November 6, 2005: THE TORONTO STAR

Politicians railing against government waste and vowing to cut "fat" from the system have been a Canadian election staple for years. Yet, despite all the promises, public money continues to be squandered.

The latest examples come from a pair of reports presented to Toronto City Council's audit committee this past week.

Auditor General Jeffrey Griffiths found that lack of centralized management over almost 1,500 buildings owned by the city has resulted in chaos.

Cleaning and maintaining some buildings costs 10 times more per square foot than for others. A bewildering number of small contractors are hired to provide similar services, such as electrical work, at various sites rather than having one company efficiently do it all.

To skirt rules requiring competitive bidding for any order valued at more than $3,000, large contracts are sometimes split into many small deals, all going to one firm.

Despite big spending on building cleaning and maintenance, including $76 million last year, Toronto faces a repair backlog of roughly $500 million. Given the chaotic nature of the system, a detailed estimate is impossible to calculate.

In a second, equally depressing report to the committee, Griffiths found that city workers assigned to recover overpayments mistakenly issued to welfare recipients cost the system far more than they were able to recover. Last year's net recovery to city hall totalled $143,000. But landing that relatively small amount cost $920,000, leaving a net loss of $777,000.

Obviously, taxpayers are not getting their money's worth from this program or from the maintenance of city real estate.

Some city councillors propose outlandish solutions. Mike Del Grande, of Scarborough-Agincourt, wants the amount of money found to be wasted by a city department to be trimmed from that department's budget.

Part of this cut money would then go to the auditor general to hire more staff and uncover more waste. Del Grande describes it as a "bounty" for catching inefficiency.

On the surface it sounds like a good approach, but there is a problem: Money used by a city department is in no way property of the department itself, or of its manager. It is the public's money. And withholding it would only hurt those people who depend on the punished department's work and who deserve better services.

Councillor Doug Holyday of Etobicoke Centre has proposed raising funds by selling the naming rights to Nathan Phillips Square, which has repair costs pegged at $40 million.

Holyday said the city could cover much of that by allowing a corporation to rename the square — for a price. And he said he intended to raise the idea at tomorrow's meeting of the administration committee.

He need not bother. Residents will not stand for having their heritage bought and sold.

Millions of dollars could, indeed, be raised by granting the right to rename Nathan Phillips Square, one of Toronto's civic landmarks, to the highest bidder. But it would amount to selling the city's soul.

There are other ways to proceed. In the matter of recovering welfare overpayments, the best solution might be to let some smaller excess payments slide while handing major cases to a private collection agency.

The auditor general has several sound ideas to fix Toronto's decrepit civic structures, such as studying centralized control and maintenance for all city buildings; tighter supervision of work orders, and creation of an electronic database tracking the condition of buildings.

Such reforms are not as flashy as a "bounty" on government waste, but they do offer some hope of real progress.