The Incredible Exploits of Super Mayor continue. He tells the chief of police to control his bloated budget or else. The chief comes through with savings. He tells the Toronto Transit Commission he can't live with a 10-cent fare increase. The commission pulls the fare hike off the table. Is there anything this man can't do?
If you believe the comic-book version of Budget 2011, then Mayor Rob Ford is indeed a superhero. By sheer determination and force of will he has wrestled concessions from two of the fattest departments in the city, the police service and the TTC.
First thing Monday morning, he issued a threat to city managers: Find more savings or lose your jobs. The very next day, both police Chief Bill Blair and TTC chief general manager Gary Webster came through - clear proof, say the mayor's backers, that the budget is just crammed with waste. All it took was for someone like Mr. Ford to crack the whip and, presto, they found the money.
Before you buy that Marvel comic, though, take a closer look at what really happened. To placate the mayor and avoid a transit-fare increase, the city had to come up with $24-million in savings. City officials will find $16-million of that and deliver it to the TTC in the form of a larger operating subsidy. The TTC itself will find the remaining $8-million.
How? Well, nobody really knows. The TTC says its share will come from an "unspecified budget reduction." That was the phrase someone scribbled on the budget document presented to the transit commission on Wednesday. "Ten-cent fare increase" was crossed out in pen, "unspecified budget reduction" written in. That is how rushed and haphazard this sped-up budget blitz has been. Officials are almost literally rearranging the city's finances on the back of a napkin.
What unspecified reduction means is, "we'll figure it out later." Never mind that Mr. Ford specifically directed the city manager in a letter last month to balance the budget with no "unfunded gaps" - in other words, unspecified budget reductions. Pushed to avoid a modest fare increase that the transit system actually needs to pay for higher costs and rising numbers of riders, city staff gave Mr. Ford the satisfaction he demanded and killed the fare hike.
The mayor comes off looking tough and effective - the guy who showed those bean counters what for. The bean counters look like obedient public servants. But has anything really changed? At a meeting on Wednesday, the TTC put off the only serious cut under consideration: service reductions on 48 bus routes. In effect, the commission has kicked the can down the road.
The same could be said of the police service. After his meeting with Mr. Ford, Chief Blair came back with a revised budget request: for a 2-per-cent increase instead of 3. To accomplish this he will put off replacing the officers who quit or retire this year, perhaps 200 to 220 of them based on the usual rate of attrition. That will probably mean fewer cops on the street, a strange result for a mayor who made an election promise to put 100 more out there.
It may eventually cost the city money, too. Councillor Adam Vaughan of Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina says the city could end up paying retiring officers extra to stay on the job, in the form of so-called retention pay.
Ford supporters would have us believe that all this dodging, weaving and delaying is the fault of coddled city bureaucrats who simply don't understand that there is a new sheriff in town. There is a grain of truth in that. Rare is the bureaucracy that will volunteer to disembowel itself.
But the real fault lies with Mr. Ford, who came to office vowing to cut taxes and waste without any credible plan for doing it. His platitude-filled campaign focused on cutting things like councillor expense budgets and free meals at overtime council meetings, symbolic cuts that have barely dented the city's $9-billion-plus budget.
Now that he is mayor, Mr. Ford seems to think that if he talks sternly enough about the need for cost-cutting, city managers will simply snap to it. Instead - lacking any real direction about what they should cut or how, told to hold the line on taxes and fares but avoid any major cuts in service - they are flailing about in confusion. It's the inevitable result when you have a mayor who ran on slogans and governs on bluster.