City tickets raise less RE VENUE
Drivers in Toronto are receiving a lot fewer traffic tickets, and city hall can’t quite figure out why, although theories abound from police and politicians.
The numbers, disclosed at a meeting of Friday’s executive committee, are striking: Toronto police are projected to issue 218,000 tickets for traffic violations this year, more than a third less than the 341,000 issued in 2013.
It means the city will collect almost $30 million less than it expected. Declining revenues and tickets actually began in 2013, the same year the city froze the police’s nearly billion-dollar budget.
Could there be a connection between the two? “Heck, yes,” said Councillor Michael Thompson, a former vicechair of the police services board who thinks the service is playing a “game.”
“Civilian oversight is not welcome by the organization and quite frankly it’s a collaborative approach to show you that you affect us, we can affect you,” he said.
But a police spokeswoman said there is “absolutely no correlation between” tickets and budget freezes.
“We don’t write tickets based on revenue decisions, we write based on public safety issues,” said Meaghan Gray, with the Toronto Police Service, adding that Chief Bill Blair plans to announce on Monday new traffic enforcement expectations, no doubt spurred on by Mayor John Tory’s determination to ease congestion.
And while city bureaucrats say they have been waiting for more than six months for the force to explain the drop in tickets (which does not include parking tickets), Ms. Gray said the answer has already been provided to its board.
She pointed to a number of factors, including the declining number of police officers and the fact that officers have been encouraged to issue warnings instead of writing a ticket on a first offence. The service also has a new computer system that has taken some getting used to. It takes longer to process a ticket, leaving less time to issue them, according to Mike McCormack, president of the police union.
Still, the drop in expected revenue is a “serious concern” for a city going into a budget cycle, said chief financial officer Rob Rossini. The budget gap in 2015 has been pegged to be about $300 million.
There’s an anticipated surplus of $98 million (on a $9.6-billion budget) in 2014, however, thanks largely to a hot housing market. The city is expected to smash its past record for money collected from the land transfer tax by reaping a whopping $425 million this year, it was revealed Friday. The projec- tions had been $350 million.
“Sales are up, as well as prices,” said Mr. Rossini. “But you know what, guys? That’s a good thing, having more money.”
The CFO said the extra money goes to good use, helping fund billions of dollars in capital projects that are critical to the city.
The executive committee also on Friday requested a report for an accelerated work plan for SmartTrack, the rail line Mayor Tory promised to build in seven years. It wants to allocate up to $750,000 for a series of studies and analysis.
Staff have recommended that the University of Toronto department led by Professor Eric Miller, a prominent backer of SmartTrack during the campaign, conduct transit modelling on the corridor, and private firm Strategic Regional Research Associates, led by Metrolinx board member Iain Dobson, assess development scenarios along the SmartTrack alignment. The city would also hire third-party reviewers.
Mayor Tory told the executive he believed voters gave him a mandate to build SmartTrack, but that it must be properly studied first.
“I think the appeal was specifically that it was put forward not in substitution for any other project on the books but rather as something … that could be done in a relatively short time frame,” he said.
“But that was a campaign claim, I’ll admit, made by me. Now the express purpose of what we’re doing here is to move forward with a factbased transparent process.”