If Karen Stintz is going to win approval for her ambitious transit expansion plan at city council next week, she may have to do it without the support of key allies who helped her defeat Rob Ford’s subway scheme earlier this year.
Stintz is expected to introduce a motion at next week’s meeting that would ask for a study of the 30-year, $30-billion OneCity proposal that she and TTC vice-chair Glenn De Bearemaeker unveiled last week. The plan, which has already been denounced by the Ford administration, calls for the construction of 170 km of subway, LRT, and streetcar lines across Toronto over the next three decades, and would be funded by equal contributions of $10 billion from the city, provincial, and federal governments.
If the key transit decisions council made earlier this year are any indication, the OneCity vote will be tight. In February council voted 25-18 to build above-ground LRTs on Eglinton and Finch, and a month later endorsed a Sheppard LRT by 24-19, with a handful of swing votes pushing the outcome in Stintz’s favour both times.
But several left-wing and centrist council members who lined up behind the TTC chair in the LRT fight suggest they will not support OneCity, citing concerns about its funding model and the lack of consultation that the small group of councillors who crafted the plan gave their colleagues before releasing it to the public.
Councillor Shelley Carroll believes Stintz is moving too quickly and is urging her not to bring OneCity before council until October. That’s when a previously requested report on the plan’s funding model, known as current value assessment (CVA) uplift, is expected to be submitted by the city’s chief financial officer.
CVA uplift would create a dedicated transit fund by taxing Torontonians for positive readjustments to their property values, but Carroll is worried that council giving even a tacit endorsement to the funding plan next week would derail discussions to create regional revenue tools that would collect money from residents across the Greater Toronto Hamilton Area.
Provincial transit agency Metrolinx is expected to release a report on regional revenue tools in 2013.
“I don’t want to stifle that conversation in any way shape or form,” says Carroll.
She also questions why Stintz and de Baeremaeker launched OneCity at a press event last Wednesday without first seeking input from more of their colleagues.
“This looks like jumping the queue to try and grab the most headlines,” Carroll says.
Councillor Josh Matlow, who worked closely with Stintz to engineer the LRT votes, won’t answer direct questions about OneCity, but it’s clear its CVA uplift component does not have his support. Like Carroll, Matlow believes a tax that only targets Torontonians doesn’t make sense because thousands of people from outside the city use the TTC every day.
He is sponsoring a motion, also going before council next week, that would give Toronto a seat at the Metrolinx discussion on regional revenue tools. He sees that process, rather than the OneCity funding model, as the best bet for winning sustainable transit funding.
“This is the best opportunity we’ve had in a generation to seriously move forward with expanding transit and improving transit,” he says. “We have an opportunity here. Let’s not blow it.”
Councillor Gord Perks, who also sided with Stintz on the LRT lines, says he will vote against OneCity unless it is substantially changed before it gets to council. He believes that the priority should be finding money to pay for the TTC’s operating shortfall instead of system expansion.
Perks also says several of the lines OneCity proposes – the Air Rail Link, replacing the Scarborough RT with a subway, and using the Stouffville GO corridor for a subway – interfere with Metrolinx projects and will never win the needed provincial approval, and in the case of the Scarborough RT replacement, would unnecessarily reopen council’s February decision to build an LRT on the route.
He predicts most councillors will vote down a study on OneCity next week.
“The tragedy in all of this is that a lot of people in Toronto were led to believe there was a viable plan that had real support, and that simply wasn’t true,” he says.
Despite the criticism from councillors, Stintz intends to stick to her plan to table OneCity at the July 11 meeting.
With polls indicating 80 per cent of Torontonians back OneCity, she says she’s “very confident” that it will gain majority support on the chamber floor.
She points out she’s only asking for a report, not a final decision.
“If council chooses not to adopt a study for a transit plan, I would be very surprised,” she says.
The exact wording of the motion that will go before council is still being worked out. Councillor Joe Mihevc, who worked with Stintz, de Baeremaeker, and Councillor Josh Colle to put together the OneCity proposal, says it’s still being shopped around City Hall in the hopes of crafting a document that can win maximum support.
Mihevc says he expects that process to continue up until five minutes before the vote.
