City budget’s bizarro passage
The Issue: This week saw the passage of the $9.4-billion Toronto city budget for 2013, which included a 2-per-cent residential property tax increase, a reprieve for five fire trucks threatened with being mothballed, and a rise in such worthwhile expenditures as daycare subsidies and school breakfast programs.
The story that emerged wasn’t the budget itself, but the weird way it passed. Mayor Rob Ford — who could lose his job any day, depending on when an appeal court’s decision arrives and what it decides — began by introducing his budget with the tax hike, but then voted in favour of Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti’s motion to freeze taxes, which failed to pass. On Wednesday, budget chair Mike Del Grande marred any celebratory stirrings by handing Ford his resignation, blaming the new spending added to his budget and saying a motion calling for more budget transparency amounted to “a non-confidence motion.”
Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, Ford’s public works chair: “I find it highly unusual for the chair of the executive committee and the mayor to vote against his own budget.” Del Grande has said he’ll return if council unanimously votes for it, but says the likelihood of that is “next to none.”
The ever-quotable Councillor Adam Vaughan, who has long been crit
ical of Ford: “We’ve beaten him so badly, he’s doing our work for us now . . . This is not a Rob Ford budget.”
Ford, declaring victory after the budget passed — with $12 million in additions added by council and mil- lions more added by Ford’s executive
and the budget committee: “Every single member of council can be happy with the small compromises made in it, because even with those compromises we have turned the corner . . . we’re on the right path, the path protecting the taxpayers of this great city.”
Royson James, Toronto Star: “In voting against his own budget, hanging his supporters out to dry, compromising where he had urged his allies to stand firm, and, still, in the end, failing to stop about $12 million of budget add-ons, Ford showed again he does not have control of city council. By compromising, though, he’s showing signs of softening. How that will help the mayor going forward is an open question.” Former budget chair Mike Del Grande, on Ford’s backing of a measure to freeze property taxes — in opposition to his own budget, which he otherwise supported: “It’s kind of hard and I don’t think the mayor gets it when he votes for zero per cent . . . I thought it was a mistake. I don’t think he understands that. I don’t think he has the capacity to understand that. I don’t think he understands when you say you support the budget and tell everybody to support the budget, you don’t do something like that.”
Del Grande, telling the Grid about his intriguing habit of dropping in on city employees unannounced while working as budget chair, so committed is he to efficiency: “I’m the kind of guy that will call them over, ask them if they know who I am. Most of the time they’ll say no. I tell them who I am, then they crap their pants. And I basically just tell them, ‘Look, the public wants to see value for their money.’ They’re working for me. I’m the boss. It’s my money.”