Any potential mayors looking to trim fat from the city's 2011 budget will find part of their job done for them in October, as most city departments are already at work trimming their spending plans by about five per cent.
Bureaucrats are spending the summer laying the groundwork for a budget that will have to be delivered by a brand new council that's elected Oct. 25. The budget, which came in at $9.2 billion in 2010, will be recommended with a framework that Toronto Council approved when it passed this year's budget. The 2011 budget will see cuts in departmental spending of five per cent, with plans to flat-line cuts for 2012. The budget will have a cushion - about $81 million in surpluses from 2009 were carried forward in a property tax stabilization fund. According to Shelley Carroll, the Don Valley East councillor who's chaired the budget committee under outgoing Mayor David Miller for the past four years, that means a new council can reduce any necessary tax increase by one per cent."Any new mayor will have a lovely property tax stabilization reserve," she said. "There's $81 million and change, and $80 million buys you a one per cent property tax increase."Carroll said she expects the five per cent cuts to be delivered everywhere but in two areas: the city's Parks, Forestry and Recreation Department, and in the new 311 telephone service hub that was opened this year."People are becoming enamoured of 311, and rightly so," said Carroll. "In the past, people would have a problem and say 'what's the use of calling.' Now they're trying it out, and we're getting a real sense of people's demands."Carroll warned potential mayors that making further cuts to the budget may not be as easy as it looks - and that in some cases, demand for services might require the new council to reconsider and actually restore funding."In spite of what nearly all the mayoralty candidates will tell you, there have been some efficiencies we've found and in a lot of cases those efficiencies are creating real pressures on services and lowering the quality of service," she said. "That's going to have to be presented to the new leadership."