🔭 PLATFORM VIEW: Mark Saunders’ Plan to End Waste

🔗 LINK: marksaundersfortoronto.ca/news/end-wast…

🔧 DOABLE? No

💰 COSTED? No

✨ OVERALL: ⭐️ (1 out of five)

This plan is bad.

Let’s start with the only good bits: first, the thumbnail image for the embedded video, where Saunders is pictured looking at a piggy bank with three loonies floating above, is fun. He looks like a man who is satisfied to view that piggy bank.

Second: some of the sentiment is nice. “Residents should expect the absolute highest degree of scrutiny when it comes to how their tax dollars are spent,” says Saunders’ plan. I agree!

I also think we should apply a high degree of scrutiny to platform promises. And in that light, this plan falls right the hell over.

A “pledge to not vote for a property tax hike greater than the rate of inflation” is simply not a doable pledge in a city facing a $1.5 billion budget gap.

Even in a city that wasn’t facing that kind of budget gap, it wouldn’t be doable. Pledging to hold property tax increases at or below the rate of inflation is equivalent to promising to take an annual revenue cut. With a growing population, that means you’d need to find a way to achieve significant savings every single year.

But no mayor who has pledged to keep property taxes below inflation has actually been able to find those savings. (Instead, both Rob Ford and John Tory turned to above-inflation tax levies to fund stuff.) A parade of City Managers have insisted — strenuously, at great length, sometimes using icebergs as visual aids — that savings of that magnitude are not possible without making dramatic cuts to services.

If you’re a “run government like a business” kind of voter, consider Saunders’ plan this way: it’s akin to a CEO getting up on stage at a shareholder meeting and announcing a strategy to reduce revenues every year for as long as they have the job.

This isn’t to say there aren’t savings to be had in the City budget. A continuous improvement program to identify ways that the bureaucracy can be pared back and processes can be modernized is good and useful. Providing the Auditor General with resources and opportunity to conduct reviews is useful too. But it is very unlikely those processes will achieve savings greater than the twin forces of inflation and population growth.

Saunders’ examples of government waste are pretty silly too. He cites the “recently awarded $400 million facelift to the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts.” You can hate the project and think TO Live should have opted for a reno rather than a rebuild, but $400 million has not yet been “awarded.” A funding strategy is still in the works.

Saunders also indicates he thinks there are too many City strategies, and savings could be had for eliminating some of them. He lists that there’s “a Skateboard Strategy, a Toronto Nightlife Action Plan, a Pollinator Protection Plan, a Walking Strategy, etc.”

I do think the City can go overboard on branding everything a strategy — and especially naming everything something like StrategyTO — but if you believe City Hall should be taking action to do things like, say, build skateparks, or improve the situation for pedestrians, isn’t it better that they consider their actions as part of a strategy instead of just doing stuff on an ad-hoc basis?

Look, I get why candidates make this “at or below inflation” property tax promise. It sounds good to voters, who aren’t generally interested in reading long explainers about how property tax revenues don’t grow with the economy (or assessment growth). Sometimes advisors — and candidates – simply don’t understand the mechanics of this either. But candidates should understand from a cursory look at the city’s books that this kind of thinking — pushed by two back-to-back conservative mayors — created an environment where City Hall is fiscally unsustainable and very vulnerable to economic shocks. More of the same approach is not likely to fix it.

PLATFORM VIEW is a new daily(ish) feature by City Hall Watcher on Substack Notes. Got a request for a candidate policy proposal I should review? Let me know.