The Toronto Transit Commission should have looked farther afield than York Mills and Yonge Street for its new, consolidated headquarters, according to mayoralty candidate Rocco Rossi.
"My position would be that if we're really going to think about solving the issues of ghettoized neighbourhoods - I would say I'm going to move the site to Victoria Park near Danforth Avenue, near Crescent Town," said Rossi, during an hour-long editorial board meeting with Toronto Community News this week.
"Or even consider getting off the subway line. Why not Jane-Finch? Why not let some of the TTC actually ride a bus and understand what it is that most Torontonians go through?"
Rossi made the comments in a wide-ranging discussion about the issues facing Toronto's inner suburban communities, and his own prospects of prevailing and leading Toronto Council in Oct. 25th's municipal election.
Rossi, a former executive and political insider, met with the board just hours after a new poll released by former mayoralty candidate Giorgio Mammoliti, indicated he was running fourth behind George Smitherman, Rob Ford and Joe Pantalone.
Mammoliti, who abandoned his own ambitions, called upon suburban voters to look closely at the candidates running for mayor and select one who represented their interests.
Speaking to that challenge, Rossi touched on a variety of measures he's introduced in the first six months of the mayoralty marathon:
- his plans to finance subway construction through the sale of Toronto Hydro and other city assets, and build less costly busway networks along the planned Transit City routes;
- a plan to distribute Section 37 development money to needier neighbourhoods;
- plans to more effectively plan new development in neighbourhoods across the city, and bring higher-level development to neighbourhoods that need it.
It was on this last point that Rossi raised the question of the Toronto Transit Commission's headquarters, which is slated to be moved from Yonge and Davisville to Yonge and York Mills.
"George Smitherman lambasted the TTC for even considering moving their headquarters anywhere but Davisville," Rossi said.
"At the same time as he's saying he's going to do a line by line assessment of the budget to make sure we run more efficiently, he's then saying the minute they offer up something that saves money - as businesses do, moving from a very valuable to a less valuable piece of land - he says, no no, you're building the Taj Mahal. But I think where they haven't gone far enough is going from a very valuable piece of real estate to a still valuable piece of real estate."
Rossi said the commission would have done far more good - both for itself and the community - moving to a community where currently property values are low and the need for local investment is high.
"I'd say I'm going to use these decisions to generate savings but also create investments that will be at the centre of future investments," he said. "Suddenly you've got hundreds of more workers in that area that have to go to lunch."
While Rossi won't have an opportunity to make that change if elected - he said the city needs to make numerous other changes to the way it engages the many communities in its borders.
"I grew up in the inner suburbs - I grew up in East York and Scarborough and my parents still live in Scarborough," he said.
"I understand the difficulty of getting around in the city and because of that I understand the frustration that people have in terms of feeling a disconnect. Before, the East York Civic Centre, and the Scarborough Civic Centre created more of a sense of place you could go to and be heard. More and more I hear from people that 'this is not my Toronto.' There were a number of polling stations in 2003 where forget about one-in-three voting - less than one-in-ten came out from some apartment blocks. That is an indictment of the system in terms of people not being a part of the system."
Rossi also dealt with his position as a city hall outsider. He and Sarah Thomson are the only two major mayoralty candidates without elected political experience. He blamed his low showings in the polls thus far on that factor.
"Any sales rep will tell you that advertising is reach times frequency," he said.
"No question I've had reach. But I haven't had frequency compared with three guys who have been in the public eye from 12 to 30 years. So I am not at all discouraged by where my numbers are - because at this stage of the campaign it's still highly reflective of name recognition. And that and the other polls that come out show that there are still roughly 40 per cent of people who are undecided. So it's still a hugely fluid situation."