Have you read Philip Preville’s cover story in Toronto Life — the one with the picture of city hall on the cover with a toilet bowl in place of the clam shell and the headline “Where your money goes”? Preville does a good job of revealing many of the things that could use fixing at city hall. The planning department is one: “[The city’s] planning department — more overworked and understaffed than any other — cannot meet its obligations to review developers’ proposals, consult stakeholders, conduct studies and make recommendations to council. The situation amounts to a form of planning insolvency, and the city is forever in the urbanist’s bankruptcy court know as the Ontario Municipal Board.”

The enormity of the police and TTC budget is another: “Even as crime rates are falling, the police eat up more and more of the city’s operating budget. For most of the past decade, other city services have had to keep tight lids on their spending, but the police force has not faced a budget freeze since 1998.” Transit, meanwhile, eats up a lot in capital expenditures, writes Preville, though I would argue that that’s where the similarities between the police budget and TTC budget end. TTC infrastructure needs to be replaced; service to and from the outer suburbs needs to be improved. Other than asking other levels of governments to help, or selling off parts of the TTC, it would be hard for the city to avoid these costs.

Preville also shined a spotlight on staffing problems: “Compounded gapping [vacant jobs that are left vacant for a while to save money] has left some departments — notably city planning, licensing and standards, and technical services — chronically short-staffed … Gapping has ripple effects — increased workloads, overtime hours, stress, absenteeism — all of which make the City of Toronto a particularly unappealing employer. Disgruntled staff members who can’t find work in the private sector or with other municipalities apply for internal transfers to positions where they don’t have to deliver a service.”

The picture Preville paints is pretty bleak. It does, however, seem to indicate (if you ignore the point about the police budget) that city hall isn’t necessarily over-spending, as many of the mayor’s critics tend to claim. Departments are severely understaffed; the city’s $300-million backlog of road repairs isn’t being adequately addressed; contacts aren’t being adequately monitored. The bigger problem appears to be that the city isn’t investing the money it does have into the proper places — investing in more planning staff to deal with development applications, for example, might reduce the amount of time and money the city spends fighting development at the OMB.  Simply screaming that the city is a big over-spender, it would seem, is an over-simplification.

My first thought upon reading this article was that it didn’t explore the reasons why city hall is in the mess it is in. The Mayor and many others say downloading from the province, pressures due to amalgamation and the city’s inability to levy taxes that grow with the economy play a large role in its financial woes. On his blog, Preville acknowledges that these are a valid arguments. The purpose of his article, however, was to explore “the decisions the city has made to cope with the shortfall, the ill effects of those decisions and the morass in which they have left the city.” In the introduction to the feature in the magazine Preville writes: “Toronto’s civic conversation is so preoccupied with the money we don’t have, we no longer talk about what we do with the money we’ve got.”

Check out Preville’s blog to read the memo City Manager Shirley Hoy sent to staff to help boost morale in wake of the story hitting the magazine stands. City hall has also responded with a new release outlining “factual errors,” though many of the points they raise read more like reassurances that nothing is as bad as it seems rather than actual correction of facts. (For example, the news release explains the reasoning behind the city’s most recent hiring freeze, which is consistent with what Preville writes. The release then goes on to say “succession plans to maintain well-qualified public service are underway in several key divisions.”)

I would argue that some wonderful things have happened this year at city hall, thanks to leadership from our Mayor and city councillors. Take the Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Action plan, Transit City, and other planned sustainable transportation initiatives. I don’t believe we should take these sorts of things for granted. At the same time, investigating some of the problems Preville has revealed is vital. It’s time to raise the level of debate.

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