We are drowning in debt, service is deteriorating, our infra-structure is falling apart, etc. but we are still spending money to renovate the mayor's office, sprucing up Nathan Phillips Square, funding 1 cent campaigns, paying premium wages for tasks like picking up litter which is a minimum wage task, adding new staff, providing little things like cigarettes/wine to people in shelters, etc. etc. It is the nickels and dimes that get us in trouble........
Recipe to help save Toronto
By Lorrie Goldstein
Within 24 hours this week, we saw why Toronto's finances are a mess.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Premier Dalton McGuinty announced well over $1 billion in federal/provincial funding to help pay for a new York University subway line and other public transit initiatives.
On Wednesday, Toronto council passed a $1.4 billion capital budget that is drowning in $2.63 billion of red ink, with 51% of the cash earmarked solely to fix and repair public transit in Toronto.
Why does this insanity happen? Because with federal and provincial elections looming, Harper and McGuinty want to be able to tell voters in the Greater Toronto Area "behold, I have brought you a new subway."
Instead, they should have used the money they earmarked for this transit bauble to start providing annual, long-term, sustainable funding to maintain the TTC and other transit systems in the Greater Toronto Area.
As Sun City Hall bureau chief Zen Ruryk reported yesterday, debt charges on Toronto's capital budget this year are $402 million, up a staggering $69 million over 2006. If nothing else is done, that alone would send residential property bills skyrocketing this year by an unacceptably high 6%.
What will happen instead, along with a smaller tax hike, is that needed repairs to roads, bridges, arenas, parks, water mains, sewers, will be put off, again. This year, 12.6c of every dollar paid in property taxes will go towards servicing the city's capital debt. By 2011, it will be 15.4c.
This debt has been building for a long time. But it is being exacerbated by the spendthrift, left-wing majority on Toronto council, led by Mayor David Miller, which stubbornly refuses to contract out work, or award city business to non-union employers in order to save taxpayers' money.
However, even if the city gets its financial house in order, it won't be enough. For that to happen, Ottawa and Queen's Park must get back into the business of properly funding public transit and social services.
Otherwise, all Toronto will get, as the song says, is another year older and deeper in debt.
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