WHEN: 6-7:30PM, April 21, 2010 (tonight!) WHERE: Council Chambers, Toronto City Hall, 100 Queen St. W. INFO: See Facebook event page or visit PublicTransitCoalition.ca Join a broad coalition of public transit supporters tonight as the Public Transit Coalition launches a bid to save Transit City. Come out to show your support and find out how you can get involved in this campaign. Hosted by Alejandra Bravo and Norm Alconcel, organizers will unveil a pledge that they hope all councillors, MPPs and candidates will sign, which promises support for Transit City funding. photo by bookchen

Despite recent media reports, I'd like to say that I'm having a good week.  In fact, I haven't been this excited about local politics in quite some time.  There's some really neat things happening across the city, and I'm fortunate to be involved with two specific campaigns that are rolling out the red carpet in April.  Seven town hall forums have been announced this week: four for Better Ballots and three for the transit workers' Let's Talk campaign. And what could better encapsulate the theme of public space than ballots and buses?  Whether you're passionate about moving people through the city or moving ideas through our web of local democracy, these two systems are what keep Toronto alive.  One is a physical network of tunnels, tracks and routes and the other is a maze-like adventure filled with councillors, candidates, platforms, policies, ballots and regulations.

There was an interesting article in the Star recently (with a misleading headline) about how Chicago's chief financial officer arranged leases on profitable city-owned infrastructure with private companies, and so raised billions of dollars of capital for the city. These assets included some parking garages, all the city's parking meters, and the Chicago Skyway, a 7.8 mile toll bridge and road connecting two expressways. Leasing is certainly a better option than selling valuable city assets outright. The city raises needed money, and then, eventually, the assets return to the city and it can either start managing them again and get the revenue directly, or re-lease them. It's not ideal, though. Leases tend to be very long term (e.g. 99 years), so it's not much different from privatization in the short term. And it might not make a lot of economic sense to sell or lease an asset that makes good money (such as Toronto Hydro), as economist Jim Stanford explains in the article: "Think of Toronto Hydro," said Stanford. "The city typically earns an annual profit of about 10 per cent on its equity investment. Some of that (but not all) is paid to the city as a cash dividend; but even the profits that are retained inside Toronto Hydro are still new wealth for the City. "If you sell off an asset that earns 10 per cent, in order to pay down debt (or avoid new debt, which is equivalent) on which you pay 5 or 6 per cent interest, have you made a good decision? Obviously not. "Your balance sheet is no stronger: debt is lower, but so are your assets." On the other hand, reading the article (especially the mention of the Skyway), I wondered whether it might make a sense to set up a lease on city assets that don't earn any revenue but have revenue-generating potential, with a private company that is able to earn revenue with them. In return, the city could get a big dose of capital funding. I am thinking of the Don Valley Parkway and the Gardiner Expressway, which were handed over to the city to manage (and pay for) as part of the Harris government's downloading.

"Every time you do something in the city, don't just do it, do it beautifully." A seemingly simple statement made by Joe Berridge at IPAC's recent Cities and Public Policy Conference, speaks volumes about how we see planning and urban design policy making in Toronto.  It summarized much of the talk during the two days and over 40 speakers, who included politicians, academics and management.  A common thread of the speakers was the need for us to change the way we think about cities and urban design. The conference opened with Mayor David Miller and Toronto's role in Canada and among other global cities.  He spoke about Toronto being a city that people choose to live in because of its diversity, culture and economic opportunities.  While admitting he did not have the answer, he urged the delegates to think about how cities can sustain themselves in a changing political context, a relevant issue for Toronto, now that Mayor Miller's time in Office is ending. Eva Ligeti, Executive Director of Clean Air Partnership stated, "one of the key things that is holding us back is our culture of entitlement," and an overall thinking that "whatever we have now, cannot be changed."  She references Malcolm Gladwell's ideas in The Tipping Point and "the magic moment when ideas transcend and social behaviours cross thresholds, tip and spread like wild fire, whereupon institutions undergo fundamental change."  Ligeti gives the successful example of the five-cent a bag bylaw, which the City of Toronto recently implemented.  A very simple change that has shown people things can be done on a small scale and now stores all over Ontario are doing the same.  As Ligeti says, "a small item, but it worked."

Well, so much for the National Transit Strategy. When  city council approved the additional $417 million for the streetcar purchase on Friday, it was tacitly delivering the last rites to the campaign -- advanced energetically in recent years by Mayor David Miller and other big city mayors -- calling on all three levels of government to equally share the cost of major transit projects. With the death of “the ask,” the Conservative world-view emerged triumphant: municipal transit expenditure is appropriately funded ...

  "We're breaking new ground for Transit City thanks to the recent investment from Premier Dalton McGuinty and the Ontario Government's Move2020 initaitive." As my hastily snapped and poorly framed camera phone picture of the advertisement above shows, the TTC and City of Toronto have done for Dalton McGuinty what he could not do for himself: give the premier personal credit, in the form of an advertisement, for funding many of Toronto's Transit City lines. Back when McGuinty was leader of the Official Opposition at Queen's Park, he relentlessly attacked then-premier Mike Harris for producing blatantly partisan ads with ...

WHAT: Spacing's spring-summer 2009 issue release party WHEN: Tonight! From 7:30pm-1am WHERE: Canadian Corps hall, 201 Niagara St. (King & Bathurst area) HOW MUCH: $10 includes copy of mag, $5 for subscribers RSVP: let us know if you're coming via our Facebook group * PLEASE NOT THAT TRACK MEET, SPACING'S RESIDENT DJs, WILL BE SPINNING MUSIC AT THE RELEASE PARTY MONDAY. Check out their Facebook group page.  Just like the tulips popping up out of the ground, spring is also bringing you a new issue of Spacing. Our newest edition focuses on the grey spaces of the city -- ...

After the first ballot at the NDP leadership convention, Michael Prue was dropped from the ballot after getting only 11.5% of the vote. While his 4th-place finish wasn't necessarily a surprise, the number of votes he received was strikingly low, especially given his solid experience and a performance in the race that people seem to agree was reasonably strong. There are many explanations -- one crucial factor was his almost complete lack of labour union support (union votes were, in addition, weighed upwards so that they made up 25% of the total vote -- not exactly a one-member-one-vote system). But, given that he was the ...

We're (myself and Matt Blackett) at the Ontario NDP leadership convention in Hamilton, looking to see what the NDP candidates have to say about the issues affecting cities in Ontario, and Toronto in particular. Six of the ten NDP MPPs at Queen's park are from urban ridings, and three of the four candidates are former city councillors, so one might expect quite a lot of attention to urban issues in the candidate's platforms. However, only one, Michael Prue, has a section of their online platform devoted specifically to cities.  Prue shows his familiarity with the crucial problems affecting cities in Ontario, promising ...

  When word started leaking out last night through Mayor David Miller via Twitter that Transit City wasn't funded in the budget brought down by the federal government, I was disappointed. But what made me mad was how little help there is in that budget for Toronto's most vulnerable people. If you used the level of access to Employment Insurance provided to Torontonians by the federal government as a gauge of how much need there is in the city, you'd think Toronto was doing just fine. While many people are fine, our ...