Taxes
December 8th, 2009
Having worked with the Beautiful City alliance to win the billboard tax and signs by-law [PDF] that was adopted by City Council yesterday, I’ve got a few stories from that experience that I want to share with Spacing readers in the coming days.
To contextualize my vantage point in this process, I worked to bridge the interests of the artists and public space activists within the Beautiful City alliance, which included a variety of arts and public space advocates, as well as allies in the community and small business sectors (including Spacing). I also steered communication and the political-level work. My efforts would have meant nothing without the capability of the arts community to mobilize thousands of people and the public space activists’ capacity to understand and manipulate the sign-related legal framework the City operates within. Though I suppose it’s easy to say now, even if the vote hadn’t gone our way yesterday, I would have been much better off for having had the opportunity to work with so many talented and passionate activists.
Going through the campaign chronologically is probably best left to Devon Ostrom’s inevitable doctoral thesis (disclaimer: some history is necessary for this article) so I wanted to start with something a bit more topical given today’s coverage of yesterday’s decision: the issues surrounding arts funding.
The arts funding component of the Beautiful City campaign, while consistently popular [PDF] in the public opinion polls we commissioned, took a bit of a beating on the blogs and was used as a wedge by a few city councillors (the same few that don’t see the merit in arts funding generally). Though you can be sure that Beautiful City will assert its voice during the operating budget process when it kicks off early next year, I’m not going to make the pitch here for the money; you can see that in the background information provided at BeautifulCity.ca. Instead, I’ll tell the story of why and how the arts piece made it into the recommendations City staff made to Council and what was in fact recommended to Council, what Council’s decision means and where it leaves the arts funding issue going forward.
December 7th, 2009
“It’s David and Goliath, not Solomon,” observed Councillor Joe Mihevc.
“The lobbying has been transparent,” said Mayor Miller. “You can’t hide Chris Korwin-Kusczynski! He’s right over there!”
In every deputation I gave on the new Sign Bylaw and Tax, I made sure to mention how wonderful it was to be speaking in favour of something for once, rather than against it. Public space advocates are used to having to schlep to City Hall to counter billboard lobbyists’ latest attempts to ingratiate their clients into the fabric of this city; so when City staff put forward a brilliantly positive new initiative to control that industry in a fair, thoughtful, and substantial way, it’s cause for celebration. Similarly, I am not used to writing things along the lines of: Uh… we won. City Council voted to uphold all of staff’s recommendations and then some.
December 4th, 2009
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJO65JaQQkg[/youtube]
A typical intersection in Los Angeles.
If Councillor Norm Kelly gets his way, every single billboard in this city will be allowed to turn into an electronic sign. Why? Because “Guess what, we live in an electronic age!” Seriously. That’s his argument.
Under the pretext of “modernization,” Los Angeles City Council ignorantly made a similar decision in 2006, as chronicled in this nightmarish L.A. Weekly feature from just over a year ago. One L.A. councilman told the paper, “obviously many of us regret it.” Another said, “When we discussed digital, I don’t think anyone had a clear idea of what it was about. It was new to me…I don’t know if any of us saw how bright they would be. It’s a whole new world.”
But you don’t have to look to Los Angeles. You can always just read this letter from a poor sucker who has the misfortune to live within a mile of the illegal CBS video screen on top of the Amsterdam Brewery at the foot of Bathurst.
And allowing third-party signs to display “electronic static copy” isn’t even the only one of Kelly’s motions that would transform the new Bylaw into an ironic mockery of its original intent.
November 2nd, 2009
After the St. Clair Right of Way was approved, Toronto Environmental Alliance activist Gord Perks told me that nothing worth doing at City Hall takes less than five years. In light of that wisdom, the seven years it has taken to get a billboard tax into City Council’s committee process seems about right.
On Wednesday, Planning and Growth Management committee will finally consider a tax on billboards and a new signs by-law that makes it harder to get a new billboard approved in most neighbourhoods while ramping up the fines on illegal billboards to make them unprofitable.
The tax and by-law are being advocated for by the umbrella group Beautiful City Alliance, which includes artists and public space activists that range from the Scarborough Arts Council and the Art Gallery of Ontario to IllegalSigns.ca and Toronto Public Space Committee. (Spacing is also an endorser of Beautiful City, and I am personally involved in the campaign.)
While the by-law and tax provisions are good but not great, there are some important changes that need to be made by the Planning and Growth Management committee when it considers the issue at its meeting this Wednesday. While John Lorinc made some suggestions on Spacing Toronto this morning, the Beautiful City Alliance disagrees with them because his main proposal (BMX/skateboard infrastructure) could, in fact, be accommodated in Beautiful City’s proposal without limiting access to arts funding for youth, if that’s what youth prefer. Plus, there are two vital issues that need to be addressed to ensure any new programs or infrastructure are funded.
October 26th, 2009
This past weekend, newspaper headlines were warning Toronto that 2010 would be the year that the city budget is cut to pieces. As the Globe reported, city staff have been asked to present to top city bureaucrats budgets that factor in a sustainable and permanent five per cent cut to their operating budget in 2010 and a further five per cent cut in 2011. In total, the city hopes to find almost $350 million in savings.
While the perception that waste is abundant at city hall permeates the body politic, if city council ends up approving a package of cuts that totals the reported $343 million, public services are going to be markedly reduced. As Jackson Proskow of Global Television reported via Twitter today, staff are using service levels from this past summer’s strike as a prospective operating model when forecasting scenarios for a -10 per cent scenario.
But the point of this post isn’t to talk about those cuts. There will be plenty of time for that next month when agencies, boards and commissions start to approve their operating budget submissions that get sent to decision-makers at city hall. This is just to contextualize a decision city council made this afternoon.
July 30th, 2009
Every Thursday, Spacing will bring you a snapshot of Toronto’s past, looking into what took place that day in the city’s history. Throwback Thursday will address how the city has evolved, with an emphasis on issues that remain relevant for development in Toronto today.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
July 30th has been a prolific day in the history of Toronto. As Bruce West writes in his book Toronto:
“the real turning point in the transition of Toronto from a rough French outpost to a budding British community took place on July 30, 1793″ (p. 18).
On that July 30th over two centuries ago, Elizabeth Simcoe and her three children Sophia, Francis (who Castle Frank was named after) and Katherine arrived aboard the Mississauga to establish the residence of Upper Canada’s Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe in the frontier town of York.
Shortly after the family’s arrival that day, a large tent called the “Canvass House” was assembled for the Simcoes by the Queen’s Rangers while Elizabeth took the first of her famous strolls through the wilderness. An avid diarist, Elizabeth carefully recorder her many explorations around the settlement of York in what is now called The Diary of Mrs. John Graves Simcoe. Her diary has become a foundational text in the history of Toronto, providing a window into the birth of the city, its early residents and the natural landscape upon which Toronto was built.
Many decades later, July 30th also became the date of one of the young city’s early tragedies. Soon after William Lyon Mackenzie was elected Toronto’s first mayor in 1834, Mackenzie along with his council proposed to raise taxes in order to pay for pressing civic improvements, one of which was to build a new board sidewalk on King Street.
June 4th, 2009
If you’re hoping Mayor David Miller will lose the 2010 mayoral election, polling firm Environics has bad news for you. Torontonians are mostly satisfied with their municipal government.
According to a poll …
June 16th, 2008
It’s June 16. After more than ten days of intense media coverage from all the major print, web, and broadcast media, Luminato has wrapped at last.
And you know what? I’m still confused about whether it was successful or unsuccessful, accessible or elitist, public fete or public failure. I headed out to events. I saw some public art. I read the coverage. I listened to my friends and acquaintances in the arts and urban advocacy community. (Including Matthew Hague, who did a great post on the Link boat earlier today.) And I still can’t tell.
Such confusion is exacerbated when fellow commentators like Martin Knelman—who I do think can have a lot of valuable things to say at times—reports that we needn’t worry about accessibility at LuminaTO because it has “143 events and 860,000 moments over 10 days, and more than 70 percent of them free.â€
Excuse me if we skipped this in my undergrad physics and stats classes, but I’m quite unclear on what a “moment†means statistically. One second? Ten? Must tears or laughter—or Kodak—be involved?
And this magic number of “860,000 moments‗where on earth did that come from? One second times 860,000 projected spectators/passerby? Do you count, as Luminato did on their events calendar, things like the CN Tower being lit up—which it is every night anyway—and people seeing that from the Gardiner? Or, um, not?
April 21st, 2008
I was a bit distracted this morning when I heard CBC radio news report that McGuinty had made some big announcement at the ROM yesterday. And hearing the words “free access” “Tuesday” and “million dollars” sift through my other tasks at the time, I must say I felt some margin of hope rise up in my museum-cynical soul: Could it be that a free evening at the ROM was actually being reinstituted? That perhaps the museum had woken up to the fact that since much of the collection it manages belongs to the public, the public has a right to see it for free?
Sadly, a little bit of poking ’round the interweb quickly grounded that wild flight of fancy: it turns out that the new Tuesday-access plan only offers free entry to “full-time students attending a post-secondary institution in Canada.”
April 10th, 2008
The City of Mississauga, hailed by critics of the City of Toronto as a financially sustainable paradise for many years, is now anything but.
It’s been forecasted that by 2012, Mississauga’s reserve …
