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Mediocrity acceptable to City Manager.

Cities survey says: Toronto the middling TheStar.com - News - Cities survey says: Toronto the middling
May 04, 2007
Royson James

"If we are so efficient, how come this study says we're doing so badly?" Councillor Norm Kelly wanted to know, on reading a benchmarking report on how well Toronto compares in delivering city services.

Kelly was looking at some of the charts that showed Toronto in the "bottom quartile," or bottom 25 per cent, among municipalities in the cost of winter maintenance of roads, waste disposal, transit, water distribution, as well as in its poor performance in curbing violent crime and traffic congestion.

"But we are better than the median in 52 per cent of the services," came the response from city manager Shirley Hoy.

In other words, for half the services it delivers, Toronto does it better than about half of the sister municipalities compared.

Hoy thinks that's good. But, of course, it means that Toronto does it worse than nearly half (48 per cent) of the other municipalities compared.

It's all a matter of perspective. The devil is in the details. And expectations.

Should Big City Toronto be more efficient that Windsor or London? Can you compare it to Markham and Milton? Results from a recent comparison done by the top bureaucrats from 15 municipalities representing 9 million Ontarians were analyzed and released this week. How did the Big Smoke do? Mixed results.

Called the Ontario Municipal CAOs Benchmarking Initiative (OMB!), the study looked at 12 service areas in 2005 and compared them according to 21 service level indicators and 48 performance measures.

High service levels earned a favourable ranking. High costs in delivering these services earned a low rating on performance. Participating were all of the GTA, Hamilton, London, Windsor, Ottawa, Sudbury, Niagara region, Thunder Bay, Muskoka and Brant County.

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