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• Mayor weighs in on budget debate

Toronto councillors should start posting the details of how they spend their office budgets online and expenditures that don't fit with council's policy should be disallowed by city staff.

Those are among the recommendations that Toronto's auditor general Jeffrey Griffiths will make early next year when he reports on ways to reform the haphazard set of rules governing the expenditure of the $53,100 annual councillor's office budget.

Those expenditures have made headlines over the last several weeks, after Toronto's executive committee looked into the practises of two of council's lowest-spending members: Ward 3 (Etobicoke Centre) Councillor Doug Holyday and Ward 2 (Etobicoke North) Councillor Rob Ford.

The committee demanded that Ford come up with receipts for money he'd spent out of pocket, but Holyday, who was found to be largely in compliance with the city's rules, turned to the auditor general and integrity commissioner and asked them to take a look at some of his colleagues' more extraordinary spending.

On Monday, Griffiths wrote back to Holyday, giving hints of the sorts of things he intends to suggest.

Included in those:

- A requirement that councillor expenses be posted online, in detail, on a quarterly basis. Griffiths noted the federal government already requires this of MPs.

- Granting the city clerk the authority to refuse to reimburse expenses that don't fall within the city's policy of what are allowable expenses.

- Making clear what allowable expenses are, assuming that all of them must be business-related.

- Establishing a third-party body to approve expenses deemed extraordinary and thus refused reimbursement.

Griffiths also focussed in on some specific expenses that he deemed inappropriate such as the large number of staff and constituency meetings that take place in restaurants and bars and unusually large mileage claims - of more than 100 kilometres. Both of those, he said, ought not to be approved.

Holyday, a longtime critic of the size and disbursement of councillors' office budgets, was pleased with Griffiths' response but said it doesn't go far enough.

"We have to look at cutting back the expenses, but perhaps this oversight committee could do that," he said. "I just think that we could take a look at the bottom line of these expenses and they could be cut back quite a bit."

Holyday said he intends to have councillors' expenses examined against the city's code of conduct, which requires that city funds only be spent on city business back as far as 2006 and requiring councillors to reimburse the city for any money they've spent in violation of the code.