ABOVE: Mayor Rob Ford may not get the tax rate he wants. Jackson Proskow reports.
TORONTO –Mayor Rob Ford’s dream of extending subways to Scarborough could preclude his pledge to keep property taxes low.
The mayor promised to hold property tax increases at just 1.75 per cent in 2014. But budget chief Frank Di Giorgio said that’s unlikely.
“That there were a number of factors that developed over the year that introduced new expenditures that needed to be made and approved by council – like the subway, for example, that required a 0.5 increase on property tax,” Di Gorgio told reporters ahead of his meeting with Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly Thursday afternoon.
Di Gorgio met with the mayor Wednesday and warned him the billion-dollar plan to extend the subway into Scarborough will make his goal of a sub-2 per cent tax increase “very difficult.”
“His reaction was not good,” Di Giorgio said. “To be brutally honest, his feeling was the moment he was pushed aside the gravy train got back in action.”
Video: Rob Ford maintains that tax increase he proposed is achievable
In-Depth: Mayor Rob Ford
Di Giorgio said he’s still committed to the mayor’s “fiscal agenda” but expects the mayor “will take shots” at him during budget debates.
“He basically believes that I should be able to deliver a 1.75 per cent increase… In other words, we have to find savings,” Di Giorgio said. “There comes a time when you say ‘Well, there are no more savings to be had.’”
Council voted 24-20 in October to extend the Bloor-Danforth line to the Scarborough Town Centre while increasing development charges and property taxes (0.5 per cent in each of 2014 and 2015, 0.6 per cent in 2016) to fund it.
In supporting a subway, they scrapped a plan for a provincially-funded $1.4 billion light rail transit line. The province also would have paid for that line’s operation, a subway cost that now falls to the city.
While councillors are expecting the mayor to rail against the proverbial “gravy train” during budget negotiations, Paula Fletcher pointed out Thursday that it was the right-leaning members of council who voted to build the subway.
“It wasn’t the so-called lefties, it was the mayor and Scarborough councillors and the mayor’s team. So we did not bring this increase to the budget from the so-called left side of council.”
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