Why the Sudden Spate of Cost Cutting at City Hall?
TheStar.com - GTA - City staff fall short on cuts
Question. Why is the city looking for cuts now when they passed a budget back in the spring that was supposed to balance revenues and expenditures?
Was the budget secretly designed to exceed revenues for this year, and they were hoping we wouldn’t notice since they were confident that they would get their new taxes, which on the surface only were supposed to be bringing in revenues for next year’s budget, not this year’s, but in fact would make up at the last-minute this past spring’s budget shortfall?
Or are the cuts not necessary at all or only until next year’s budget and are just being huffed and puffed about now because Mayor Miller is pissed he didn’t get his taxes when he wanted them: Now! Now! Now!
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Hey there,
You wrote:
“Was the budget secretly designed to exceed revenues for this year, and they were hoping we wouldn’t notice since they were confident that they would get their new taxes, which on the surface only were supposed to be bringing in revenues for next year’s budget, not this year’s, but in fact would make up at the last-minute this past spring’s budget shortfall?”
First of all re” “secretly”. The City of Toronto is a part of Ontario and Dalton McGuinty has pronounced that Toronto is an open, accountable and “mature government”. He even solidified his belief in The Toronto Act giving the city all manner of new powers. It’s not possible to have a “secret” municipality in Ontario.
One way to verify just how on-top-of-things Mr. McGuinty is, is to drop down a few judicious Freedom of Information requests –especially “working papers” on the budget for this year.
Just do it fast because if they’re anything like my municipality, Toronto will have a records “retention” bylaw that ensure the records you’re interested in aren’t retained.
Ah yes, FOI requests, McGuinty loves those! Just ask those trying to find out how much he spent breaking his promise to the parents of autistic children.
I’ve never heard of a records retention bylaw. And I always thought Mississauga was the bastion of fiscal prudence and good management! Learn something new eveyday!
If they weren’t cutting costs in view of the coming shortfall, you’d just call them stupid and wasteful.
How can y’all spend so much time complaining about Miller’s evil plans to steal every last penny from widows and orphans trying to buy two million dollar houses and Miller’s evil plans to not sweep your street so much and not notice that you CAN’T BE AGAINST BOTH!
No wonder Harris got re-elected in this province: people really do want everything for nothing.
Huh? It isn’t the Rosedale buyers that will be badly affected by the land transfer tax, but the middle class, those people who drive the economy, those people who as it is struggle to buy $350,000 homes.
And BTW a full one-third of the city’s budget goes to pay for provincial responsibilities, things that income taxes should be paying for, not property taxes. My property taxes are supposed to pay for basic municipal services like street cleaning and should not be cut back because Miller doesn’t have the balls to stand up to McGuinty et al and demand the province resume its fiscal responsibilities as they are doing for the 905 area. I’ve already paid for social services and social housing through my income taxes to the province and should not have to pay for them again through my property taxes and neither should those struggling to buy a home through land transfer taxes.
“Stand up to McGuinty”? I’ll write the scene out for you:
The outrage at these proposed service cuts is exactly what’s needed, of course, but it has to get even worse — so bad that the province saying “no” is no longer the vote-buying, reality-denying, winning answer. But if Miller just assumes that the province will see the light if he writes a stern letter, everyone will deride him for ignoring the shortfall and say that he expects money to come from the tooth fairy.
The “get your house in order” crowd will only be neutralized when everybody else realizes that what they advocate is burning the house down.
Such is people’s affinity for free lunches that nothing less will convince them to demand higher income taxes. They will in fact vote for lower taxes every single time; they will vote to remove a “wasteful, socialist” leg from a three-legged stool because last year they voted to remove a leg from a four-legged stool and they haven’t yet ended up on the floor.
I’m not convinced we need higher income taxes as the Feds are running huge surpluses, and they’re the ones, under Chretien, who started this whole cascading downloading nightmare from Feds to province to city. It’s time they anted up too.
Nope, you’re right, a stern letter will be ineffectual. McGuinty already said no. The only response to that is for Torontonians to start using the brains God gave them and stop voting for same-old, same-old, and start requiring their MPPs to say concretely how they will help Toronto. Unfortunately, Tory has not given us concrete alternatives to McGuinty. So the screws need to be applied to him too. I have a feeling the “get your house in order” crowd is finally dying, but only by persistently refusing tax hikes in Toronto and by persistently pinning the province to the wall will things start to change. The province got away with what they did to us because we, directly and indirectly through our politicians, let them.
When I say Miller needs to get some balls, I don’t mean a letter or a photo-op, I mean something like…well, since the TTC cannot be run effectively for much longer (OK, it isn’t now) without restoration of the previous level of provincial funding, how about shutting down the entire system every Monday. Stop pussyfooting around by talking about mothballing Sheppard. Go whole hog. Make a dramatic statement. Make it apparent what happens when there is no TTC. Or better yet do it on a day McGuinty makes one of his pseudo-promises, starting the day after Labour Day. When Toronto is thrown into chaos, so is the entire province, as the 905ers will soon discover with a real TTC shutdown. Just one idea.