Citing his experience as key to his mayoral aspirations, current deputy mayor Joe Pantalone officially opened his first campaign office today.
Pantalone spoke to a group of supporters and volunteers at the office, located at 1 Clinton St. in Little Italy.The mayoral hopeful, a city councillor for 29 years and deputy mayor for six, said he felt his tenure at City Hall made him an ideal choice to succeed Mayor David Miller come October.Likening the city to a living organism, he said he wanted to ensure its prosperity by protecting what makes the city work and improving on areas that need improvement. In so doing, he fired a salvo at high-profile mayoral candidates without a pedigree at City Hall."You have to have experience because if you don't have experience, you're going to get it wrong," he said. "To have people who have not been at City Hall (elected mayor), it really is asking that others experiment with us. Toronto cannot afford it, if you want to protect this amazing city, people who don't know how this place really runs go there and experiment with us."Pantalone acknowledged taxpayer frustration over spending at City Hall is cause for concern. He noted that many look at their municipal government as a spendthrift institution, but warned against broad generalizations."People in Toronto are worried because it's getting harder and harder to make ends meet and City Hall has got to be part of the solution," he said. "It doesn't work when City Hall is perceived to be part of the problem."He said more tax dollars raised in Toronto need to remain in the city rather than staying with the federal and provincial governments.He cited a Fraser Institute study that showed Toronto getting a pittance in revenue through taxation compared to the other levels of government."In Ontario, of all the taxes paid if you put it all in one basket, 5.6 per cent went to municipalities (while) 94.4 per cent went to the federal and provincial government," he said. "(The federal and provincial governments) have the money and they should be sharing that money."He pointed to the lack of funding for the TTC as one glaring example. For years, the province covered 50 per cent of the transit system's funding subsidy, but the law enforcing that funding was repealed under the Harris government."The city's putting in $510 million towards transit subsidy," he said. "The province is absent. Under normal rules, they should be putting in $255 million."Pantalone suggested the province should step back to the plate with funding, echoing a familiar call over the past few years, though he could not speculate on how to get the province to budge on its current stance other than voting for a party that supports transit in the 2011 provincial budget.Pantalone also called for a hiring freeze at City Hall as a cost-cutting measure, suggesting new staff should only be taken on to replace retiring workers whose jobs could not be done through technology."You can't have, for example, if ambulance drivers retire, have an ambulance sitting there without having a driver," he said. "We can't say we're not going to hire anybody."With Adam Giambrone pulling out of the race earlier this month, Pantalone has picked up some of Giambrone's supporters on the far left.While he has yet to receive the endorsement of unions, he said he has heard from individual union members and leaders that he has their support."They're definitely gravitating in my direction," he said.