Your January 2012 Executive Committee Preview

Rob Ford at an Executive Committee meeting, presumably telling a deputant to live long and prosper. 

So Tuesday brings us another Executive Committee meeting and there's several items on the agenda that will generate interest. There's also one item that will be introduced at the meeting, as Michelle Berardinetti will put forward a motion to encourage local businesses to apply proceeds from the five cent plastic bag fee  towards protecting Toronto's tree canopy. 


The item that will generate the most interest is on selling TCHC homes, and there are also motions on Dave Meslin's Fourth Wall and Occupy Toronto that are of note. 


TCHC Motion:


The TCHC motion to sell 675 standalone homes will begin at 1:30pm and will be the most contentious of the day. 


The administration argues that there is a backlog of capital repairs ($650M) to be done on TCHC housing and the standalone homes are the worst of the lot. These homes are also relatively high-value (they're right around the city averarge for home values in the mid-$400,000s). City staff figure that selling 675 homes would generate somewhere in the neighbourhood of $330M after fees. 


But there are significant downsides to the plan. While a number of the existing houses are in dire need of repair, some are perfectly fine and so amount to a decrease (or cash-in) of the existing housing supply. 


This comes at a particularly bad time. There are currently 81,000+ on the waitlist for housing and this grows each year. Over the past three years the number of new tenants coming into TCHC housing has declined from 4,266 to 3,733 to 3,300, indicating that lower turnover will cause the waitlist to grow longer. The reduction of the proposed sale units (as current tenants will be relocated) will further exacerbate this problem. 


Moreover, there are questions as to how much such a big sale will actually help. The proposal at hand suggests using the $330M as an endowment of sorts to be invested in a a safe investment like an annuity that would protect the principal. The interest earned would then be used for capital repairs, but this is paltry next to the city's claim of $650M needed for repairs.


The assumed discount rate of 5% from an annuity would generate an estimated extra cashflow of $12M, hardly the big dent in $650M that is needed. 


$12M is a decidedly optimistic number, even if the document refers to the 5% discount rate as 'conservative' (the Bank of Canada currently has the 30-year bond yield at 4%, which is a big difference). The sale proposes a phased approach to sell homes (which makes sense) but assumes the real estate market will remain as robust as it currently is. Given that Toronto is the hottest market in North America, it might be prudent to price in a correction as well. On the other hand, if you ever wanted to sell fixer-upper homes, then doing so at the top of the market makes most sense.


Additionally, many of these homes are in clusters (like wards 30 and 32, which combine for more than 200 of the 675). This creates further problems in selling as there is limited demand in any given area which will cause prices to drop in the area, and not just for TCHC homes.  


Lastly, the $12M number is derived by mixing operating and capital budgets together (sound familiar?), as seen in the table below:

A hat tip to reader Rowan Caister for pointing out question marks here. 

The problem with mixing up operating and capital in this case is that the capital expenses (like capital repairs) are declining and terminal while the assets like rental income from the property are ongoing and growing (within limits). This has the effect of further exaggerating the net value of the cash flow in the table in addition to the above points. 

If the annual income derived from selling 675 homes is in the neighbourhood of $8-12M (to be conservative), then legitimate questions do arise about whether the sale is really a remedy for repairs or a way to decrease housing in the spirit of 'smaller government,' as the City Hall letterhead says.

There are structural problems in TCHC homes, but moreso there are structural problems in the relationship the city has with funding housing (both with the province and tenants). Having an extra amount of money on hand sounds enticing, but it's not the detailed blueprint the TCHC needs to build a better foundation for public housing in Toronto.

TO Hydro Privatization:

When I covered the Scarborough budget town hall a couple of weeks ago for The Grid, I was surprised at the turnout to oppose the proposed 10% privatization of TO Hydro. 

Scarborough receives a disproportionate amount of brownouts and residents were concerned these would increase if a private company would focus on profits more than people. 

TO Hydro is in a tough spot. The Ontario Energy Board recently ruled that they could not raise their prices in response to what TO Hydro felt were growing fiscal challenges (TO Hydro has since asked them to reconsider). To reduce costs TO Hydro has fired hundreds of contractors, as they need the money to invest in infrastructure. 

However, this motion does not propose that the proceeds fund TO Hydro. Instead, any money from a sale would go to the Capital Financing Reserve Fund to offset future debt issuance. In other words, it's taking money from one area that needs it now to save it for a rainy day. 

Knowing what kind of return TO Hydro would generate is difficult. The Committee doesn't discuss that kind of financial information in public, but utility companies have relatively low and stable price to earnings ratios and are comparable to bonds in some respects (a steady stream of reliable income). However given TO Hydro's state its discount rate would be lower than usual. 

A number of councillors- including centrists- have expressed reservations about selling 10% of TO Hydro, so it could be a hard sell at Council. There's also the legitimate concern that without investment in the organization TO Hydro's dividend will freeze (which has been budgeted for) or even fall (which rarely happens at companies and is a sign of big trouble). 

Josh Colle, with his newfound superhero status, background as an energy executive and board position on TO Hydro, could play an interesting role in this. 

Dave Meslin's Fourth Wall/Civic Proposals:
I'm planning on writing more about this later, but this is a motion that is heartening. For the past couple of months activist extraordinaire Dave Meslin has hosted a collection of proposals at 401 Richmond to promote civic engagement. They run the gamut from ranked balloting to voting on weekends to wifi in Council (already achieved, woot!) 


Meslin's motions are being forwarded by Paul Ainslie, who visited the Fourth Wall exhibit (several other councillors have too). I tend to deride Ainslie a bit as being too much of a follower and not enough of a leader, but on this he deserves credit. It's easy to say you think an idea is interesting but it's harder to attach your name to it, and he followed through. 


Of course credit goes to Mez too, who continues to work within and outside of institutions to great effect. This motion will study a variety of the proposals without a commitment to them, but it's still an example of the political process working. 


Plastic Bag Fee Motion:
Michelle Berardinetti has been looking for additional revenue sources and she will add this item to the agenda tomorrow. The item is to encourage businesses to direct the five cent bag fee toward the city fund to protect the tree canopy. 


The five cent fee has been a pet peeve of the Toronto Sun for some time, and they've done favourable reporting on Berardinetti's idea.


No business could be forced to comply due to the fee's legal structure, so this would just be a case of moral suasion. That's a good enough tool to use when you need to although it's pretty difficult to pull off too. 


After all, companies either like to keep the money or donate it to existing charities that fit in with their existing branding. 


So the challenge for Berardinetti's idea to be successful would be to package the branding of directing money towards the city's tree canopy as something that's appealing and noticeable for company's to take part in. Whether this is leveraging the idea of supporting local goods and the environment or connecting the idea of trees and healthy living, there's some room to work with there but it's not an easy task. At council, the challenge for Berardinetti will be to frame it in a way that all sides will like, something like, 'We need to give the private sector the opportunity to contribute to the public good.' 


Additionally, the five cent bag fee is something that Rob Ford mentioned in year end interviews he might like to get rid of. So if there's little take-up on Berardinetti's idea it could be used as a further argument to cancel the fee by saying, 'See, companies just want to keep the money.'


It's worth mentioning that the fee has been incredibly effective for its purpose of reducing plastic bag use. Reports have bag use at 70% less than before the fee, as this Toronto Star editorial points out.   


Motions that will Likely Fail
There's also two motions that were referred to the Executive from Council, and so they will die here. Those are Gloria Lindsay Luby's motion to declare EMS an essential service (currently in lockout or strike situations only 15% can be off the job at a time, but this hurts response times). 


Another motion is to 'endorse the peaceful protests of Occupy Toronto.' It might make for some interesting deputations and responses from the Executive but will go nowhere. 


And lastly, there's a motion from Kristyn Wong-Tam and Glenn de Baeremaeker to exempt Toronto from the implications of Canada-EU trade talks. It won't pass, but de Baeremaeker outdid himself on an awesome prop once again, this time a gift left outside City Hall:

A Deputation: Doing Things Right and Doing the Right Things

I was thinking of making a deputation - my last one didn't exactly happen- but after talking to a couple people about the ethical implications I'm deciding against it. If I'm going to write about city hall as a 'citizen journalist' then it's probably better not to blur that line any more.


With that said, sharing a deputation is a useful writing exercise, so like last time, here is what I would say. 

******************

Before I begin I'd like to thank everyone present for participating in this process from Executive Committee and Visiting Councillors to city staff to the hundreds of engaged observers and deputants here today. It may have happened in July, but this kind of tangible expression of civic virtues and values doesn't happen often and it should be noted how special it is.  


The core service review tells us a lot about the priorities that citizens hold for Toronto. In a way, it asks the valuable and important question 'what is your Toronto?'. 


Looking at the report, we get an idea of our values. According to KPMG, the lowest ranking policy priority in their consultation with citizens was 'affordable taxes'. Instead, we had 13,000 survey responses and while some may try to dismiss it as 'not statistically valid' it provides a useful roadmap for a city that values its services. We value transparent and accountable government and meeting the needs of vulnerable people. This sounds like Toronto the good. 


Sadly, the process thus far has not reflected this. 


The process explicitly targeted services to be cut without pairing them with potential revenue sources and the value the services provide for citizens. This assumption fundamentally ignores the wants of the citizenry and reduces the names, faces and needs into abstract budget numbers. This isn't good planning. 


It isn't good planning when we cancel the vehicle registration tax without finding an offset for that revenue, just saying 'oh, we'll find that next year'. 


It isn't good planning when the Mayor's Speaker forbade- forbade- councillors from mentioning this year's budget when they were planning last year's budget with the David Miller surplus. 


It isn't good planning to ignore the needs of citizens and those motivated to be involved in civic affairs as 'usual suspects'. We need more people who regularly care about their city and government. 


And we have it here today. The expression of the values and priorities in the seats in front of you, in the overflow rooms and hallways. It's an expression that Toronto is about more than the bare essentials, that we care to be better as a people and city. It's a sentiment expressed by business management guru Peter Drucker, that "management is about doing things right; leadership is about doing the right things". 


It's the leadership we have here today and had in July with hundreds of Torontonians expressing their voices- practically in unison- that they care when daycare spaces vanish, they care when dental care for the poor goes away and nutrition programs for children are considered gravy. 


From what I've seen, people care about a process that listens to them and those values. They know that that means raising property taxes a reasonable amount and thinking creatively about revenue sources. That's the sacrifice- the leadership- that citizens have acknowledged they are willing to make because they feel it's right, that it makes a city they're proud of.


In these passionate deputations they've expressed their opposition to the flawed and narrow-minded process from KPMG and the mayor. Now it's your turn, councillors. It's your turn to answer the question 'what is your Toronto', show leadership and do the right things. 


I hope you will and I thank you for your time.  

Responding to Ford-KPMG Talking Points

The upcoming Executive Committee meeting on the recommended KPMG service cuts will be well-attended and watched. Questions remain as to whether it will be as dramatic and eventful as the 'Citizen's Filibuster' in July and whether councillors like Jaye Robinson and Michelle Berardinetti will defect and vote against the report. One thing that we do know is the type of arguments Team Ford will employ to further their agenda. In the spirit of CodeBlueTO's  excellent Spacing article on arguments against Waterfront Toronto I've compiled the KPMG list below to provide my own humble bit. Reading some of Matt Elliott's old posts was a great help in this, so a hat tip to Ford for Toronto


1) "Toronto has a massive $774 million deficit. This needs to be solved".
This is an oft-repeated refrain that has been cited by most media sources and officials. 


Toronto does have a deficit, and its starting point was indeed $774 million. As happens each year, Toronto starts with a very high deficit and whittles it down, which Edward Keenan explains nicely at The Grid. The idea that this particular starting point is a 'tsunami' is misleading as it tracks with previous years pretty closely. Matt Elliott, writer of the superlative blog Ford For Toronto put together the nifty chart below:

In fact, $774 million isn't really the number we should be talking about as Elliott explains in that excellent post. Instead, we should conservatively be talking about a $530 million deficit. Other people have pegged the number much lower, such as left-wing councillor Gord Perks and Rob Ford's former Chief of Staff Nick Kouvalis (August 28 on The City) have pointed to a number closer to $300-$450 million (Kouvalis later recanted this on Twitter, oddly claiming he meant this in addition to the starting point). 

$530 million is conservatively the more accurate number we're dealing with at this time and using the $774 million is an effort to increase political leverage to make unpopular cuts. 

2) "We've inherited this mess from the out-of-control Miller regime. We're the only ones willing to talk about the problems we face". 

For all of the promise of accountability and responsibility coming from Team Ford, this is a frequent line. 

As suggested in the chart above, Toronto has endured large annual structural deficits since amalgamation. During the mayoral campaign Ford frequently pointed this out and criticized the Miller administration for only thinking of the year at hand. 

Yet in the first budget for Team Ford, Frances Nunziata- presumably on orders from the mayor's office- refused to allow mention of the 2012 budget. As Sean Meagher pointed out in his Citizen's Filibuster deputation, if Team Ford had planned ahead for the 2012 budget in the previous budget it would have had the lowest deficit starting point in almost a decade. 

But council was forbidden from talking about or planning for this year's budget-that-must-not-be-named. Now that it's here, The Voldemort Budget is-surprise- scary. All of that money from keeping the Vehicle Registration Tax and having an inflation-based property tax increase (which would just maintain levels, as this Spacing article explains) would be enough to pay for all of the KPMG recommended cuts. Even the Christmas bureau. 

David Miller left a $350 million surplus. By refusing to plan for 2012, Team Ford owns this budget and has turned what could have been a very manageable budget-that-must-not-be-named into a Voldemort Budget of heartless cuts.    

3) "Either we do these cuts or we face a 35% property tax increase. Some downtown NDP councillors want to do this, but I don't".

Rob Ford mentioned a few variations of this line of attack in his interview with Jerry Agar. 

The 35% property tax increase number comes from the Toronto Taxpayers Coalition (tacitly endorsed by Doug Ford, Sue-Ann Levy and Michael Coren, oh my!). The TTC that's not really the TTC based this number on the $22 million generated for every 1% increase in property taxes. Using the faulty $774 million number covered in number one here, you get 35%.

This is a completely unreasonable number. The number excludes any further funding sources for the city (land transfer tax, user fees, dividends from assets etc...), surplus money left over from the previous budget ($88 million) and actual honest-to-goodness efficiencies that departments can find to cut their budget. The number is also politically unfeasible and acts only as a scare tactic. 

Furthermore, no councillor has supported raising property taxes by this amount and I haven't seen any activist, journalist or deputant support it either. 

Saying 'either we make these cuts or raise property taxes 35%' is a disingenuous false dichotomy that uses a false number for cynical politics.

4) "We're being taxed to death in Toronto. This has got to stop". 

Rob Ford has essentially ruled out any property tax increase greater than 2.5% (he wants 2%) and feels taxpayers are unduly burdened. 

Toronto has significantly lower property taxes than comparable Ontario cities. While Toronto has a 0.79% property tax rate, Mississauga's is 0.96%, Ottawa's is 1.25% and Hamilton's is 1.48%. 

Additionally, Toronto offers more services than these cities and pretty efficiently as the KPMG report indicated. Within the KPMG report the lowest ranked policy priority from citizens was 'affordable taxes' (page four), so the idea that this is being demanded by citizens is contradicted by the report the mayor is relying on. 

Lastly, there's a secondary concern in having very low taxes. When the city goes to arbitration- as it soon will with the TTC in a very expensive process- the city will argue that it doesn't have the financial capacity to extend salaries in the manner the union wants. The arbitrator will then say, 'but you have extremely low property taxes compared to your comparables and recently cancelled a tax just granted to you by the province. You clearly have more capacity, and should pay accordingly'.

Toronto is not being taxed to death- far from it. This isn't to say taxes should be at Hamilton rates, but that there is public willingness and an economic argument to raise taxes reasonably. 

5) These aren't really cuts, they're efficiencies. 

Rob Ford said no service cuts. Guaranteed. He promised efficiencies and doggone it, that's what these are. 

While Ford's lead spokesperson acknowledged service cuts in a talking points memo to allies recently, the mayor has refused to do so. In the Jerry Agar interview yesterday, Ford was asked whether cutting 2000 daycare spots was a service cut. His response? "No, it's an efficiency. There are no service cuts." 

Someone on the Toronto subReddit made the appropriate analogy that it would be akin to saying cutting off three of your fingers makes your hand more efficient. This line is utter nonsense. Potentially cancelling the blue night bus? Service cut. Eliminating 2000 daycare spots? Service cut. Reducing snow shoveling, street sweeping, horticulture, getting rid of the Christmas bureau, reducing wheel trans, eliminating libraries or reducing hours? Those are service cuts. 

Importantly, Rob Ford told the National Post's Natalie Alcoba and Chris Selley that closing one library on a Sunday would be a 'major' service cut. 

Efficiencies are when you have the same service delivered at a lower price or increased services delivered at the same price (or better value, dollar for dollar). That is not the case here.

These aren't really efficiencies, they're cuts. 

6) "There's lots of gravy. Just look at all of these unionized city employees. How come we have more than at the start of amalgamation? We should have less."

This is a relatively new line of attack and the strategy is to position your tax dollars against the disliked unions. 

In 2000, Toronto had 2.4 million citizens and 45,000 employees according to this budget (page 3).   

In 2010, Toronto had 2.77 million people and 46,228 employees according to this city document. Granted, the number of employees has been low at various points- it was 40,000 in 2006- but it's hardly out of control like this claim suggests. 

And it does bring up another Ford campaign pledge, that he wouldn't fire staff but would finance his budgets through a managed 3% attrition rate. 

This wasn't the 'gravy' Rob Ford promised, in fact he promised to not fire anyone. City employee growth tracks reasonably well with population growth which makes Ford's claim less meaningful. 

7) "The People complaining are just the Usual Suspects, Unionists, Socialists or Jobless. They don't speak for the city."

"There are 2.5 million people in this city and we've heard from about 400 individuals over the process of consultation. Letting them say which programs they would like to keep and which ones they don't want to keep for 2.5 million people, to me that doesn't make sense." -Giorgio Mammoliti to Inside Toronto

While Team Ford simultaneously says that they've done historic consultation, staying up all night listening to people, they also dismiss them out of hand as having unrepresentative voices. 

Aside from the fact that activists, unionists, socialists and the unemployed are also Torontonians who have a valid voice and contribution to make to the discourse, this line of argument is also untrue. Anyone who was there at the Citizen's Filibuster knows that the day was not just remarkable for its length, but the diversity of people and causes who were there. 

Another argument ties in to this one, that 'these people' are just out their to protect their own self-interests. In a way, that's true- they feel invested in their community and value services provided for it. Much like, say, some people might be self-interested and value having a lower property tax rate. After all, in the Habermas vein, that's what politics is about. 

What's really going on with this is an attempt to categorize the opposition into a caricature and devalue that voice so as to ignore it. And really, that's undemocratic.

 This argument ignores the reality of the diversity of people speaking out, is anti-consultation and cheapens the political institutions the mayor's office is supposed to uphold. 

8) "Why are we in the business of running zoos and theatres? It's about wants and needs. When we ask people 'what do you need', it's not running a zoo". 

This argument suggests we need to re-prioritize and have a paradigm shift (ugh, that phrase) in how we think of government. 

This is a somewhat reasonable argument. It's important to re-assess the role of government to make sure it's on track. We should force ourselves to re-think what the status quo could be too. 

However, for that to be done, a simultaneous efficiency and value study has to be conducted to find out what those priorities are. People have to be genuinely asked and listened to for what they need so that subsidized dental care for the poor can be evaluated from both the citizen's and a 'business' perspective. 

This was not done. The scope of the KMPG report was explicitly limited to discovering what could legally be cut and giving limited recommendations. The value the city gets from the services it delivers (the intangible benefits of the arts, say) was not considered. The limited consultation that was conducted was dismissed as 'not statistically valid' by Ford ally Denzil Minnan-Wong. 

Wants and needs cannot be determined until you find the value of each service in consultation with citizens.

9) "We need to run this city like a business. I'm going to do that."

With his experience at Deco Labels, Rob Ford positions himself as the man with the knowledge to get things done at City Hall. 

I'm not going to cast aspersion on Ford's experience at Deco Labels, but I don't think his 'business strategy' is right for the city. 

I work in business too. Businesses conduct thorough cost-benefit analyses to make prudent short and long-term decisions to optimize profit and limit risk appropriately given their profile. That means they invest in themselves and cut sometimes and most of the time they're doing a combination of both. 

However, this mayor is so idelogically opposed to the idea of government that he is unwilling to look at ways for the city to invest in itself. So the argument of how arts funding spurs a multiplier effect of city benefits falls on deaf ears. Good businesses are open-minded, think creatively and plan for contingencies. They look at the market for the cost of debt- interest rates- to see whether they can get capital at cheaper rates than the returns they generate. With interest levels at record lows, cities with business savvy and good AA+ credit ratings like Toronto can see that as an opportunity for wise investment and measured growth.  

Good businesses do not exclusively cut. They grow because they believe in themselves.

If the city must be compared to a business, it's one that should rightly face a shareholder revolt for not finding value. 

10) "This is the City Manager's report, not ours. We're just following staff."

We're just responding to data and acting accordingly. Why are you making this all political?

Ah, the age-old 'we're just following the wishes of staff' argument. It's a great argument because councillors are not really allowed to criticize staff- Joe Mihevc drew some 'ohhhhhs' when he criticized Pennachetti for producing the Waterfront Toronto-TPLC report. 

The thing is, everyone knows staff are influenced by political pressure and the mayor's office in particular. To think otherwise is just naive.

City staff aren't immune to political pressure. 

**********************

Team Ford will give lots of reasons to justify their actions including some of the above. Many of them are demonstrably false or shallow arguments and should be treated accordingly. 


Note: An earlier version of this article stated Matt Blackett wrote the Spacing article with arguments against the proposed Waterfront-TPLC changes. This was written by CodeBlueTO and the article has been edited to reflect this. Apologies for the error and thanks to Matt Elliott for pointing it out. 

What My Executive Committee Deputation Would Have Been

I took a day off work on Tuesday so I could attend the Executive Committee (and I'm not even in a union or a communist!) and depute on the Waterfront issue, which I did a fair amount of research on to write my latest post. There were some really passionate, knowledgeable and insightful speakers there-- I was feeling a bit intimidated to be honest. At one point, my ex-gf sent a text asking what was up so I stepped out of the room and gave her a call to see how her recent vacation was. In this time a rush of speakers weren't there to make their deputations and my name was called. (Cityslickr later asked me if my ex is a secret Ford operative, but we get along, she's an awesome person and is not exactly a Ford voter, so I'm going to go with no). 


But I did miss my chance to depute, as I asked the City Clerk if I could go at the end but the Mayor declined that opportunity. C'est la vie. For posterity's sake, I thought I would post my deputation- I had a rough outline of my arguments, but wanted to speak extemporaneously. 

Before I begin, I’d like to thank both Executive and Visiting councillors for their effort and attention and particularly city staff for enabling these deputations to take place. I say this because I think we can all agree that hearing from citizens is an important function of government to craft better plans and policies.

It’s something I know Mayor Ford agrees with too. As a councillor he made it a priority in listening to the needs and concerns of constituents and excelled in doing so. He encapsulated this ethic in the mayoral campaign too, promising to ‘respect taxpayers’. This wasn’t just a vague notion either. The tenth point of his mayoral platform, ‘Real Community Consultation’, eloquently stated these principles:

“[The consultation process] will not just ‘inform communities of decisions already made- it will engage stakeholders early enough so plans can reflect their interests and ideas. This process will include proactive notification of all impacted residents, businesses and other stakeholder groups and require sufficient lead-time to receive informed input.”

I didn’t vote for Mayor Ford, but I support these values. They’re the values that build the foundation of a strong city and democracy, that enable the strength and diversity of voices to come together and enrich us all. They also help to avoid, as Councillor Paul Ainslie mentioned this morning in relation to his windmill motion to ‘avoid government foisting projects onto citizens’. It’s a conservative principle- let’s ensure that we have both grassroots dialogue and expert opinions before implementing principles- and it’s one that I’m sure all the councillors here can agree is the bedrock of prudent, intelligent and meaningful city building.

But that’s not what we have here today.

What we have here today is a Mayor- and his brother, Councillor Ford, brazenly flouting the principles and values they campaigned on. They didn’t campaign on the waterfront, but they did campaign on the values of transparent, respectful and prudent governance.

I believe that these are the values you subscribed to when you chose to accept a seat on the Executive Committee and I remind each one of the councillors here today that they are beholden to those values- the commitment to their constituents and Toronto, not beholden to the Mayor.

The Mayor isn’t representing your values when he derides ‘backroom decision-making’ during his campaign and then his brother crows about his ‘backroom vision’ of which we know nothing.

The Mayor isn’t representing your values when he derides Waterfront Toronto as moving too slowly yet since he’s been on their board as of December 8 has not attended any of their five board meetings, three conference calls or one strategy session.

The Mayor isn’t representing your values when he promises to have a close and thoughtful examination of each budget item but isn’t willing to defer this decision until after Waterfront Toronto votes on their Don River business plan- long in the works- tomorrow.

The Mayor isn’t representing your values when he promises openness and transparency yet gives the public four business days to understand the vague generalities of a vision and an Epcot Centre style video for their Ferris Wheel-Mega Mall-Monorail attraction.

Your principles, and by extension the principles of your constituents, are better than that.

Councillor Milczyn, your expertise as an architect and planner would fly in the face of these rushed development  visions that violate process.

Councillor Parker, who is absent, I know has been a long supporter of the Don, which does not receive any attention in the ‘vision-making exercise’ we see here today.

Councillor Kelly, at the July 22 opening for Sherbourne Common, you called Waterfront Toronto’s work and cooperation with the three levels of government ‘magical’ and ‘one of the reason’s why Toronto is one of the world’s emerging cities’.

Councillors Thompson, Del Grande, Minnan-Wong and Holyday, you routinely criticized the previous administration for seeking one-time cash to solve problems, yet that’s the solution sought here today.

Councillor Robinson, you campaigned on shifting power back to residents on community development and planning issues and promoted civic engagement as part of the ‘My Life, My City’ series.

Councillor Berardinetti, you believe in creating jobs through protecting the natural environment, a central tenet of the Waterfront Toronto plan.

There’s an opportunity today, and it’s not the ‘vision making’ brainstorming, although some of that may complement existing plans. The opportunity belongs to the councillors on the Executive, and it’s this:

You have the opportunity today to show leadership. You have the opportunity to be what you were elected to be- strong community representatives in touch with your own principles and those of your constituents. You have the opportunity to hold this mayoralty to account to the values they espouse, to make sure that their actions align with their promises. You're being asked to give the Mayor a blank slate by sending this to Council. Instead, the community and council, as people have pointed out today, needs to ask more questions

Like politics, the end product for the Port Lands is a result of the process. As empty as the Port Lands are, as frustrating as the building process can be, they will not be built on murky PowerPoint promises or toxic and shallow accusations. They’re built with the values and integrity of our process generated through consultation and transparency. They’re built with an active and engaged citizenry that demands better, that wants Toronto to be prudent, thoughtful and great. 

Today, you have a chance to affirm those values and your principles by voting No on Motion 9.6. 

I hope you do so today, and I thank you for listening. 

Doug Ford and the Forgotten Waterfront History

The diversity of scenes I met with this morning made the ride extremely pleasant. The wooded part of the peninsula was like shrubbery. The sands towards the lake reminded me of the sands at Weymouth, and

the sight of the highlands presented a totally different country to anything near the bay, tho' I was not more than four miles from it.

-Elizabeth Simcoe, wife of Toronto founder John Graves Simcoe, describes the Don River in her diary, August 1793

York Habour as painted by Elizabeth Simcoe in 1793

At the heart of Toronto’s founding is the Don River, a site of natural beauty and promise, its industrial history and a hybrid of the two. From when John Graves Simcoe picked the area between the Don and Humber Rivers as the site for Toronto, the Don has been a point of constant discussion for what its role is. For Simcoe’s wife Elizabeth, it was a source of inspiration and possibility. For the mid and late 19^th century industrialists of the site the Don was a means to an end for their factories, a place to dump waste and transport materials. This made it a public health hazard until the 1940s when the lower Don was buried and mostly forgotten. The Don continues to be a site at the heart of Toronto’s potential and imagination, with proposals for a “Technodrome”, 20-story glass pyramid and harness racing site along the way.

With his big announcement of his vision for a monorail, the world’s largest Ferris wheel and a massive mega-mall, Doug Ford added himself to that history last Tuesday, altering the course of the Don-and by extension, Toronto- yet again.

“We had fifteen people in the room at the Port Lands and everybody’s jaw just dropped. [The vision for the waterfront] is spectacular, just spectacular”

-Doug Ford describing the reaction to his Port Lands proposal on Metro Morning

Tuesday August 30 was going to be a big day for Doug Ford. The articulate older brother of the Mayor was tasked with selling his vision for the Port Lands and changing the tone of a sceptical reception. For the rookie councillor whose most recent foray in selling the Mayor’s agenda involved ill-advised derision of Margaret Atwood. This would be his toughest and most important challenge yet.

The agenda for the City Hall Executive Committee had been released Friday afternoon, the dead zone for media coverage. Between Hurricane Irene’s impending threat of New York, Moammar Gaddafi’s standoff in Libya and coverage of Jack Layton’s life and funeral, there wasn’t much news capacity to pay attention to the procedural details at City Hall. But there it was, item 9.6 on the agenda in the city’s dry looking template, “Revitalization Opportunities for the Port Lands”.

It sounds innocuous, but the Twitter-verse predictably sounded the alarm. Underlying the bureaucratic language of the document was a clear direction to sell the Port Lands--some of the most underdeveloped but valued land in Canada--to the private sector and distance the city from the existing arms-length Waterfront Toronto agency that has been guiding it for ten years. Typically news about procedure and technical changes don’t make it much further than City Hall and Twitter, but when speculation for details grew on the weekend, that all changed.

Like the KPMG reports that put anything legally able to be cut up for cuts, the Port Lands strategy was to not commit to any specific ideas until needed. The advantage of this is that the administration is able to test public sentiment and can distance itself from anything by saying, ‘We’re just talking about ideas here, a vision to make this great. Things will change’. The disadvantage is that rumours and speculation can run wild, enabling easy criticism.

The latter overwhelmed the benefit of the former. By Monday the news was creeping outside the City Hall Watcher bubble and into the general public about any number of wild ideas. The Port Lands were Doug’s thing, and he would have to sell them with just enough details. So began his day of giving interviews, starting with Metro Morning’s Matt Galloway just past 8AM. His salesman face would be on for the rest of the day.

At the heart of motion 9.6 isn’t a Ferris wheel or monorail or mega-mall, but the Don River. The motion addresses the pace and investment in naturalizing the Don:

“The proposed flood protection measures for the Port Lands are currently unfunded. Without flood protection, significant revitalization cannot occur. Staff recommend that TPLC be granted authority to explore private sector and other options to front end infrastructure and flood protection costs in order to unlock development potential within the Port Lands.”

By criticizing the pace for the naturalization of the Don the motion undermines the very reason that Waterfront Toronto has been lauded: for its careful and methodical planning and execution. As much as the Don is shaped by water and erosion and other forces of nature, it has been shaped by Toronto’s political history, and often for the worse. It’s a history that people often stumble into or it goes unnoticed.

Waterfront Toronto's Port Lands plan with restored Don

John Wilson’s first encounter with the Don River was as a university student. Coming from the countryside, he missed the interaction with nature but connected with it in Toronto at Wilket Creek Park. He didn’t know it at the time but when he and his friends slipped under the chain link fence to sit by the river he would be forming the roots of a lifelong passion for the Don. He would also be connecting to a deep and rich history of naturalists and conservationsists like Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles Sauriol and the river’s tension between conservation and industrialization.

Wilson would re-connect with the Don in the early 1990s when the report Bringing Back the Don came out to much news coverage. He wrote a few articles on the subject and found himself pulled in, “I wanted to be able to show my kids they could do something about the environment close to them”. He joined the Task Force to Bring Back the Don which produced the report and was one of the first City Hall advisory committees. Wilson would go on to chair this committee, describing their role to be, ‘friendly to city staff and councillors and offer good advice’. In this capacity, Wilson has contributed thousands of hours of volunteer work, doing frequent educational walks, community consultations, presentations and research. 

But the Ford administration has not looked for their advice.

In May a motion backed by Ford came before council to axe the more than 20 advisory committees comprised of citizens and experts who consult with city staff on ideas and local priorities. These advisory bodies are required to be renewed at the start of each mayoralty. The rationale for eliminating the committees- the Task Force among them- is that staff time would be freed up and the void could be filled by social media.

The motion was sent back to the executive for consideration with the stipulation they had to report back in July with a detailed rationale for why each advisory body should stay or go. But it was missing on the agenda and when left-leaning Councillor Janet Davis pointed this out at the start of the meeting, the item was punted to September. It wasn’t a priority.

Wilson indicates that some Task Force members are active in other ways, but that there’s a frustration that their voice and expertise aren’t wanted by City Hall. Wilson adds, “Sometimes life sucks and you move on. I’m fine with not everything turning out the way I want, that’s the way these things go.” With that said, he cautions Ford on altering the process, “We’ve already done this, the consultation, the environmental assessment...To use the terminology of the day, it’s not ‘respect for taxpayers’”.

Due to the monorail content of Doug Ford’s pitch, the immediate reference for most people was that Ford was Lyle Lanley, the silver-tongued salesman who hoodwinks Springfield into building a monorail in a classic Simpsons episode. But watching all of these interviews again, one can’t help but think that there’s another classic American cartoon figure that is a Doug Ford substitute.

With his slicked back hair, business background and insistence that the vision will be ‘huge’, ‘spectactular’ and ‘world-renowned’, Doug Ford is Toronto’s Donald Trump. With that larger than life persona he took to Newstalk 1010 at 9:30 to sell his vision to a decidedly different radio audience than Metro Morning, one that leans right-wing and tends to support Ford.

In the intro to the Doug Ford interview on Newstalk Ryan Doyle enthuses about the Ford Vision arguing that its dazzle and signature Ferris wheel would lure tourists from abroad. With a sympathetic host, Ford expanded his vision, indicating that it would include ice cream shops and pubs in addition to the Ferris wheel.

Las Vegas just built a monorail and is planning to build the world's largest Ferris wheel for $500M

Ford would reiterate his talking points 15 minutes later on John Oakley’s Talk 640 radio show, long a Ford-friendly media outlet. The argument goes something like this: Waterfront Toronto moves too slowly and does not have allotted funding. The private sector moves faster and will do a better job at making something we can be proud of.

Drawn to spectacle, the media quickly focused in on the prospect of a monorail, mega-mall and the world’s largest Ferris wheel. In so doing some outlets, like Newstalk and Talk 640, ignored the historical context for the waterfront and the existing framework that goes with it. Talking about the process was dull, but Ferris wheels and monorails are shiny.

There were lots of good questions to be asked. What were the legal liabilities? Where was the consultation? Wouldn’t breaking government agreements scare investors off through instability? How would this impact neighbouring projects? If Ford was concerned with the slow pace of Waterfront Toronto and the lack of investment in its properties, what effort had he made to work with them? For the latter, according to Waterfront Toronto spokesperson Michelle Noble, Mayor Ford had been installed as a member of the Waterfront board on December 8. Since then he has not attended any of the five board meetings, three conference calls or a strategy session. City Hall’s sense of inquiry into these questions was as limited as some media members’.

As for the funding at issue for the Don naturalization, the Waterfront Toronto schedule explicitly stated that the funding would not be available until late 2011. Over the past few months they have been preparing a business case to be made to the board in September which will then be released to the public later if it passes. According to a Toronto Star column by Royson James, this board meeting will occur on September 7, the day after the Executive Committee meeting.

Waiting another day for more information would seem like prudent business planning for a multi-million dollar decision, but Doug Ford’s Trump-like persona is more about the style than any business substance.

It’s not the first time Toronto has seen a business proposal for the Port Lands and Lower Don that didn’t have the underlying details sorted out. In 1987, the Ataratiri housing project was proposed for the West Donlands which would have provided 14,000 mixed housing spaces. After investing in soil de-contamination and various studies, no private investors had an interest in the project.

Facing budget difficulties, the Bob Rae government tried to unload the site for a song in 1992, offering it for $30M provided the buyer finish the de-contamination process. There were no takers, partially due to a soft real estate market.

In 1999 the Mike Harris government attempted to sell the property to a harness racing consortium, bypassing any community consultation. It’s this last instance that got Cindy Wilkey involved. On the board of the local BIA, she was blindsided by the proposal and has since been one of the most active individuals to build sustainable waterfront development

“I see a lot of parallels between now and then”, writes Wilkey, a lawyer, about the lack of transparency. Ultimately in 1999 the community opposition shut down the development. In contrast to the Harris plan to sell the land, Waterfront Toronto consulted extensively, spending six years and $19M on various studies, assessments and consultations. Wilkey has since got involved in #CodeBlueTO, a group quickly put together to oppose the Ford vision for the Port Lands.  

Kids play in Waterfront Toronto's Sherbourne Commons

The Ford vision seems to have some of the same weaknesses as the Harris plan. Gene Desfor is a York professor has specialized in urban waterfront planning who recently co-edited a book, Re-Shaping Toronto’s Waterfront, with fellow academic Jennifer Laidley. He got back from an Algonquin Park camping trip to learn that the waterfront had been flipped upside down and violated the lessons outlined in the book, “If planning and development of Toronto’s waterfront does not recognize the plurality of interests and the variety of scales (local, regional, national and global) through which these interests are expressed, then the city will not succeed...Planning is a process as well as producing a product. And to ensure a great waterfront, both the process and product need to be considered”.

The process has been decidedly private. Ford has insisted there is sufficient private sector interest in contrast to previous waterfront opportunities and cites preliminary talks with the Australian real estate developer Westfield as an example. However, Ford did not receive council approval to pursue these talks and searches for Westfield in the lobbyist registry do not yield any results.

One disconnected piece of transparency occurred in April when City Council voted to allow the Toronto Port Lands Company, a city agency, to sell its real estate holdings for a profit and funnel the proceeds back into the capital reserves as opposed to reinvesting them in the waterfront. This lends credence to the idea that the Ford plan for the Waterfront is designed to shore up short-term budget gaps as opposed to long-term investment in the community. It’s an approach that contradicts the Waterfront Toronto strategy of a consultative market based, phased approach. “The city can only absorb so much development each year,”  says Noble. She adds that the first few years are for planning and consultation to get it right. Rushing this process and selling to much at once would dramatically depress prices. 

  

When Wilson was asked what advice he would give Mayor Ford about the waterfront planning, he was quite direct, “ You must not sell off the city’s future for pennies on the dollar in order to balance next year’s budget. It looks to me they’re selling off potentially expensive real estate at firesale prices unimproved because they have a problem with how they’re going to balance the books”.

Desfor agrees, “I believe that Ford’s plan for the waterfront is not a plan at all. It seems to be an ill-considered attempt to solve a fiscal problem rather than planning what is best for the waterfront and city... There have been many other ill-conceived plans for the waterfront and I would place Ford’s scheme right at the head of the line”.

Doug Ford’s long day continued, giving TV interviews with CTV and CP24 for their noon newscasts. The day must have been a rush, a blur of repetition and oddly symbolic. The Don River and Port Lands are fraught with people adding mistakes and not learning from history or the context that shapes its discourse. As Doug Ford pitched his way through his day, he created a void of history and context. With images of monorails and Ferris wheels and mega-malls he created a historical vacuum by using Fordian rhetoric and planning.

In the background lay everything else. In the background lay the details of the Ford plan, of which no one but he knew. It’s where the guardians of the Don and waterfront were, people like Wilkey and Desfor and Wilson who have collectively put in countless hours of thought and research. It’s where the collective citizenry was relegated, with no consultation or transparency and existing assessments and consultations dismissed. But most of all, it’s where history lay. All the lessons, errors and politics that layer the Don and Port Lands like sediments on a river bed were washed away. The Waterfront Toronto plan tried to capture that in a workable, open framework. But Ford wanted to make his own history and do it quickly. But in making his own splash he ignored the environment of the Don, City Hall and the citizens of Toronto and refused to engage in the history he’s altering.

Tyler Anderson/National Post