A fiasco that everyone saw coming
The problems at city hall clearly run much deeper than the vacant-home tax snafu
There’s an old J. Paul Getty quote that says if you owe the bank $100, you have a problem, but if you owe the bank $100 million, the bank has a problem.
In a similar vein, I think if the city gets, say, 62 complaints about a new tax policy’s implementation, it might be a problem with those complainants. But if the city gets 62,000 complaints in one day, it’s probably a problem with the city.
And that’s what happened this week, when property owners started getting bills reflecting thousands of dollars for the increased vacant home tax — many or most of them not owners of any vacant homes at all — and formed long lines at city hall to express their confusion, fear and outrage.
Nominally, this problem arose because those people didn’t declare that the properties they own were occupied by the city’s deadline, and so they were taxed for them being vacant. But in practice, that many people missing the same deadline means that the city experienced a massive communication and implementation problem. It’s a fiasco. A snafu. A debacle. A farce.
And you can judge the comprehensiveness of the foul up by how universally it has been recognized as such by politicians at city hall. From the mayor and from representatives of every corner of the city, councillors from the extreme left to the extreme right of Toronto’s political spectrum, the word has been that the city has messed up and needs to make it right.
The good news: No one is going to have to pay this tax if they lived in their house, whether or not they got a big bill. The errors will be fixed. Further, according to a bylaw being proposed by Mayor Olivia Chow and budget chief Shelley Carroll, no one at all will be forced to pay the late fees that would normally accompany the missed declaration after a successful appeal of the tax.
The bad news is this colossal shambles was entirely foreseeable, and in fact was entirely foreseen, and somehow proceeded anyway. Mere weeks ago at a city council meeting (where the deadline for making the required vacant-home declarations was retroactively extended — clearly not enough) a parade of city councillors expressed their concern that many, many people were still unaware of what they needed to do, and how, and why.
The bureaucrats in the city’s revenue services department kept insisting it would all be fine.
“Isn’t there a way that we could collect this information by targeting homes that we suspect are vacant without asking everyone in the city to fill out these forms? It seems terribly inefficient how we do this,” Coun. Jamaal Myers said, to kick off the questioning, coincidentally summing up the line of questioning from those who would follow.
They didn’t get far, then. Staff members said privacy regulations forbid them to use utility bills to identify vacancies, for instance. They swore up and down that there’s no way they could add a tick box to the bill itself requiring the declaration be made at the time tax bills are paid (though it seems like a very simple technical challenge to overcome). We’re stuck with this way, they insisted. “This is not an ideal method,” the head of revenue services said, “but this is the optimum way.”
And yet, at that very meeting, after the deadline had already passed, the same man said about 160,000 property owners had not made the required declaration.
“Oh boy,” Coun. Stephen Holyday said, then.
Oh boy, indeed: now 62,000 people in one day have testified to the city that it wasn’t “optimum.” There must be a better way.
Those who remember the cable company fiasco in the 1990s over “negative option billing” — in which customers were charged for premium TV channels unless they contacted the company to say they didn’t want them — will recall the uproar it caused.
This seems similar, in that a home is presumed vacant until someone goes out of their way to indicate it is not.
At the best of times, a great many people in the city are only vaguely aware of what’s going on at city hall. And how many see or hear that information is about a “vacant home tax” and immediately think, “I don’t own a vacant home, so this doesn’t apply to me,” and stop paying attention immediately?
Fixing this is one question. Another is a question of basic competence: everyone could see this issue coming, and just weeks ago councillors knew exactly what the problems would be. And yet the best minds in the city bureaucracy were not able to fix it before it became a fiasco.
If you’ve got 62,000 complaints, you’ve got a problem. That you knew those complaints were coming and didn’t think you should do anything to prevent it may be a bigger one.