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Much has been made of the report released by the mayor's fiscal review panel this past week, as it should have.

The authors of the report are all respected members of the Toronto community, who were given the responsibility of finding ways of making city hall work more efficiently.

While much was made of the financial issues uncovered by the task force, there was also another aspect of the report that has not received the attention it deserves.

This was the recommendation for a series of significant changes in the governance structure of city council that will have a profound impact on how local communities are to be represented at city hall.

One of the report's findings was that local councillors currently have too much power and that by reducing that power the city would operate more efficiently.

This suggestion ties into the ongoing critique of city council that you have been seeing in Toronto's media regarding the spending habits and behaviour of some councillors.

The image of city council that has been presented to the public by it critics is that it is nothing more than a collection of fiefdoms, which each councillor runs according to his or her own whims.

What the report opens the door for is the elimination of the independent local councillor and introduction of formal political parties into city hall.

Frankly, the mechanism for allowing this to happen is already in the works as provincial legislation is being prepared to allow for councillors to be elected "at large" in the next municipal elections.

Likewise, calls are being made to allow political parties to run slates of candidates and candidates are already being recruited by some parties for this purpose.

These suggestions and political manoeuvering are far from new developments, for as I have mentioned in this column, both the provincial Liberals and Conservatives were discussing these policy changes back in the mid-1980s.

The inspiration came from policies implemented by the British Conservatives led by former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the Republican-led government of California, which both went as far as eliminating some municipal councils entirely.

However, as I have also pointed out, those political experiments failed to produce any real financial savings or greater efficiency in governance.

Worse, they seriously damaged local democracy by concentrating power into the hands of people without any real accountability to the communities they supposedly represented.

Our forced amalgamation was just a first step amongst many in a process begun more than 20 years ago to see that our local influence on municipal policy decisions was limited.

Sadly, the manufactured crisis that city council has been placed into during these past 10 years will make many people believe the so-called reforms that will be introduced to "save" the city will reduce taxes through new efficiencies.

Be prepared to pay higher taxes as those who will actually hold power in the new political structure reduce theirs.