With the Core Services Review taking up so much space, it feels like the city budget process is just one continuous happening these days.
But budget season is just beginning, and what a flawed project it is. The biggest problem is the cynicism and lack of trust it generates in a city we like to think of as high on the participatory scale.
First we start with city staff floating a large negative number: a $500 million to $700 million shortfall. Besides the fact that the current mayor’s office prefers the large negative because it prompts a false crisis only solved by dismantling city functions, it’s also true that city bureaucrats generally prefer to offer worst-case scenarios.
It’s not that staff can’t count. It’s that they know the figures are going to be made public and that they will have a much harder time adjusting numbers upwards if the situation changes than reducing them downwards. So they take the safer route.
The figures are also unreliable because revenue projections – from development charges, user fees, etc – are intentionally underestimated and efficiency measures enacted in previous budgets not counted, despite the fact that they continue to generate savings. One way of countering the skepticism that arises when no one is confident the numbers are real is to start the whole process with last year’s revised numbers as the base.
But there are other ways to get rid of the accounting drama. We could look to what other large governments do to insure financial transparency. Both the Canadian and U.S. federal governments have independent structures that evaluate budget figures and provide unbiased ledgers.
In Canada, this function is performed by the parliamentary budget officer (currently Kevin Page), an office established as part of the Accountability Act and reporting to Parliament as a whole, not to the government or any party. In the U.S., the congressional budget office provides non-partisan evaluation of numbers, and despite the country’s divisive politics, the CBO’s numbers are rarely criticized.
Toronto already has three accountability officers – the integrity commissioner, the auditor general (who reviews spending after the fact) and the lobbyist registrar – who are all fully independent and report to council. It seems that now is the time to consider adding a budget officer to ensure that council and the public get numbers free of political intervention or manipulation. It’s hard to ask people to give their views on managing the budget if no one believes in the figures.
One thing that would be interesting to explore is giving more powers to community councils to make limited decisions on tailoring spending priorities in their areas, instead of the one-size-fits-all approach that frustrates many across the city.
But if inflated numbers have an authenticity problem, so does the way the opportunity for citizen feedback is organized. The current process allows only two minutes (five in theory) for presenters to offer their ideas, not enough to lay out any complex idea, and while the consultations are open to everyone, they exclude people who can’t take a day off work or stay up all night. If you watched the deputations two weeks ago, you could tell they didn’t represent Toronto’s dynamic mix.
The current attempt to rush resident participation just isn’t an honest check-in system. In today’s busy world, a municipal government should also be proactive about soliciting opinions by way of information and feedback sessions at community events and drop-in zones, with feedback opportunities at subway stations, even in malls.
In 2008 and 09, when the TTC went to retail centres across the city to consult around the Transit City expansion program, it received a very different perspective. Instead of engaging people who self-select to attend public meetings, this effort reached a much wider demographic.
If a similar process were conducted months ahead of a budget deadline and included an extensive program of online consultation – and perhaps limited city-wide polling – we would have a more informed citizenry in addition to hearing from voices often missed.
In the end, council has to commit to the philosophy of open and transparent decision-making, more citizen input and better numbers. It’s the only way services will accurately reflect what Torontonians value.
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