the foreseeable future.

But what’s needed is not a policy created to fight the last war, as it were. Rather, we need is something that tethers the City’s revenue collecting capacity to a dispassionate and difficult-to-override decision making framework that somehow applies to not only the City, but the other orders as well. The tallest of orders, I realize: the feds and the province can always do what’s politically expedient, knowing that obedient local councillors are unlikely to turn up their noses at gifts of cash.

There are, of course, all sorts of extant policies that direct revenues to specific projects or categories of projects, e.g., the city’s development charges by-law, or the standing policy on the use of budget surpluses. The province, through Metrolinx, has a loose and easily manipulated policy to produce a “benefits case analysis” for major new transit schemes.