The Star: Never Ending Circus

By: Carol Goar
Published: Feb 08, 2008 04:30 AM
Source: The Star

There was a time when it was mildly amusing to watch Toronto's mayor run the city with zany exuberance. Mel Lastman would lurch from scrape to scandal, bluster at the premier and prime minister, concoct wild marketing schemes and put on fine street festivals.

But Lastman's antics lost their charm when Torontonians learned how much was askew at city hall. They wanted a clean, competent civic government.

They're still waiting.

The upheavals of the 2008 budgetary cycle have shown Mayor David Miller and his key bureaucrats to be amateurish, at times sneaky and at times craven.

They have shown the city's 44-member council to be inattentive and destructively querulous.

This week's sudden disclosure that the city was planning to raise rental fees for municipal ice rinks, soccer fields and swimming pools by an average of 21.5 per cent sparked yet another fiasco – the latest in a string of debacles that need not have happened.

Late Monday, as the budget committee was nearing the end of its public hearings, the proposal to increase sports permit fees came to light. Councillors blamed the city's parks and recreation department for burying the recommendation in a thick wad of budgetary background documents. Apparently, it did not occur to them to check an item that would affect thousands of their constituents.

Budget chief Shelley Carroll (who had known about the measure for more than a week, but said nothing) expressed her displeasure with the $2.1 million cash grab.

Miller was nowhere to be found.

Hockey coaches, soccer officials and irate parents cried foul. Kids braced for cancellations.

Two days later, the mayor popped up and told everybody to calm down. The controversial proposal would be reviewed.

To put this imbroglio in context, it came one week after Miller proudly unveiled Toronto's first balanced budget in a decade. He assured residents that Toronto would be able to pay for the services it provided. Property taxes would go up by a relatively modest 3.75 per cent. Not a word was said about the hidden zinger.

It came one day before the end of community consultations on the budget. The schedule was already set, with 90 speakers on the lineup. That precluded any public debate.

And it came one month after the department of parks, forestry and recreation released its "revolutionary" policy entitled "Everybody Gets to Play." The plan called for a sharp increase in fees for sports programs over the next six years, coupled with enriched subsidies to ensure that low-income families could participate. For many councillors, it was a hard pill to swallow.

Had they known the whole story, it would have been harder. But parks and recreation manager Brenda Librecz withheld one critical detail. Asked whether rental fees for ice time would be raised, she responded: "Permit fees, including ice time, are not part of this policy." It wasn't a lie, but it certainly was misleading.

Coming on the heels of last summer and fall's mismanaged campaign to introduce two new levies – a land transfer tax and vehicle registration tax – this week's controversy was disheartening proof that the city's senior politicians and bureaucrats are either out of their depth or so obsessed with finding money that they've lost their perspective.

They do have an unenviable task. The city's expenses outstrip its revenues by hundreds of millions of dollars. It is paying for services that ought to be financed by the province, as even Premier Dalton McGuinty admits. It can barely afford to maintain, let alone renew, its aging infrastructure.

But that does not excuse sloppy management, faulty communication and negligent oversight. It does not give city officials a right to balance Toronto's budget without alerting councillors and the public to hefty fee increases. And it doesn't justify the mayor's oops-we'll-fix-it attitude.

It has been more than four years since Lastman, Toronto's grand but gaffe-prone circus master, relinquished the chain of office.

Yet the circus goes on.