Here’s a loaded question: Is the strike costing the City of Toronto money, or is it generating a financial windfall for the Corporation?
City officials won’t touch that one with a barge pole. “We’ll be calculating the costs after the labour dispute ends,†spokesperson Rob Andrusevich said Friday.
No wonder: the strike’s ongoing net cost (or surplus) represents a radioactive shard of information for those on either side of the bargaining table, as well as those on either end of the political spectrum.
If the city’s is saving money, there’s less incentive for management to settle. Conversely, if the costs associated with operating core services are piling up, so to speak, that fact alone should create internal pressure to cut a deal.
As for Torontonians, we’d be in a better position to judge which side is blowing smoke if we knew how the strike looked from the vantage point of the bean counters working for city manager Joe Pennachetti. Notwithstanding the deflection quote above, I’d be shocked if they weren’t keeping a running balance. That said, the calculation is not straightforward. Using 2009 operating budget data [PDF], I estimate the city spends $1.3 million on child services per week. Parks, forestry and recreation, another department that’s been mostly on idle, gobbles up $4.5 million.
But when the strike passes the 14-day mark this week, the city won’t have saved $11.6 million on those two service categories (the total for two weeks) because of additional strike related costs: managers clocking overtime, fees paid for security guards, and so on.
The strike also means foregone fees for attractions (e.g., Centre Island). In 2002, the city saw a significant drop in attendance and event revenue during the strike, a 2004 budget document notes [PDF].
The garbage story offers another twist. According to budget documents [PDF], the City spends $880,000 a day to operate solid waste management services, or about $12.3 million as of Day 14. If the garbage collectors aren’t collecting their paycheques and if their trucks aren’t consuming gas, there will be savings. But as in 2002, there will also be significant clean-up costs afterwards, not to mention expenses relating to securing and spraying temporary dumps.
Now here’s the twist: with the new garbage levy, solid waste management is “user-fee supported,†as the budget documents like to say. Estimated revenues for 2009: $239.5 million, or approximately $660,000 a day.
By my tally, city taxpayers will have forked over $9.2 million in said fees as of Day 14, without receiving any service in return. Will council move to refund a pro rata portion of those fees to homeowners? Interesting to ponder.
Councillor Karen Stintz told me that when the 2002 strike ended and the city added up the net cost, it turned out to be a wash…as luck would have it!
A politically neutral answer from the bureaucracy was certainly expedient. But budget officials are not disinterested players, and I’d say the job of determining the net cost this time around should fall to an independent third party, like the Auditor General. That way, Torontonians will have a much clearer sense of the strike’s bottom line if and when this kind of dispute happens again.
Other garbage notes: Implicit in The Star’s expose about flaws in the green bin program is a question: are there environmentally friendly alternatives to composting organics? Exhibit A: The City of San Jose last month announced a plan to build a $20-million facility that uses a German “dry fermentation†digestion process to convert organic household waste into marketable bio-gas and fertilizer pellets. The deal, the first of its kind in the U.S., involves private partners and is part of San Jose’s green jobs strategy. The Silicon Valley capital wants to hike its diversion rate to above 90% and shift entirely to renewable energy, all while creating 25,000 clean-tech jobs over the next 15 years.
10 comments
Toronto should look next door at Dongara.
http://www.dongara.ca/mprocess.html
On the issue of what to do if the strike saves the city money……. Fat chance that their will be a rebate. Next years budget is shaping up to start 350 million in the hole.
If there ends up to be a surplus, the City should just bank that money and use it to balance their books for this fiscal year or the next. I know everyone would love a rebate but think about the costs and wastes associated with the rebate to it’s residents/households. It might cost millions just to process the rebate in terms of cheques, postage cost, envelopes, labour/wages involved, etc. Then there’s the matter of wasting resources such as paper, labour, processing, ink, etc.
And I’ve always been in favour of a fermentation process/facility. It really does reduce landfill waste by a significant margin (about 86-88% in real world figures, not the above 90% as stated in theory) and at the same time, you recover energy such as bio-gas and pellets. I’ve done the research and the due diligence work on it.
I expect that, when the strike finally ends, the City will have to pay for a
24/7 clean-up campaign.
The overtime costs (double-time Sundays?) will use up much of any perceived savings.
that star article was not helpful.
demeaning the system because it cannot handle plastic + diapers is ridiculous.
we all know toronto is lazy + will never do w/o the liners.
and the diapers HAVE to be collected weekly – the bin program allows for BIWEEKLY trash pickup. We cant operate a WEEKLY green + trash pickup.
John missing the big numbers,
We can be sure that any calculation of cost coming out of City Staff will reflect Mayor Miller’s spin and not any reliable truth. It will not reflect the cost of parents denied child care, it will not reflect the loss of wages for tuition of 400 students layed off on the Island; it will not account for multi millions lost in tourists not wanting to visit a garbage dump; it will not account for children deprived of camping experiences; it will not account for the value of summer enjoyment of Islands/beaches/pools and wading pools; it will not account for the increase in rats and vermin for years to come; it will not account for the alienation of City Citizens from their public servants who go on strike because they have some sort of special status that allows them 18 days a year in sick leave and to book them to boot!!
It’s going to be harder for Toronto not to offer a rebate when (1) they separated garbage into the waste bill and (2) Windsor are promising one. That said I’m not sure it’s productive to be going around promising rebates – instead perhaps the City should offer (among other things) a fees holiday on park permit fees, island ferry fares and recreation charges for an equivalent duration, encouraging Torontonians to re-engage with their city.
also re: green bins – is there any reason why Toronto could not encourage transferring vegetable peels and similar into the garden waste composting stream, with cooked food/meat/diapers/animal waste going to biodigestion? I wonder what position Toronto is in financially w.r.t to the processors, since presumably they guaranteed them a stream of organics which has now ceased.
Well-thought-out pieces like this are the reason John Lorinc is the best journalist writing about Toronto. Kudos.
Green bins suck. We already have an organic waste system that operates quite efficiently. It’s the city sewage system. Why doesn’t the city mandate garbage disposals in every home and business so that everyone who doesn’t compost can dispose of their green waste without using huge, noisy, polluting trucks? Too simple? How counterproductive is burning fossil fuels to truck around banana peels and coffee grounds?
The waste could then be treated or processed into fertilizer or biofuel or whatever on a large scale.