Crossposted from Torontoist.
This is the last City Council meeting before its two-month summer break, and boy, is it a doozy. On the agenda: yet another Scarborough subway/light rail showdown, supervised injection sites, the Road Safety Plan, street hockey, the latest craft brewery, and more.
As City staff gear up for the 2017 budget process, the mayor has declared that an above-inflation property tax revenue increase is off the table. Council has also successfully pushed off introducing any new revenue tools until next year. What does that mean for the budget? We read the City Manager’s latest report so you don’t have to.
On this month’s City Council agenda: inclusionary zoning, pot crackdowns in midtown, licensing landlords, and our financial future.
For years, the City of Toronto has been deliberately taking in less revenue while expanding infrastructure and services. Forget the “efficiency” bullshit—this has largely been made possible through unsustainable and unreliable funding sources. In this new report, top City bureaucrats warn City Council that they can’t postpone tough decisions any more.
Here’s the full report. It’s like 40 pages. Are you gonna read it? Hell, no! So here’s the gist.
Continue reading Let’s Read: Toronto’s Long-Term Financial Direction
This City Council meeting will be a busy one, with taxis, bike lanes, Rob Ford’s replacement, the TORONTO sign, and more. Read my full preview at Torontoist.
A current pet peeve: the “sharing economy”. It seems to me that two quite different things are being lumped together under this label, and it muddies the debate. Continue reading Hot Take: The “sharing economy”
Hello, friends. We’ve crawled out of post-budget recuperation to bring you this guide to the next City Council meeting. On this month’s agenda: SmartTrack, the East Gardiner, bees, tennis, ca$h for gold, Black Lives Matter, and more.
So last year I got a netbook with rather poor Linux support. I finally got elementary OS working on it (a blog post in itself), but for the past several months I was using Windows alone. And it was terrible, for many reasons.
I’ve been writing about the budget so long. Please help. I want to go home ;_; Continue reading Linkdump: All My 2016 Municipal Budget Writing
This post first appeared on Torontoist.com in February 2016. It is very out of date and is republished here for historical purposes.
Featured photo by edk7 from the Torontoist Flickr pool.
I won’t call them revenue tools. I think that’s a misnomer. We have to have more taxes or fees to offset the cost of government.
—John Campbell (Ward 4, Etobicoke Centre)
John Campbell is right. A “revenue tool” is just any way the City can bring in more money. Using “revenue tool” may circumvent that knee-jerk response people get when you say “taxes”. The difference is that John Campbell thinks taxes and fees are inherently a bad thing, and others don’t. Welcome to the plight of the Toronto Revenue Tools Debate.
Continue reading Torontoist Explains: City Council Revenue Tools
