Budget travels on the road less dusty

Or how city council makes its most important decision of the year.

Thestar.com
Feb. 16, 2017
By Edward Keenan

Around about the time Wednesday night turned into Thursday morning, a bit of confusion broke out at Toronto City Hall. It seems the city council, who had been meeting for almost 15 hours at that point, appeared to be on the verge of breaking the law.

There are strange things done in the midnight runs of the councillors who Toronto controlled ...

In the punch-drunk atmosphere that often accompanies the late nights at the end of council’s longest (and often most important) meetings, the city’s governing body had suddenly and unexpectedly voted not to cut $2 million from the street sweeping budget, as had been planned. If you had bet on “frequency of street sweeping” to be saved in the budget over Penny Oleksiak’s beloved swimming pool or the jobs of 10 workers in the homeless shelter division, you’d have gotten odds that would’ve made you rich - even those who voted for it seemed shocked. But partly because it was unplanned, taking the road less dusty made all the difference. There was now a $2 million deficit in the budget council had passed, and no obvious way to fix it.

This is a pressing problem, because it is illegal for city council to pass a budget that is not balanced. They tried to reopen the sweeping item so some of the mayor’s allies could change their votes, but they could not get a majority of council to agree. There was much conferring of staff on how this could be fixed. Finally, at 12:25 a.m., council went through a series of votes - two-thirds of them had to vote for a procedure variance to allow budget chief Gary Crawford to introduce a motion to balance the budget, then a majority of them voted for his motion to pay the $2 million to the sweeps from reserves, and then a majority voted to pass the budget as amended. And finally it was done. Crisis averted.

And yet, the question of why council would vote this way - given all the other things they voted against spending money on, and given that they did not even debate this item at all, and no one even seemed to notice it was there until they voted on it - and why it would be a surprise and cause such chaos remained. Perhaps it can all be explained simply by the lateness of the hour.

But that raises its own question: why, oh why, is city council making its most important decision of the year by way of an endurance contest? There’s no reason to have a meeting stretch on for more than 15 hours. Councillors can easily break after a reasonable workday and reconvene the meeting the next day.

Do you make your best decisions at the end of a 15-hour workday? As my colleague Matt Elliott said on Twitter in the middle of the chaos, “It’s possible that having people vote on a $10 billion budget at 11:45 p.m. is a bad idea.” It is. But it is the kind of idea city council has all the time.

Council views the continuous length of a meeting the way that guy on your hockey team views hot sauce on chicken wings: as some kind of macho proving ground for demonstrating strength. And so the more important the subject, the more likely they are to actually have a lot to discuss and debate and question and vote on, the more certain they are to refuse breaks and meals and just keep on given ’er till they get it done. Let the record show, they do not get smarter as the day goes on, or more focused on the task at hand. What they do, as you’d expect, is make silly mistakes. Get more outrageous. Let their tempers flare. Sometimes maybe almost accidentally break the law.

It’s important to note that they’re not running through a bunch of mindless formalities here, in the dead of night. They are actually making multi-million-dollar budget decisions, on the fly.

And this is not a crew who, collectively, demonstrate a firm grasp on the material even at the best of times. Indeed, it was in the first hour of the meeting, when the coffee was still fresh, that Councillor David Shiner began trying to argue - first in protest against a petition from his constituents that he was presenting - that Toronto homeowners actually pay more property taxes than those in any other city in Ontario. This is patently false.

And yet it was in many ways a theme from a series of councilors throughout the morning and early afternoon when the tax rate was being debated. Questioning staff, they fancied themselves grand inquisitors like Matlock and came off self-sabotaging fools like Lionel Hutz.

What if you don’t include condominiums? What if you only include two-storey homes? What if you include the effect of provincial assessments (that are beyond the city’s control and have the same effect in all Ontario cities?) What if you don’t include the bottom half of homes in the city? Or if you pretend that value assessments don’t lower tax rates as often as they raise them?

As Pierre Trudeau put it: yes, and if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bus. If you disregard the very many Toronto homeowners who pay less than those elsewhere, then yes, those remaining certainly pay more.

This parade of belligerent ignorance came to a head when Shiner fixated on a chart showing that the taxes paid on a two-storey, three-bedroom, 2.5-bathroom home in downtown Toronto with a two-car garage are higher than those on homes fitting that description in suburban municipalities. Indeed they are. Just as, the same chart shows, they are higher than those on similar homes in the other parts of Toronto (Scarborough has the cheapest taxes paid in that very specific category of any area in the chart.)

He seemed not to understand or care that a two-storey detached house with a two-car garage in downtown Toronto is hard to find. When you do find one, it is a sign of significant wealth. Meanwhile, that housing type is the absolute norm in Pickering or Markham. Wouldn’t you agree that if you simply compare the very richest people in Toronto to absolutely average people in Ajax, then we pay more? Checkmate, pinkos!

With increasing frustration, City Manager Peter Wallace repeatedly interjected to say that this form of comparison we so often fixate on is not all that helpful. “Arbitrary comparisons across jurisdictions are not particularly important,” he said early in the meeting, and repeated variations on throughout the day. “The critical issue is your service expectations versus your tax expectations.” This council, he said, generally voted against cutting services, and often voted to enhance services. What they needed to do was vote for a tax rate that would support those services. No matter what tax rates they charge elsewhere.

Well after hearing this, repeatedly, Councillor Cesar Palacio asked, by way of trying to compare tax rates, “Is it fair to say that living in Toronto is more expensive than in other areas?”

“No,” replied CFO Rossini.

And on it went into the night. As I say, they don’t get smarter as the meetings go on. But they do go on. And on. And on. And that’s how the government makes its most important decision of the year.