Last week, I attended a presentation on the City’s 2010 budget given by Councillor Shelly Carroll (the head of the budget committee), courtesy of Social Planning Toronto. According to Councillor Carroll, there is now a general principle at work of cost recovery within city departments whenever possible. In the case of the planning department, that means when development fees go down – as they have this year, given the recession (and because the City froze development charges last year) – the budget of the planning department takes a dive as well.
This is worrisome for a number of reasons…