It's now clear that Rob Ford's new transit plan will waste millions and provide worse service. Can we get a Mulligan?
Holy crap, it’s been an insanely enraging week (or month, or year) of news from the world of Toronto transit. Right now, as I type this, apparently 70 people are lined up to speak to the TTC commissioners about the proposed 10-cent fare hike. But really the increase—around the rate of inflation, thanks to TTC Chair Karen Stintz’s refusal to consider a 15-cent fare increase—is the least of a transit users’ worries.
First, the very recent news:
Earlier this week, Gordon Chong, the man hand-picked by the mayor to figure out how to give us a private-sector financed subway extension on Sheppard Avenue, told the Globe and Mail that there is no way the private sector will pay for more than 10 to 30 per cent of the cost of construction, and that to find out if we can even get that much from them, we’ll need to spend another $10 million over the next year.
Then yesterday, TTC General Manager Gary Webster told city council’s budget committee that the city will be on the hook for at least $65 million in costs simply to cancel Transit City. That was higher than the numbers previously cited, and it is mysteriously not included in the TTC capital budget currently under debate. The really troubling question about that $65 million (or more—the number has not been finalized) is that city council has never, ever authorized spending it, or agreed to spend it. City council has still never had a vote on replacing Transit City with the Ford subway scheme—the provincial agency Metrolinx has changed plans based simply on the mayor’s expressed desire, and Metrolinx and the mayor cooked up a memorandum of understanding about the change that says the province will have no additional costs related to the change and that the city will cover any sunk costs Metrolinx has already incurred related to building the original plan. The meter is still running on those costs, but so far they total $65 million.
The mayor of Toronto does not have the authority to spend that money, or to agree to spend that money, without approval from council. Hell, the mayor cannot order office supplies without seeking competitive bids, and he cannot give out or cut a $10,000 grant without getting full council approval. It’s as if he snuck out with the city credit card when no one was looking and charged an open-ended tab with Metrolinx. And the costs on that tab are the costs of not building anything. At least $65 million.
Just to make it clear: these are not costs the city was spending anyway because it planned to spend a lot more. That is arguably the case with the Fort York bridge, where we’d already spent $1.3 million and decided not to spend any more to complete the project. In this case, the city was not going to pay a single dime for the construction of Transit City; the provincial government was going to cover the entire cost. The new plan is that the province now spends all of that money on the Eglinton Crosstown LRT line, and the city will now have to pay $65 million or more to cover the losses on cancelling Transit City.
It’s useful to remember here that the MFP computer leasing scandal that definitively ruined Mel Lastman’s reputation was a case where a contract went $42 million over-budget. The St. Clair Right-of-Way construction fiasco under David Miller that poisoned much of the city on the idea of new streetcars was controversial in part because the project went $58 million over-budget. So $65 million is a truly scandalous number by any definition, and the mayor has committed the city to pay it—to waste it, if you ask me, since the city gets nothing at all in return for it—without approval from city council. (You cannot really argue he had approval from the taxpayers who elected him, since this number is a big surprise, and we still do not even know what the final number will be—former TTC Chair Adam Giambrone thinks it will be closer to $195 million.)
The only way he has been able to get away with it so far is because while the mayor does not have authority to spend that kind of money on the city’s behalf all on his own, the provincial government does. The city has no powers of any kind unless the province gives it powers. If it wanted to, the provincial government could eliminate the entire city government with a simple act of parliament (and, in a way, has done so before with 1998′s Bill 103). The province can compel the city to spend as much money as it wants to. So Metrolinx, a provincial agency, is apparently free to write a memorandum of understanding committing the city to covering these costs. It did so, apparently, because it was under the impression after last year’s election that the Mayor had popular support to change the plan. A year later, now that we have some real information about how the old and new plans compare, it’s worth revisiting that decision and talking about whether we should ask Metrolinx to reverse it.
Next page: an overview of how the new plan is shaking out
