Funny that your conclusion is not supported by your article. You can start by explaining what specific policies and initiatives enacted during the Miller regime are responsible (with financials).
Unsustainable public service contracts,excessive hiring and umpteen programs the city carries that they shouldn't like child care the Liberal Party stopped funding and Miller continued.
Why do you think he never ran again, he would have been slaughtered. The voters had enough.
http://www.transportfutures.ca/news/your-day-financial-reckoning-nigh-toronto
.....and Ford wasn't elected with his team until late Oct. 2010 with an existing 400 $ million shortfall.
Yet this $400 million problem is nothing new. And the problem will only get worse unless the mayor and council are willing to "think big" and consider new ideas for restraining spending or raising revenues.
Throughout this past decade, Toronto has depended on a variety of non-sustainable sources of cash, including bailouts from the province and withdrawals from its own reserve accounts, to balance its budget. Put plainly, the city has been running a structural deficit since the start of the decade.
That structural deficit has grown rapidly, from a $72 million gap in 2002 to a $447 million rift last year.
So the $400 million hole for 2010 is hardly a new phenomenon. What has changed, this year, is the likelihood of pulling another rabbit out of the hat to plug it. Toronto has drawn down its reserves to a level much lower than neighbouring jurisdictions.
The problem is, at its root, a simple one. From 2000 through 2008, the city's operating expenditures increased at an annual average pace of 5.3 per cent. Yet its main source of revenue, property taxes, increased at 3.6 per cent per annum. It is this wedge between the growth rates of spending and revenue that gave rise to the structural deficit.
The city has made some attempts to address the sustainability of its finances, to little overall effect. Increases in user fees have provided some relief: for instance, the 9 per cent annual increases in water rates, in effect through 2012, ensure that water and sewer costs are covered entirely by a fee-for-service arrangement. Toronto's land transfer tax and vehicle-registration fees, introduced in 2008, are adding roughly $200 million per year to city coffers.
Yet despite these measures, the city's structural deficit has continued to grow. Simply put, Toronto's municipal government spends money faster than it collects it.
