Here at Toronto City Council for the budget meeting!
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Carroll gets Pasternak to say "I don't think we should be putting a shelter beside a daycare." Ah, there we are
Oh hey, Cllr Shan gives a nod to the people rallying outside. "For one of the wealthiest cities in the world, we cannot be the child poverty capital of Canada," he says, mentioning one of the points one of the speakers mentioned.
Totally superficial observation: I really like Cllr Kandavel's sunny goldenrod-leaning-mustard-yellow sweater. It is a colour I am afraid to try to pull off myself though
Cllr Cheng laments having to advocate for social & cultural investments for North York every year. Me (having watched tired community organizers beg for funding for student nutrition programs for the past 15 years): staring blankly in to the distance get used to it
"Go talk to people in the neighbourhoods. Ask them what they think about taking away police officers," says Cllr Colle.
me (from Parkdale): ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY
"I'm not going to speak very long on this…" Cllr Perruzza begins. FACT CHECK NEEDED, I bet he goes into full Perruzza Rant Mode at minute 3
Perruzza does not go into full rant mode, but he does go over time and has to be cut off by Nunziata.
He is the kind of councillor who will probably vote with your motion, but who you absolutely do not want speaking in favour of it
Cllr Bradford now doing advance-campaign-speech thing. Just to remind everyone, he got 1.28% of the vote last election (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Toronto_mayoral_by-election#Total).
He says the city has never drawn so much on the reserves before. "I call this budget financial malpractice, mortgaging the city's future to make an election-year budget look better on paper."
Cllr Colle starts heckling him. "Brad, what about the police budget?" Cllr Carroll, a couple rows ahead of him, turns around and mouths a "don't do it Mike, he's not worth it"-type message.
Fletcher questioning Bradford about the Main Square redevelopment project in one of his motions. Somehow everyone at the City missed that the lease was expiring in 2023. (Background: https://beachmetro.com/2023/09/12/city-working-on-new-lease-for-main-square-community-centre-amid-plans-for-more-highrises-increased-density-in-area) Fletcher is like, I'm not voting for your motion because we're going to have to dip into reserves to to fund it.
Fletcher: "I have an announcement to make! It is raining!" I am momentarily nonplussed until she goes on to say, "There is someone south of the border creating a lot of storms." Oh, it's a metaphor about rainy-day funds
"Is it too high? Is it too low? Make up your minds!" Fletcher criticizes her colleagues' "hysteria" over a "Goldilocks budget".
It's Cllr Bravo's turn to speak. "I thought Fletcher was the last speaker," says someone. "Crisanti after that," says Nunziata. "Vince! Vince!" heckles Burnside plaintively. Cllr Crisanti makes a 🤌 motion at him.
"Cllr Fletcher motivated me to say what I'm going to say," says Cllr Crisanti. Fletcherrrr!!! He is like, TECHNICALLY, we're not voting on the budget, just on certain amendments (true).
To clarify for anyone new to this, Council's conservatives are all in favour of keeping residential property tax increases as low as possible and would normally approve of a mere 2.2%. However, they object to this budget because 1) they want to finance that by cutting services, not by dipping into reserves; and 2) they see it as a naked campaign ploy.
Nunziata: "Cllr Colle, you would like to get up and..." (everyone groans) "…declare a conflict [of interest]." (everyone sighs)
Voting. I realize this sounds quite intemperate but this has been a peeve of mine for as long as I've been following City Council. They do the item pages in MS Word, I believe, so we're not gonna get like semantic markup, but it does have outline functionality that should allow for it
Holyday's TTC motions failed. So did Pasternak's motion to delay the shelter. Perruzza accidentally votes against Bradford's Main Square motion and they have to re-open the vote so it can pass unanimously.
(See results on the item page.)
Oh shit I forgot about the other budget item (where they actually set the rates). As is tradition, it is considered after the main budget item, even though now it makes no difference.
You'll notice the table of property tax rates is mind-meltingly confusing. As ever, see David Hains's perennially useful explainer on how property taxes work in Toronto.
Holyday has questions about the changes to Toronto Parking Authority financing. (There are interesting changes afoot that I have not looked into myself.)
Cllr Fletcher going into deep history (1998) about money set aside for the Main Square development, the old Neighbourhood Services Committee, etc. "Did the new City spend four million dollars in vain?" I begrudgingly admit I am mildly interested.
As expected, Cllr Carroll has a motion to increase the tax break for small businesses and balance it out with hiking rates for the rest of the commercial property tax subclass. She also has another motion which I don't think does very much
