Smooth sailing in council not always ideal

OC Transpo fare hike highlights lack of budget debate

Faced with having to approve a whopping 16-per-cent fare increase for the so-called Community Pass at last week’s transit commission meeting, public commissioner Blair Crew asked a very reasonable question: How much would other OC Transpo fares have to increase in order to keep the passes for disabled residents at the same rate? Turns out, not that much. To freeze the Community Pass at $35 a month, a regular adult pass would be hiked an extra five cents a month: an express pass, an additional 30 cents.

A single ride fare? If you pay with Presto, the cost would go up one penny, a denomination so insignificant, we don’t even mint it anymore.

Hard to imagine many people in Ottawa balking at shelling out a few more cents per month so that some of the more vulnerable folks in our community — think people on provincial disability or who use Para Transpo — could keep an extra five bucks in their pockets.

However, even though Crew asked the question last week, the answer did not reach councillors until late Tuesday, the evening before council was to vote on the entire budget. So what happened? City council passed the transit budget without a single question or comment.

And that’s a problem on two fronts.

First, there’s the specific issue of the fare. It’s amazing that in light of the new information they had received just the night before, not a single councillor asked about the Community Pass.

This is not to argue that council should have automatically upped other fares in order to keep the passes for the disabled at the same price.

Indeed, this is the second big hike in two years because the commission at some point decided that Community Passes should cost the same as seniors’ passes.

But are no decisions ever to be revisited or discussed? Apparently not.

And that brings us to the second, larger issue that was illuminated by the transit fare example: the lack of debate at council.

For four years in a row, we’ve seen harmony among councillors during the city’s budget process. Nothing wrong with that — it’s certainly preferable to the chaos that ensued during budget meetings in past terms of council.

What we haven’t seen are any major — and very few minor — changes throughout the budget process.

The draft document that Mayor Jim Watson presents is pretty much the budget that is passed by council.

Now, there aren’t any riots in the streets over the city’s spending, so the situation is not disastrous. But it’s also hard to imagine that it’s ideal for a process surrounding something as important as a budget to be this inflexible.

The key reason for the budget’s rigidity stems from a promise that Watson extracted from his fellow councillors in late 2010: they pledged to “work within the funding envelope for the budgets in their mandates, and that any additions to the budget will require offsetting reductions.”

There’s some validity to this system.

“It’s given us the discipline that we don’t start the budget process by simply adding things onto one side of the ledger,” Watson said Wednesday.

But the process makes for a virtually unchangeable budget, with little room for discretion by councillors who we elect, ostensibly, for their judgment.

Should Watson be mayor in the next term of council, he’s indicated he’ll want his colleagues to make the same sort of pledge to keep all expenditures and cuts within the same envelope. That would be unwise.

Consider that the group that oversees three of the city’s eight day programs — which offer emergency services, including meals, to anyone who walks through the doors — told the Community and Protective Services Committee that even with a 1.5 per cent increase in their budget, the programs wouldn’t be able to provide healthy food to an estimated 1,400 clients. Could they have an additional $25,000 to $50,000?

No can do. The discretionary spending part of the social services budget is very tight, so there was no place in that part of the budget to find the extra money.

But what about looking in the entire $3-billion budget for some additional cash? Not allowed because of the pledge councillors made to keep all spending within their respective silos. (Although $250,000 was found in city-wide reserves for an employment land study.)

In theory, looking to move money across departmental envelopes can be discussed at the council meeting where the budget is voted on as a whole, but it’s not.

Only Coun. Rainer Bloess ever tried it, but was publicly admonished by Watson for trying to find $5 million in the budget for transit without suggestions for cuts elsewhere. So that was the end of that. Even when councillors have followed the rules of matching extra spending with equivalent cuts, unhappiness has ensued.

When she was chair of the transportation committee, Coun. Marianne Wilkinson got her knuckles rapped by the mayor’s office after her committee reinstated a crossing-guard program by decreasing the number of planned hires in the transportation department by two.

Wilkinson is no longer chair of the transportation committee.

Crew was playing by the rules too, doing the “heavy lifting” of the budget deliberations at the committee level. He asked an excellent question at the appropriate meeting, but didn’t get an answer until the night before the council meeting.

And as a public member of the transit commission, he does not have a vote on council.

Should Watson be mayor in the next term of council, he’s indicated he’ll want his colleagues to make the same sort of pledge to keep all expenditures and cuts within the same envelope.

That would be unwise. Such restrictions do impose a certain discipline on councillors, but it also ties their hands in dealing with issues that were unforeseen during the draft budget process, a process that is largely run through Watson’s office.

We may have wanted a more functional council, but we did not elect councillors to simply accept the mayor’s budget as written. Which is exactly what has happened for the past four years.