Looking for the gravy

The Toronto Star:

Councillor Mary-Margaret McMahon believed there was a Gravy Train.

As a fiscal conservative, she arrived at city hall fired up to end the wasteful spending that voters heard so much about during the election.

But after a little more than two months in office — two months of listening during in-camera meetings, reading staff reports and looking over confidential documents — this rookie councillor sees things a little differently.

“The gravy’s not flowing through city hall like originally expected,” McMahon said.

McMahon is the political newcomer who, with the backing of prominent Conservatives such as John Tory, ousted an entrenched left-wing incumbent. She is not a part of the mayor’s inner circle. She’s just one of a dozen new councillors who promised change and rode a wave of anger and mistrust in local government to victory. They’re now getting a dose of reality about the city’s financial situation.

That’s not to say there isn’t waste, she added. Hundreds of thousands in savings could be found by turning off lights on weekends and powering down computers at night.

But when the city is $774 million short, a hundred thousand here and a million there don’t go very far to fill that hole.

It’s a lesson that Rob Ford’s team is also learning.

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.

Worse, with every cut, the mayor seems to add more pressure. Since taking office, Ford has added more than $100 million to the bottom line by killing the vehicle registration tax and promising a property tax freeze in 2011.

To balance his first $9.4 billion operating budget this year, the mayor relied on $230 million in revenue windfalls and then depleted the city’s surplus and reserve funds — a combined $370 million — to avoid major service cuts.

Ford only needed to find $57 million in efficiencies to make the numbers work. But next year, he will need to come up with $774 million to balance his books. And with all of the city’s emergency savings spent, the mayor has no safety net.

“I have no idea what they can do. All I know is they have taken a problem we were starting to manage and made it much, much worse,” said Councillor Gord Perks, a key player in former mayor David Miller’s administration. “Rob Ford sold Torontonians on a fantasy. He argued that money comes down to city hall and vanishes, and it’s simply not true.”

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