We need to be able to trust city staff
City staff seem to suffer from fear of recommending the unacceptable

thestar.com
By Edward Keenan
Oct. 27, 2016

“Recommending the unacceptable is not a great way for a public servant to make a living,” Toronto City Manager Peter Wallace said in a talk recently at the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance.

Just ask Gary Webster, the former TTC honcho who was unceremoniously shown the door by mayor Rob Ford and his executive committee after daring to suggest that LRT was a superior choice to subways, in his professional opinion, for a few specific routes. In that particular case, council did take Webster’s advice, but the unacceptability of providing it against the mayor’s wishes was made clear, to him and to everyone else.

There seems little risk, at least right now, of Webster’s successor, TTC CEO Andy Byford, falling into that trap. After reporting by my colleague Jennifer Pagliaro this week, that much became obvious. The topic was some politically convenient and misleading cost and time estimate updates for the LRT option in the recent revisiting of the Scarborough RT replacement debate.

First in an email to the mayor, then in information leaked to the press, then presented to council, the TTC revised long-used numbers to suddenly show that the LRT option would cost almost as much and take as long to build as Mayor John Tory’s preferred one-stop Scarborough subway extension. The numbers fail to add up in the same way as the ones they were being compared to for a number of reasons - I’d refer you to Pagliaro’s stories this week for a fuller exploration. But the only reason, it turns out, that the new information showed it would take just as long (and that the corresponding budget inflation is so high) is that Byford says he was asked to provide numbers based on the same “finish date.”

Asked? By whom? He says now he can’t recall. “But we would be rightly criticized if we didn’t anticipate questions on costs and escalation,” he told the Star recently. Well, well, well. Which is it? Was he asked, or did he anticipate being asked? And either way, why provide numbers that appear misleading or inaccurate as points of comparison to the subway option also being considered?

Could it be a fear of “recommending the unacceptable”? As Councillor Shelley Carroll calls it, “The Webster Effect”?

Consider, too, that department also furnished a “planning rationale” for the one-stop subway extension that isn’t based on ridership or traditional metrics like existing residential and commercial density and development. This rationale, again, conveniently aligned with the mayor’s campaign promise to deliver a subway extension. In fact, during the debate and presentation at city council, much of the staff advice from multiple departments is in remarkable agreement with the mayor’s talking points on the issue - which in many ways departed significantly from the contours of the years-old debate to that point.

This is curious.

“The Webster Effect” was on people’s lips at city hall again Wednesday when a report on elements of Mayor Tory’s SmartTrack transit plan, needed to meet a provincial deadline just over a month away, was not provided. At the last moment, it was taken off a committee agenda, and postponed until next month. Some speculated that some kind of disagreement between staff and the mayor’s office could be an explanation for the delay. The mayor said that was not the case - that necessary negotiations with the province that would inform the report are simply ongoing.

As a counterpoint to this speculation, it’s worth noting that during the Gardiner Expressway debate, the advice of staff members, including, famously, the chief planner’s, ran contrary to the mayor’s preference. And that Wallace, in his talk to the IMFG, was publicly providing the advice he thought council would find unacceptable. The case isn’t closed on some smothering of professional staff independence. I am not saying I believe the Scarborough subway examples prove the conclusion that expert advice has been massaged to suit political goals. But the curious alignment of unexpected changes in the evidence and opinion provided by staff, and in some cases the coordination of releasing that information with the mayor’s office, certainly raise the hypothesis. Especially in an environment where you might say, “recommending the unacceptable is not a great way for a public servant to earn a living.”

And that this is even a question is a problem, because the city - its decision-making politicians and we in the public who evaluate their record - need to be able to rely on the advice of the city’s professional staff. We don’t need to take that advice, we don’t need to agree with its conclusions, we don’t even need to accept every premise or agree with every criteria they use for evaluation. But we need to be able to trust that they believe what they are saying: that is why we hire them. To provide evidence to the best of their ability, and sometimes opinions based on that evidence based on their professional analysis. The information they provide is the basis of what we know about the city’s situation and its options. We need to be able to trust that it is offered in good faith, and that it is not an exercise in realpolitik calculation and spin.

Clearly, staff members take their instructions from city council’s decisions, and they have to follow those instructions whether they agree with them or not. If the bosses go ahead and blow the whole grocery budget on lemons, then certainly a good staff member will pull out the recipe for lemonade. But that staff member should not, in anticipation of that decision, search out and provide tenuous arguments to incorrectly suggest the superiority of an all-lemon diet. They should not feel compelled to furnish the very rationale that would make their true opinion unacceptable.