To close the budget gap, Rob Ford wants to sell city assets. Good idea, bad timing. Even a novice real estate investor knows to fix up the house before putting it on the market
By Rob Granatstein | Illustration by Jack Fylan

Cities acquire assets for many reasons. Sometimes a wealthy citizen donates a property, as in the case of High Park; sometimes assets, such as Henry Pellatt’s Casa Loma, are seized when tax bills go unpaid. A city grows to meet the needs of its citizens, adding public housing and office buildings, a zoo (or three), convention centres, highways, police and fire stations, parks, arenas, garbage trucks, landfill sites and libraries.

Over its 180-year history, Toronto has amassed an impressive array of land, utilities, subways and buildings—we’re sitting on $18 billion in real estate holdings alone. However, what seems like an enviable and diversified portfolio that should pay massive dividends is actually a money-sucking liability. The taxes, rents and fees the city collects aren’t enough to cover its ownership costs—contributing to the operating budget hole Rob Ford is currently trying to plug.

Ford likes to say Toronto has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. In fact, Toronto has a non-spending problem—that is, a chronic failure to regularly upgrade and replace its assets. It’s time to operate Toronto with an eBay expert’s mentality: shine up the stuff we don’t need, then sell it to pay for the goods we do need. The important thing is to do it on our terms, not in a fire sale. Ford is pushing city council toward a historic liquidation sale, but with no strategy to maximize the value of the assets. Just about everything except the TTC, Toronto Water and city hall could go on the block, and mistakes are irrevocable.

Asset sales have worked for us in the past. In 2005, facing a sudden deficit, the city sold its streetlight poles to Toronto Hydro for $60 million. Toronto Hydro Telecom (a Hydro subsidiary) then used the tops of the poles to build a Wi-Fi network downtown, which it in turn sold to Cogeco for $200 million in 2008. The city used part of its proceeds from the deal—$75 million—to fix up ramshackle Community Housing buildings. Smart move.

Not all municipal asset sales go swimmingly, however. Chicago offers a case study in the perils of selling potential income generators for one-time cash infusions. In 2009, then-mayor Richard M. Daley made a privatization blunder that sent a chill through cities across North America. He sold the investment bank Morgan Stanley a 75-year lease on Chicago’s 36,000 parking meters in return for $1.16 billion in cash. Parking rates immediately quadrupled, and the city burned through most of its windfall in two years. The loss in revenue contributed to a drop in Chicago’s credit rating, and interest payments rose. Meanwhile, the parking business—recently sold to investors in Abu Dhabi and Luxembourg—can expect to earn $9 billion in profits over the course of its lease.

Since the Chicago debacle, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Memphis and New Haven have all nixed plans to sell or lease parking assets. Indianapolis, on the other hand, went for it, but learned from Chicago’s mistakes. Last November, the city entered into a 50-year deal that included a big lump sum payment, an exit clause and, most significantly, a revenue-sharing arrangement. Already, the private partner has modernized the parking system and is generating greater profits for both itself and Indianapolis taxpayers.

By Nicholas Hune-Brown | Photography by Lee Towndrow

On a bright morning in August, Judi Lloyd drove through Twin Pines with the air of a visiting dignitary. The preternaturally cheerful 57-year-old real estate broker was on her way to list a home. The Mississauga trailer park is located just off Dundas, one of the city’s main arteries. Like all of Lloyd’s visits to the park, the trip quickly turned into a mixture of socializing and networking as she waved to and chatted with residents from the driver’s seat of her black Ford Escape. She gestured at the mobiles we passed, noting the histories and special features of each. “You wouldn’t even know that’s a trailer,” she said, pointing at a 48-by-24-foot mobile on a spacious, pie-shaped lot. “If someone dropped you in there and you didn’t see the outside, I swear you’d think it was a little bungalow.”

The home Lloyd was putting on the market that day was a beige “double-wide,” mobile-home lingo for a model that’s the size of two typical trailers. Inside, Stephen Plume—a transport truck driver in a black baseball cap with a “Got beer?” slogan—good-naturedly signed and initialled a stack of papers while Lloyd kept up a steady patter. “This is one of the widest master bedrooms in all of Twin Pines,” she said authoritatively. She was going to list the home for $139,900. When the papers had been completed to her satisfaction, Lloyd went out to the front lawn and drove a “For Sale” sign into the ground with a few quick jabs of her pink-toenail-polished foot. “See you on Facebook!” she yelled as she rolled down the leafy street.

Lloyd didn’t set out to become the “Trailer Park Queen,” as her colleagues call her. A decade ago, when she was still relatively new to the business, she sold her first mobile home in Twin Pines. Then she sold another. Then, somehow, she sold 83 more. Now she’s the community’s patron broker, the agent responsible for the majority of the transactions in Twin Pines, and the woman you need to speak to if you want to live in the GTA’s last big mobile community.

(Image: LimeBye)

Late last week, our friends at Torontoist reported that the city appeared to be making a move to seize control of development in the Port Lands, and things have only become more bewildering since then. First, Doug Ford started outlining vague plans for a massive Ferris wheel before he amped up the crazy in a conversation with CBC Metro Morning’s Matt Galloway, adding a monorail and a mega-mall to his waterfront wish list. So before the Fords dispatch Giorgio Mammoliti to distract us, we have a few questions regarding Doug’s grand vision, after the jump.

• Ford insists that the all-powerful private sector is thrilled at the prospect of getting involved in the Port Lands. But how can Ford guarantee that a private corporation will be interested in backing something like the necessary flood protection for the area? The National Post’s Steve Murray said it best: “While I have to admit that I kind of want to live in a world where we have Kotex Flood Protection, if the protection ever failed, you can kiss that maxi-company goodbye.”

• Speaking of the private sector, city hall blogger—and Informer contributor—Matt Elliott has us questioning the Fords’ vision for the area: Elliott points out that private-sector development in the area has been pretty paltry so far.

• Paula Fletcher vented to the Globe and Mail that the Port Lands proposal has thus far been a backroom deal. We’re hopeful more details will be available by next week, but for now we have to ask: why, for the second time in recent memory, has a local councillor not be consulted on an issue in her own ward?

• The National Post reported in April that Rob Ford hadn’t attended any Waterfront TO board meetings, despite the organization’s request that the mayor retain his seat. That makes us wonder how much communication there has been between Waterfront TO and the mayor since Ford took office.

• Of course there are also all the obvious questions about Ford’s mega-mall—in particular, who’s going to shop there? The Eaton Centre is already easily accessible by public transit. Suburbanites have Sherway Gardens, Square One and Yorkdale. And if digging an underground parking lot is impossible so close to the water, does that mean the city will be turning land over for vast swaths of parking?

• Are the Port Lands About to be Privatized? [Torontoist]
• Political Panel: Exploring the port lands through the power of imagination [National Post]
• The Fords have a terrible, no-good, very bad plan for Toronto’s Port Lands [Ford For Toronto]
• Port Lands councillor Paul Fletcher slams ‘backroom’ planning [Globe and Mail]
• Waterfront Toronto is moving too slowly: critics [National Post]

A vanishingly rare occurrence (Image: Half my Dad's age from the Torontolife.com Flickr pool)

Believe it or not, Toronto isn’t the only city dealing with traffic congestion (paging Los Angeles). Big or small, old or new, cities around the globe are afflicted with the same issue: too many cars and too little road. Earlier this week, the Globe and Mail explored some of the more interesting and inventive ways that other cities—including Singapore, Zurich and Bogota—are dealing with their respective traffic problems. Unfortunately, most of the ideas the nation’s newspaper looked at are non-starters in Rob Ford’s Toronto.

From the Globe:

Around the world, cities have implemented extreme solutions to their congestion woes, from taxes to tolls to cable cars that soar above the vehicle-clogged streets. “I think a lot of the measures are built on the very real assumption that there’s no more room to build new stuff,” says Tom Vanderbilt, author of the bestseller Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do. “So if you can’t add capacity, how do you manage the demand?”

Many of these solutions will eventually become standard practice for large municipalities around the world, he believes. There was a time in New York, Mr. Vanderbilt points out, when paying for on-street parking was considered untenable. “Now it’s just considered the norm,” he said. “I think a lot of these things, the longer the policy is there, the more it will be accepted.”

As Vanderbilt hints, many of the proposed solutions to traffic congestion can be summed up under the umbrella of “drivers paying more.” Whether its taxes, parking fees, licence fees (Singapore charges the equivalent of $48,000 just to get permission to own a car) or removing on-street parking spots (which are a huge hassle for traffic engineers). These are all interesting examples, but it’s a fair question whether any of them will be coming to Toronto anytime soon. Mayor Rob Ford has explicitly ruled out some of them and, given the current political climate, others are likely non-starters. But no worries—that Sheppard subway extension is coming right along, right?

• Cities get creative with solutions for traffic congestion woes [Globe and Mail]

In between some of the more outlandish proposals by KPMG that will never be seriously considered (selling the Toronto Zoo, privatizing the public library system), there’s another proposal that actually should be considered: selling off the Toronto Parking Authority, either in its entirety or in part. We wrote about this a little in February, but it’s worth taking a look at—and not for the reasons you might think.

Admittedly, selling off the TPA lots might actually hurt Toronto’s financial situation—after the initial quick hit of cash from hawking the off-street garages, the city would actually have less money coming in without its favourite cash cow (although it’s possible paying down a good chunk of Toronto’s debt could change that math in complicated ways). It’s a scenario similar to the one that comes up whenever someone proposes selling the LCBO: Ontario would actually lose money in the end.

But like selling the LCBO, there are some big reasons to do it anyway. In this case, selling the TPA would be the single best thing that the city could do to discourage driving in the downtown core, probably more effective even than a road toll (which the province would never allow in any case). Without the TPA providing below-market rates on parking spaces (and before the protests come in at how expensive Green P spaces already are, check out what parking spaces are selling for downtown), the cost of driving downtown would go way up. Meaning that a lot of people would find other ways to get there.

There are other things the city could do short of selling the Green P lots, like simply raising rates on parking. But a) this would be wildly unpopular, b) the TPA’s on-street parking is required by law not to exceed $3.50 an hour, so councillors would have to change the law themselves and c) so far, council hasn’t exactly demonstrated a willingness to make the unpopular choices. So if privatization lets the city get away with a pro-transit, pro-bike, pro-downtown policy, we’re tempted to let them try it. At the very least, if the city is considering getting out of providing cheap daycare for people, it should also consider getting out of providing cheap daycare for cars. Of course, this would without a doubt open up a new front in the War on the Car—so it will probably never happen.

• Toronto to consider more than $700 million in cuts to police, TTC and zoo [Globe and Mail]

(Images: Gravy boat, Grannies Kitchen; parking sign, Matt MacGillivray)

Undeground parking—always glamorous (Image: THOR)

Apparently the market for parking spaces is booming at the moment. Or at least the cost of a spot in the new Four Seasons Private Residences in Yorkville suggests as much. The price tag? A cool $100,000. That’s right—five zeros. It may seem a little much for an uninspiring piece of concrete marked by a pair of white (or sometimes yellow) lines, but it appears that residents are more than willing to shell out the dough. And we guess we probably shouldn’t be surprised, with the likes of Mark Wahlberg and an unnamed international man of mystery—for whom $100,000 is probably pocket change, after blowing $28 million on a condo—moving into the neighbourhood.

From the Toronto Star:

“Our purchasers typically have a small collection of automobiles, and they would likely have both a winter car and a summer car,” said [Mimi] Ng. “In terms of cost, the price of the parking is in line with the pricing of the unit.”

“I guess you’ve got to put your Ferrari or Aston Martin somewhere,” said developer George Wong of Magnum Projects Ltd. “And if you’re in that income bracket you’re willing to pay the price.”

On second thought, considering that average prices for condo parking spots in Toronto fall in the $25,000 to $40,000 range, $100,000 (or about $500 per square foot) for a single spot does seem a touch ridiculous. When sales for the luxury condos began in 2008, the parking spots were available at the relative bargain bin price of $75,000, meaning that since then the spots have increased in value at a rate of roughly $32 a day.

With surface parking in the city being snapped up by condo developers, we understand that the value of a good parking spot can’t be measured in simple dollars and cents. But $100,000 is an awful lot of scratch, enough to buy something a little more, lets say, substantial. Like this Jetpack. Or a razor that can withstand being dropped in hot lava. Actually, maybe the parking space price tag doesn’t seem so crazy after all.

• What will $100,000 get you in Toronto? A parking spot [The Toronto Star]

We assumed that Toronto’s war on the car ended when Rob Ford won the election. But apparently the good mayor himself is willing to fight one last battle against the motor-vehicle tribe—namely, city staff’s recommendation that the city lower its fines for people who park illegally in handicapped spaces. And he has some unusual bedfellows this time around.

Quoth the Toronto Sun:

Mayor Rob Ford and Councillor Pam McConnell—who are at opposite ends of the political spectrum—are bewildered why city staff are recommending lowering the fine for parking illegally in a handicapped spot to $300 from $450.

City council’s government management committee will consider the change next week.

Ford told reporters Wednesday he disagrees with the recommendation.

“If you park in a handicap spot the fine should be up as much as possible,” Ford said. “People that park in a handicapped spot, I’d even go farther, I’d tow them away.

It’s refreshing to see that there are some things that not even Rob Ford will defend. But the story doesn’t end there. The same staff report also recommends that Toronto start levying a fee against those who try to challenge their parking tickets in court and lose (an increasingly common tactic by people looking to lower their fines). No surprise that Ford is more sympathetic on this one and opposes the additional fine. The staff report goes to the government management committee next week—we’ll see what parking changes, if any, emerge from the city hall machine then.

• Ford wants to get tough on handicapped parking violators [Toronto Star]
• Political foes unite on handicapped parking [Toronto Sun]
• Parking ticket trial may become more costly [National Post]
• Ford opposes parking ticket court fee [CBC]

(Images: Handicap parking space—Valerie Everett; Rob Ford—Shaun Merritt)

A tire flattened at the home of a Liberal supporter in St. Paul’s (Image: courtesy Bennett campaign)

Until late last week, Toronto had been spared the election-themed vandalism that’s hit other ridings (notably Ottawa, where a Liberal sign had cross-hairs spray painted on to it). That’s all changed over the past few days as Liberal supporters were allegedly targeted in four Toronto ridings: signs were apparently stolen or defaced, cars keyed and tires slashed.

According to the Toronto Star:

Vandalism, first reported in the ridings of St. Paul’s and Trinity-Spadina, has now spread to Davenport and Toronto Centre where, among others, Liberal heavyweight Bob Rae and Eric Hoskins, Liberal MPP from St. Paul’s, woke up on Saturday to see their car tires hacked.

“This isn’t vandalism as much as voter intimidation,” said Hoskins on Sunday. “Really, it’s a vicious attack on individuals and families expressing their political preference on their lawns.”

During a campaign we’re told nobody cares about, some people certainly seem to be ornery. This makes it two elections in a row where we’ve seen this kind of mischief. At least things haven’t risen to the level of 2008’s vandalism where some Carolyn Bennett supporters had their brake lines cut.

While law enforcement does its thing, the city is asking itself what to do with vandals roaming the streets during the last week of the campaign. Josh Matlow, city councillor for part of the riding of St. Paul’s, showed some sharp thinking over the weekend by recommending that people park in the street, not their driveways. He even went so far as to say that that his office will deal with the inevitable tickets that follow. There’s an elegance to simply confusing a potential saboteur, so we’ll avoid the obvious joke about city councillors having practice at confusing the residents of this city.

• Election vandalism spreads, senior Liberals targeted [Toronto Star]
• Toronto ridings spooked by spate of tire slashings [Globe and Mail]
• Apparent anti-Liberal vandalism a ‘disgrace’: Ignatieff [National Post]
• Politicians denounce election-related vandalism [CP24]

Sweet 90th: In January, a furor erupted over a leaked memo indicating that city hall would pay for councillors to go to McCallion’s birthday gala. The mayor dismissed the controversy as overblown

On a mid-January morning, Hazel McCallion looks out her backyard window and sees blood in the snow. Missy, her long-haired German shepherd, has killed a rabbit. The dog has never done this before, and it strikes McCallion as strange. She furrows her furrowed brow.

This is also the first day the mayor has agreed to let me watch her at work. A dead rabbit in the morning is an ominous sign, but those are everywhere these days. McCallion, who has built a successful career and a city without changing her approach in over 30 years, is now under siege. She’ll be 90 years old in a few weeks—a curiosity in itself—and her peculiar morning is just the start of another day in a year of scandal and recriminations.

I arrived at her 1980s two-storey brick house in Streetsville at 7:30, but she was awake long before—she starts every day at 5:30. She lives alone. (Sam, her husband of nearly 46 years, had Alz­heimer’s, and died of pneumonia in 1997.) Her property is surrounded by similar houses. Much of the residential development in Mississauga happened in clusters, repetitive blocks of townhouses and condos, and almost everywhere you go you have the feeling you’ve been there before. McCallion says seven years ago her street ended in a farm. She would walk over to buy eggs.

Every surface in her living room is cluttered with embroidered pillows, German shepherd–themed knick-knacks, and photographs of McCallion with such notables as Oscar Peterson and Pope John Paul II. When you are mayor, you get a lot of stuff: cans of nuts, a tall glass canister of Lindt chocolates, potted poinsettias.

Disposing of the dead rabbit leaves her little time to read her morning papers. She usually flips through the Star, the Globe, the Post and the Mississauga News, marking articles with yellow stickies. There is no time for breakfast, either, so she shoves her work papers into cloth shopping bags, orders the dog into the cage that takes up a corner of the living room, and heads to her grey Malibu hybrid parked in the driveway. The darkness of the early hour is punctured by a surprise snowfall, fat and heavy, and the car’s windshield is covered in a sheet of ice. McCallion doesn’t scrape it off; instead, she climbs in and cranks up the heat, backing out onto the crescent.

McCallion is tiny, barely five feet tall, and so is eye level with the small circle of clear windshield, which defrosts at a very slow rate. She manoeuvres quickly through the streets, peering over the wheel like a sitcom granny. She turns on Newstalk 1010 quite loud. A panel is discussing reports of a woman freezing to death on the sidewalk in the east end of Toronto, no one answering her screams. “Terrible,” McCallion murmurs.

When we stop at a red light, another driver spots her licence plate (“Mayor1”) and waves. She waves back, and, yes, it happens all the time.

McCallion arrives at the modern, recently renovated Mississauga city hall, parks in her underground spot, and takes the elevator to the third floor. She is the first one there. She turns on the lights in her office, which looks across a four-lane road at the massive Square One shopping mall. Three large fish that McCallion caught in Lake Ontario are mounted on the walls. Her tidy desk looks emptier than most office desks because there’s no computer on it—she doesn’t use one. She doesn’t use a smart phone, either. She tried using a BlackBerry, but found the keys too small. She will, however, soon be getting “an iPod,” she says. A what? “Wait—iPad, that’s what I meant to say.”

Perhaps it is mere ageism, with a little sexism thrown in, that prompts one to wonder if a bath is the only thing a 90-year-old woman should be running. But there she is, day after day, year after year, surrounded by office buildings and malls that she OK’d, as if she waved a wand and a city was built. Her office faces Hazel McCallion Walk, an entryway to the Square One shopping extravaganza of department stores and chain restaurants. Her folk hero status is evident in the number of things named after her: a ballroom in the Delta Meadowvale Hotel, a school, a wine, a rose and bobble-head dolls—the kind of tributes usually reserved for the dead. She is Hurricane Hazel, a nickname she loves.

McCallion is in her 12th term as mayor of what is now Canada’s sixth largest city. But last fall, she seemed at risk of losing the election, thanks to a conflict-of-interest investigation that is nearing its end. Her accusers say she used her office to promote a $14.4-million land deal brokered by her son, Stetson hat–wearing Peter McCallion. (She also has a daughter, Linda, and a second son, Paul, who publishes the Mississauga Booster.) McCallion has admitted that she sat in on more than 20 meetings with Peter and other parties who had invested in World Class Developments, the company her son formed to build a luxury hotel and convention centre next to Mississauga city hall. She doesn’t dispute that she intervened at the 11th hour to try to stop the deal from falling apart. But at the judicial inquiry, the mayor’s lawyer argued that when McCallion advocated for the sale of a plot of land to WCD, she did so purely to serve the city’s best interests. What’s good for Mississauga is good for everyone, and if her son happens to profit, that’s just a happy coincidence.

The farmers’ market at Trinity-Bellwoods Park (Image: Matthew Burpee)

City councillor Mike Layton is sticking up for Toronto’s farmers’ markets. The rookie representative from Trinity-Spadina feels markets should be exempt from a daily charge by transportation authorities in cases where vendors need street-side parking to set up shop. For the past five years, vendors that need parking have been paying an annual “street event fee” of $81.33. Recently, however, city officials notified market organizers that the fee would soon start to be applied each day. At least five park-based markets would be affected by the changes: Trinity-Bellwoods, Riverdale Farm, East Lynn, Withrow Park and Sorauren Park.

Anne Freeman, coordinator of Toronto Farmers’ Market Network, wrote Layton to express the financial strain this daily fee would put on markets throughout Toronto. Considering farmers’ market budgets are usually less than $10,000, Freeman told Layton the daily fee “would threaten the viability of Toronto’s small markets . . . In the case of Trinity-Bellwoods, which runs for 25 market days, this would mean a cost of $2,033.25 for parking alone.”

Layton’s response is a proposed one-time annual feel of $71.97. “How can you not support farmers and food in our communities? It’s not that much money out of our pockets, we’ve never charged them this much before,” Layton told the National Post. The public works committee will consider the proposal at its April meeting.

• Farmers’ markets seek parking fee exemption [National Post]
• Farmers’ markets to get special permit [Toronto Star]

Downtown Mississauga as seen from Square One (Image: Ian Muttoo)

As Mississauga continues to deal with having few spaces left to develop, we’ve been fascinated to see how the politics of the city would change to accommodate a new reality of rising taxes, more demand for transit services, and questions of how to develop remaining land. The latest revelation is that the city council voted to freeze development in the downtown core, because too many parking-intense big-box stores were on their way.

From the city of Mississauga’s Web site:

“This is a defining moment for the City of Mississauga. We needed to take this time out to study land uses in this area and make sure we’re getting it right,” said planning and building commissioner Ed Sajecki. “Development in our downtown has to make it a place where people want to be. That is what we’ve outlined in our Downtown21 Master Plan, and it’s what the residents of Mississauga want and deserve.”

According to a report submitted by Sajecki, the bylaw was needed to put a hold on large format retail and other automobile-oriented developments in Mississauga’s downtown core. The bylaw freezes new development in the subject area, allowing the city the time it needs to examine land uses that would be more in keeping with Downtown21, Mississauga’s new vision for its downtown.

Wait—now Mississauga is opposing big-box stores because of the impact they’d have on the community? We thought that was something only Torontonians did. In any case, the language of Mississauga’s Downtown21 plan makes it clear that this isn’t actually about “preservation” the way it was when Leslieville residents opposed a proposed Walmart. The title of Downtown21 gives it away [PDF link here]: “Creating an Urban Place in the Heart of Mississauga” (our emphasis).

This freeze on development—and the master plan that’s behind it—isn’t about preserving a historic downtown. It’s about, maybe for the first time, building something in Mississauga aside from freeway-abetted sprawl. For a city of more than 600,000 (roughly the population of Toronto-East York), it might be about time.

• Mississauga Bylaw Calls for Time-out on New Development in the Downtown Core [Mississauga.com]

P is for “privatization”? (Image: Matt MacGillivray)

With the latest in what seems like a never-ending string of budget crises looming over the horizon, Rob Ford’s office is looking at assets the city can sell to close next year’s gap. One of the assets that the Toronto Star says is potentially up for sale is the Toronto Parking Authority (TPA)—the body that runs the Green P lots and all the on-street parking in the city. Like so many of the proposals out of the mayor’s office these days, this idea merits some scrutiny.

The first big objection to selling the TPA is common to all government privatization schemes: it’s a short-term shot of money at the expense of future revenue the city might have had. It’s one thing to sell off a money-loser to some entrepreneur who thinks she can turn it around. It’s quite another to sell a money-making property like the TPA.

There’s another political objection that needs to be dealt with. Almost half of the TPA’s parking spaces are on-street spaces that are ridiculously profitable. (They’d have to be: unlike the off-street lots, the TPA pays neither rent nor property taxes for on-street spaces.) According to their 2011 budget presentation [PDF], the TPA makes almost twice as much money per space from on-street parking as it does from off-street lots. The obvious question for motorists, as well as local businesses, is why should a private company reap the profits from using up public real estate, which is all an on-street parking space is?

Then there’s the obvious question of whether a private firm would be allowed to raise rates on parking without getting council approval first. It’s hard to imagine anyone buying the TPA without that kind of leeway, but that puts Toronto in the same position that Ontario is in with the 407—watching the cost to use a public asset get ratcheted higher and higher without public consultation.

If the Ford administration wants to make some money out of the TPA—and how could it not?— it might want to look at what San Francisco is doing: the rush-hour rate for parking will be $6 per hour, or even more depending on events. The SFPark intiative is a small baby step toward reducing the high cost of free (or way too cheap) parking. One problem: charging drivers the cost of actually using the street as a parking lot would likely end up being called the next war on the car.

• Looking for the gravy [Looking for the gravy]
• About the project [SFPark]

Insiders—ranging from members of the budget and executive committees to city financial staff—say that bubbling pot of gravy still hasn’t been found. The financial renaissance Ford campaigned on is still a few years away, they say.

“Honestly, it’s going to be a challenge,” said Councillor Doug Ford, vice-chair of the budget committee and the mayor’s brother. “This administration did not put the city in the position we’re in. You can’t change the world in 100 days. We’ve already done so much and we’ll continue to do more.”

In his short time in office, Mayor Ford has scored a number of symbolic victories. Office budget caps for councillors and the mayor took a $1.46 million whack. Ford won his longtime battle against free food at council and committee meetings. That cut is worth $48,000 to taxpayers. And by coaxing councillors into a pay freeze, he drained another $110,000 worth of gravy.

Important? Absolutely. But it’s still small potatoes.

As the Star notes, Ford’s crack budget team has actually made things substantially worse by draining the city’s reserves as well, meaning that next year Toronto is looking at filling a budget hole that’s about $730 million wide.

How to bridge the gap? A good old-fashioned fire sale of city assets. Potentially up for sale are everything from the city’s $18 billion in real estate holdings to the Toronto Parking Authority and Enwave.

The objective, says Doug Ford, is for Toronto to be like Mississsauga—debt-free and with substantial cash reserves. Of course, Mississauga is also considering a whopping 8 percent tax increase this year and building 30 km of new bike lanes, making the municipal metaphor as clear as, well, gravy.

• Looking for the gravy [Toronto Star]
• Sniffing out the gravy [Toronto Star]

(Image: Dennis Jarvis)