http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=16324189&postcount=1225
You mentioned that Doug (a first time councillor from Etobicoke) had painted a fairly rosy picture.
We can better answer your questions now, since the actual numbers have come in: Ford has “saved” not the billion he claimed, but about $400 million. Awesome numbers! Except that using the same math, Miller saved…$600 million (whether this is even vaguely appropriate math to use can be debated, but, using the same numbers, Ford has been a spendthrift).
The next problem is the dreaded Scarborough Subway. 100 million and climbing in cancellation costs, an additional 1 billion in costs to the city, and all the operating costs to be born by the city (instead of uploaded to the province).
So, not only is Rob Ford not finding the efficiencies that Miller found, he is costing, well, 1.1 billion more (that’s cost to the city; the feds and province are kicking in more cash, too), plus ongoing operating expenses.
Oh, I’m wayyyy too lazy to pull a cite for this, but Bloomberg (the rating firm, not the former Mayor of New York) is claiming that Ford’s antics make bond holders anxious enough that he tacks on a bias point. This works out to about $250k/year. Not enough to worry about, really, but Ford campaigned on waste far, far below those levels.
Oh, as mayor, he has also had the ability to put holds on things. He has repeatedly put holds on trivial, nonsense things (stop lights in neighbourhoods, etc) that usually sail through, in order to punish his enemies. His doing so has shocked long time councillors. Yes, there is a small dollar amount associated with this (in the hundreds of thousands) since these things do get debated.
You know, you’re being fairly gracious about this, but in the area around the comment I linked above, you mentioned that Toronto press had a liberal bias. And you know what, the Star might. But, at this point, the Star, The Globe and Mail, the Sun, and the National Post all agree that from a financial perspective, Ford is…bad.
The thing is, none of this is a surprise. He smoked crack. He got drunk, beat up his wife (and no, that’s not proven in court - but where there’s this much smoke there’s fire, and…not everything makes the papers), abused staff members while dead drunk, sent staff members to buy him vodka on approximately a daily basis, got drunk in his office, refused to read any of the rules of his job. That he made mistakes that cost, well, over a billion isn’t a surprise.
