Rob Ford’s come out of hiding on his budget plans should he become mayor – sort of.
Ford chose his campaign headquarters in a lonely mall at Islington and Dixon to answer growing questions about his promise to cut $1.7 billion out of a $9.2 billion budget and still maintain city services.
Only it wasn’t Ford answering most of the “technical” questions at all, but his policy guy Mark Towhey, before Ford actually took the podium to offer the broad strokes.
Amazing the Ford team has been able to keep details so long under wraps, a little more than two weeks from E-day.
Ford, or at least the people behind him, think they can find the bil in existing waste in the system. But the 2 mil here, 6 mil there he’s talking about saving by contracting out garbage and cleaning services for the cop shop, just doesn’t add up. Nope, the 80 mil savings from fair wage policy and rules requiring union labour in city contracts won’t do it either.
Ford says he can “guarantee” services won’t be cut even with 260 mil or so in lost revenue from the vehicle registration tax and land transfer tax he’s pledging to kill.
Which is where the idea of selling off surplus city land comes in. Towhey says there’s a bil sitting right there to be had.
Ford can waffle all he wants. But the bottom line is that without wholesale outsourcing Ford’s not going to be able to cut the debt in half by 2012, as he’s promising, and hire more cops.
Ford hinted as much, without, of course, getting into details cuz that would just scare the bejeezes out of voters. He said simply that the city “has to look at alternative ways of doing business.” (BTW, wasn’t Towhey the guy who suggested th city stop funding the TTC way back when? Yup.)
Sounds like privatization city to me.
The weird thing: tax fighter Ford’s not promising to hold the line on property taxes. But then how could he? There’s not enough to cover the glaring holes now for those not reading between the lines.
