Just raise taxes. That’s the message the majority of the citizens who participated in the city’s core service review process want city councillors to hear. This week, councillors are reviewing various reports from the external consultants at KPMG on what services they could cut to reduce the city’s 2012 budget deficit. But they’ll also be considering a report from the City Manager telling them what members of the public think. People told city staff that a transparent, accountable government, infrastructure and roads, a clean environment, jobs and a healthy economy were important to them. They also want fair and affordable taxes. Nearly 13,000 people took part. Most completed an extensive survey online, but some also attended one of eight discussions that city staff organized in communities across Toronto. Still others attended similar public meetings that councillors hosted in their own wards. The city asked citizens to consider five funding strategies for the city: + not increasing user fees or taxes, even if that meant reducing the level of service + increasing user fees to keep the same level of service + increasing taxes to keep the same level of service + increasing both user fees and property taxes to keep the same level of service + significantly increasing user fees and property taxes to increase the level of service Most people preferred that the city increase either property taxes or both taxes and fees to maintain the municipal services they enjoy now. In fact, at the public session I attended in Etobicoke, one woman interrupted proceedings to demand why staff don’t just propose increasing taxes as a way out of the city’s budget shortfall. An increase of just five percent in property tax would cost the average homeowner $120 a year–only $10 a month, she pointed out. Raising taxes to help solve Toronto’s revenue problem is an approach that now even Mayor Rob Ford is thinking about. Even though the mayor campaigned on not raising taxes or cutting services, he recently told Newstalk Radio 1010’s John Oakley that Torontonians could expect a possible increase of as much as three percent in their property taxes next year. Some councillors, however aren’t interested in listening to the results of the public consultation. Denzil Minnan-Wong, chair of the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee, dismissed the consultation results when he told the Toronto Sun, “It’s not statistically valid, those people self-selected, they decided to fill that form out as opposed to if you were to take a representative sample and have a pollster do it,” he said.
