The infusion of civic energy into the proposed city budget for 2012 has been astonishing. I feel good about a city where so many people care about and have strong opinions about our shared lives, even if I don’t feel so good about some of the opinions of the decision makers. The common thread among the more than 300 deputants at City Hall is that the mayor and his colleagues are being short-sighted. The critics say to City Hall: you need to be smart with public money. You can’t just randomly chop away at spending to balance the budget.
One example of the wrong approach is in the proposed cuts that would eliminate seven swimming pools and 12 recreation programs at schools. The programs are delivered under what is called “shared use,” where a city program is operated in a school facility, making good use of school buildings that would otherwise sit unused after school hours.
City staff said a net of $2,111,000 will be saved by cutting these recreation programs, and $978,6000 will be saved by chopping seven swimming pools. But staff were blunt about the non-cash impact: “Eliminating programming at the 12 selected school locations will impact 230,000 or 35 per cent of participant visits in the TDSB schools. The majority of eliminated programs cannot be accommodated in existing city-owned facilities.”
So what happens to these kids? Will they gently fade into the background? Not bloody likely.
The best advice on what happens when recreation programs for young kids are cut back comes from a brilliant report by Roy McMurtry and Alvin Curling in 2008, entitled Roots of Youth Violence. These are not your usual suspects. McMurtry was attorney general in the Bill Davis government, then chief justice of Ontario. Curling was speaker of the legislature.
Their report makes it clear that good programs are critical to keeping kids away from crime and delinquency. Spending more money on policing is not part of the solution for kids — in fact, their report shows that too much money is eaten by police and is not available for the needed social and recreational programs. (The police budget for 2012, you’ll remember, will increase and is not subject to cuts. The money that goes to the police-budget increase causes the cuts to programs for youth.)
Cutting recreation programs for kids won’t save money — it will cost more because some of those kids on the loose will get into trouble and into the court system and into jails. If any of the councillors had the time to consult with Roy McMurtry, they wouldn’t support these cuts.
Or they could look at a 2004 book: Research on Community Safety, edited by Bruce Kidd, a runner and professor of physical education at University of Toronto. The essays in this book contain lots of data coming to the same conclusions. All of which means we’d be better served if our city council took a longer term view about revenue and spending. Don’t cut the things that make kids and communities healthy. If you need to find more revenue to keep those programs funded — and maybe expanded — then look at the revenue options.
I’m thinking there’s money to save at City Hall — not gravy, but money. For instance, in a previous column, I argued much money could be cut in the police budget without compromising service. And here’s another idea: I suspect there is money to be found by rethinking how we deal with the homeless. Currently we spend $60 a night for each bed in a shelter, while the individual in that shelter bed could be housed in a standard apartment at a cost of less than $30 a night (or about $800 per month).
Those are the kinds of ideas we should be studying carefully, rather than chopping away at a useful future for some Toronto kids.