Jan 12 - Crunching Numbers with Miller

Budget Advisory Committee met informally with David Miller, Shirley Hoy, the City CAO and Finance staff just to review where we stand after the Standing Committees finished detailing their budgets for us. While we had whittled the shortfall down to $91 million with some difficult choices and cuts offered up by staff, Standing Committee Councillors have added back a few necessities and the gap is back at $119 million. It's very hard to argue with my colleagues. Add backs include such things as replacement of 24 year old fire trucks, youth outreach workers for at risk areas and some badly needed parks litter pick-up & lawn maintenance. In the evening I went back to work with the Youth Working Group, charged with drafting a Toronto Civic Youth Strategy by the end of the year. Can I just say that the hardest thing in the world to do is to write a set of Guiding Principles for something as important as this! We are all feeling the weight of this task, BIGTIME! My co-chair Kehinde Bah and I will present their work thus far to the Roundtable on Education, Children and Youth on January 25th at 6:30 at City Hall.