George Smitherman has promised to freeze taxes and write the 2011 city budget himself if he's elected mayor.
"Today is the first day of school so it's an appropriate time to make it clear that it's time for city hall to get back to basics," Smitherman told a room full of reporters Tuesday, Sept. 7, morning. "Today I am pledging to freeze property taxes for a year - and freeze new spending while I spend the first hundred days of my mandate conducting a line by line analysis of Toronto's budget to protect every penny. As mayor I will launch a war on waste and non-essential spending."Smitherman said in an effort to get city hall "Back to Basics," he would also freeze councillors' salaries and cut $2 million from their office budgets as a way to show leadership. There would be fewer trips and an end to perks for councillors such as "language lessons.""The spending binge is over - it's back to basics," said Smitherman. "Politicians must sacrifice. That's the first test of leadership. We'll freeze politicians' wages, and cut budgets by $2 million. We'll dump language lessons and other perks. The city hall frequent flyer club is going out of business. In short, leaders will lead. There will be less Copenhagen, more Scarborough."But the big promise in the platform was the property tax freeze - something that hasn't happened since 2000, when Mel Lastman finished his first term of office. Lastman won the first race for the mayoralty of amalgamated Toronto in 1997 by promising to freeze property taxes for three years.But those tax freezes caused problems for the young city that was still trying to find its way, making it more difficult to balance the books as the provincial government downloaded services such as the TTC and housing to the property tax base.Smitherman said it wasn't fair to compare his one-year property tax freeze to Lastman's three-year plan."I'm only talking about a one-year tax freeze," said Smitherman. "But more significantly, in 1997 we were in the world of the unknown - totally unknown. The province had passed a piece of legislation then said to the municipalities, you work it out yourselves. We had a new mayor. We didn't have a sense of what the numbers were. We're in a very different circumstance now - we're at the end of a seven-year run of rather extraordinary growth in revenues. We've seen downloading uploaded, we've seen new taxes brought forward - new fees and services. And tax increases that most years were greater than the rate of inflation."Smitherman wouldn't say what he'd cut to freeze taxes beyond the perks to councillors, although he did say that he'd keep the city payroll down by continuing a hiring freeze currently in place - for everything but essential and mandated services. He wouldn't commit to exactly how to extract $2 million from city councillors' budgets. And that he'd go through the budget "line by line" over the course of the first 100 days. But after facing a barrage of questions about the details of his plan, Smitherman took the opportunity to dig at Rob Ford, his somewhat more fiscally conservative opponent."He has no experience. He's been a part-time councillor taking a second wage while running another business and he has a one billion dollar hole in his budget, in his logic. And I think that the people of Toronto in the next period of weeks before the election are going to come to understand that Councillor Ford for all of his good intentions can't make the numbers add up."In a news release, Ford questioned Smitherman's credibility."It's like the fox watching the hen house," he said. "He was responsible for $1 billion E-Health boondoggle, he was at the cabinet table giving Miller taxing authority for the land transfer tax, vehicle registration tax and bag tax."Smitherman accepted some responsibility for the E-Health scandal, which transpired while he was provincial minister of health.When asked if he screwed up, he said, "I could say I scâ?¦ that I didn't achieve the results that were as good as they should be. In other areas I think I achieved exemplary results. But the one thing you can see I achieved from my E-Health learnings is me saying I'm going to step up to the plate and play the leader role and be the budget chief. Some things are too important to be delegated."Mayoralty candidate Joe Pantalone said Smitherman's plan would inevitably lead to service cuts."If you assume that we would have needed a two per cent tax increase, that's $41 million," said Pantalone. "How is it believable that he can make ends meet when you have less income and expenses are going up? If Smitherman truly wants to cut services he should say that's what he wants to do. It's a question of being truthful to Toronto and not feeding the Rob Ford agenda which is the Mike Harris agenda."Sarah Thomson, meanwhile, suggested that Smitherman had taken his plan from her own fiscal platform.""I announced months ago that a Sarah Thomson administration will keep a hiring freeze at city hall, freeze taxes for one year and do a full line by line analysis of every city department. I have also committed to only raising taxes with inflation if absolutely necessary after a one year freeze," she said.Toronto budget chief Shelley Carroll, who's led the budget process for the last four years under David Miller, said Smitherman could indeed deliver on his property tax freeze plan - using the $85 million surplus that council put into a property tax stabilization fund earlier this year."What Mr. Smitherman is proposing to do is to spend it all in the first year," she said. "Were it me I would be using that probably over a period of three years. If we take our garbage, water and property tax combined, we are the lowest in the GTA. I would use it to make sure we remain the lowest."She said a hiring freeze was a good idea - but the city has had one for the past three years, and Carroll said there will likely be less to be gained now from continuing it."I'm just not sure that the savings continue to bubble out of this," she said.She also said it would be difficult to chair the budget committee and be mayor in a pared-down mayor's office."Mr. Smitherman is going to need some extra staff," she said. "If he's going to do it in his office he's going to find that people aren't going to be able to answer the phone and engage the public."