The following post comes to us from Adil Dhalla:
After telling a friend that I couldn’t go out last Thursday because I was attending a Toronto Engagement event, he jokingly responded “Okay buddy, have a good time getting engaged to the city”. Obviously, had I clarified the entire title of the series, he would not have had the chance to play with my words but it did force me to consider the important distinction between education and engagement.
To the onlooker, Civics 101 might appear more about educating citizens about the city and certainly, there has been a great deal of information shared. But what elevates the experience to ‘engagement’ is the fact that participants for 101 are hearing from actual decision makers and then being encouraged to work together to tackle the city’s challenges. This approach not only leaves participants with a much deeper understanding of how the city operates, but can lead to collaborative thinking which could manifest into real solutions.
This week, for example, we were led into a deep discussion of the city’s finances by Shelley Carroll (the city’s Budget Chief) and Cam Weldon (the City’s CFO). The session was part informative, part interactive, as we sat at circular tables and attempted in small groups to balance the city’s budget. The exercise had a profound impact and helping me understand how hard it is for the city to match the needs of its citizens without raising taxes or making cuts and redistributing resources.
With neither option welcoming, there are two conclusions that can be drawn:
- The city must continually work to ensure that each of its arms are accountable and maximizing the potential of what they are allotted and
- Assuming no one wants more taxes and that we cannot rely on larger contributions from other levels of government, the City needs to get creative in deriving revenue.
The second point, however, allows me to return to this concept of engagement. Listening to Councilor Carroll, my mind began racing with ideas on how the city could generate more revenues. My ideas weren’t about what the city could do, as much as they were about what we citizens could do. For example, we could crowd-source for needed projects (akin to what President Obama has been doing) or create an initiative that encourages businesses to make a small contribution back to the city. For example, I am launching a new business soon and am now considering a give-back to the city as part of our social contribution. Sure, my contribution might only be enough at first to install a new swing set but to the detractors, I would say one swing set is better than no swing set and what would happen if we all thought about one thing we could do?
The point is, education leads to learning whereas engagement leads to collaboration and new thinking. I hope it’s doing the same for you and would love to hear how.
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Adil Dhalla (@TheNetTale) is the founder of creativitykilledtherecession.org.
Part of the challenge of creating new revenue will be finding new stable revenue. It appears to be easy to find $10 million to build one mile of new road, but difficult to find the $1 million each year for 30 years to keep that mile of road in serviceable repair. Voluntary business contributions are usually charity or advertising investments - both can be discontinued whenever the business loses interest in the project. A new municipal tax on breathing within city limits would probably be very stable, but difficult to measure fairly.
ReplyDeleteI agree that stable is the key word there but chalk it up among the challenges that we'll need to overcome to bridge the gap.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if I'm reading your last line correctly but assuming I am, yes it would be difficult as heck to measure breathing. In general though, I think that there has to be solutions which are not tax-based and this is why I'm beginning to lean towards business partnerships/approaches for the city to accomplish this.
The Budget exercise was fantastic. I took home a few blank copies of the activities and have since gotten my friends to try it out.
ReplyDeleteI think that it would be beneficial, to the residents and to the council, to have every citizen try this activity. I think it would broaden people's understanding of how difficult a job the council has in solving Toronto's budgets.
I especially got friends to try this activity who constantly complain about their taxes and what a bunch of monsters council is for raising taxes or talking about the possibility of a sales tax.
I got them to admit that they do want police, fire service, public transit, social, family and health services and parks and rec centres in the city they live in, since more than 70% of their taxes go towards these things, I think I might have envoked a small measure of sympathy in them for the evil tax raising council.
In regards to the above blog, I did like Adil's ideas for new revenues, especially the possibility of crowd-sourcing. Another idea that I think Councillor Carroll mentioned that Chicago does is some kind of income tax on non-residents of Toronto who earn their salary in Toronto. I don't know how possible it is but it seems like there are a lot of people using the infrastructure of Toronto on a daily basis to earn a living that don't pay anything towards the development and upkeep and that doesn't seem right.
I very much appreciated Class 4 and am looking forward to Class 5 as I have worked on elections in the past and would love to know even more about them.
Another possibility I thought of to lessen the yearly blow of the property tax is to some how set a system of monthly or bimonthely payments (to coincide with paychecks for instance) rather than a lump sum. I know this would be difficult as there are variables that go into calculating the property tax, but there are even more variables when calculating income tax and that can be set up to come off paychecks.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that one of the reasons people find property tax hikes so intense is the fact that it is a lump sum payment method and when your lump sum jumps by $500 it hurts.
If the tax hike involved paying an extra $10 a paycheck perhaps people wouldn't find it so harsh.
I know people could probably set this up on their own, as in setting aside money from each paycheck etc etc but most people are too lazy/technologically challeged etc to bother doing it.
Just another thought! Hopefully people from the course or not in the course read this stuff. If so comment!