ALTERNATE BUDGET COMMITTEE
Toronto,
November 18, 2005 - The City of Toronto has an operating budget of
approximately
$7 billion.
Employee salaries and benefits account for close to $3.3 billion of that
budget. But how many people does it take to run the City of Toronto?
The answer was amazingly difficult to find and could not be readily
and accurately provided even by the Mayor and City Managers.
“Who’s
at the helm?”, asks Councillor Norm Kelly, (Ward 40 – Scarborough
Agincourt) Chair and organizer of the Alternate Budget Committee, (ABC),
an informal committee of Councillors, not-for-profit organizations,
academics and business representatives, set up to promote alternatives to
the inefficiencies and mismanagement of City finances.
“The City of Toronto is like a ship without a rudder – with a
captain who doesn’t know how many crew it takes to operate it. Knowing
how many people you employ is the basic information any organization must
have to effectively manage and plan for the future.”
Based on
Councillor Jane Pitfield’s (Ward 26 – Don Valley West) recent request
of various City Departments and ABC’s a total number of city pay stubs
per period came to 60, 854. Yet the 2005 Budget Briefing Note - Summary of
2005 Staff Recommended Approved Positions, cites the number of positions
at 46,681 - a difference of 14, 173 positions.
Incredibly, these numbers indicate that the City of Toronto
employs, and pays benefits for, staff positions that may surpass the
entire Government of Ontario which employs between 60,000 - 65,000 people.
Furthermore,
increases in the number of staff employed by the City of Toronto persist
despite service cuts that Toronto residents have experienced since
Amalgamation on January 1st, 1998.
The purpose of Amalgamation was to eliminate duplication, reduce
costs, stream line administration and improve efficiency, but the growing
operating budget indicates that this goal has not been achieved.
“The City
of Toronto must determine the staffing levels necessary to provide core
services and stick to that number”, recommended Councillor Jane Pitfield
(Ward 26 – Don Valley West ) at the November 17th Alternate
Budget Committee meeting held at City Hall.
“The current budget is unsustainable. We must get our spending
under control and manage the dollars with greater accountability”, she
concluded.
…./2
The
Alternate Budget Committee is concerned not only with the lack of
responsible City management but also about the difficulty of obtaining
accurate information about the City’s financial position. As Kelly
pointed out: “The fact that this information was not readily accessible
to anyone highlights the lack of openness and accountability that lead to
mismanagement in the first place. To control spending and come up with a
sustainable long term fiscal plan we must break the barriers that keep us
and Toronto’s residents from easily obtaining this type of
information”.
The
Alternate Budget Committee will present recommendations to break these
barriers before the Policy and Finance Committee.
Alternate
Budget Committee Membership
Councillor
Norm Kelly – Chair
Councillor Mike Del Grande
Ward 40,
Scarborough Agincourt
Ward 39, Scarborough Agincourt
Councillor
Denzil Minnan-Wong
Councillor Francis Nunziata
Ward 34, Don
Valley East
Ward 11, York South-Weston
Councillor
Jane Pitfield
Councillor
Karen Stintz
Ward 26,
Eglinton-Lawrence
Ward 16, Eglinton-Lawrence
Judith
Andrew
Mike Chopowick
Canadian
Federation of Independent Business
Toronto Board of Trade
Gord Bennett
Prof. Richard Irving
LSM
Consulting
Assoc. Professor
Schulich School of Business
Craig
Lillico C.A
Tasha Kheiriddin
Canadian
National Institute for the Blind
Canadian Taxpayers Federation
Larry
Solomon
Manny Sousa
Urban
Renaissance Institute
Scarborough
Chamber of Commerce
