For the first time since 2008, Toronto’s finance staff will be looking at the benefits and drawbacks of new taxes, the city’s Chief Financial Officer Roberto Rossini said Thursday.
Rossini told the first meeting of Toronto’s budget committee on Dec. 18 that staff will be revisiting such revenue tools as road tolls, consumption and entertainment taxes and tobacco taxes as a possible way to bring in revenue to cover the city’s increasing costs.
"We’re looking at dusting off the old reports and seeing what the potential implications would be, and is it something we should be looking at in the future," said Roberto Rossini, Toronto’s CFO, following the meeting.
The matter came up as Rossini was walking the new councillors on the committee through the budget process for 2015 before it officially kicks off on Jan. 20 of next year.
At that point, Rossini said, the city will find out just how much of a hole it’s in financially. Last year, staff estimated that the city would need to find $333 million, or face a property tax hike of 15 per cent.
Rossini said that it wouldn’t likely be that high when all the numbers came in.
But he made it clear that in the future staff will be studying other ways to fill that gap in revenues rather than further cuts in budgets past 2015.
"It’s just something we’re looking at," he said. "The last time we looked at this in 2007/2008. We had revenue projections then and we’re looking at revenue projections, wondering what they would amount to if we did them today."
In 2007, Toronto’s finance staff performed a detailed study and consultation on what additional revenue tools the city might impose, and eventually recommended two: the land transfer tax and the vehicle registration tax, both of which were eventually imposed under former Mayor David Miller.
But when former Mayor Rob Ford was elected in 2010, the vehicle registration tax of $60 per automobile was repealed, and Rossini said given that staff were reluctant to look at other possible revenue tools.
Budget chief Gary Crawford said there was no harm in looking at all the options.
"I want to ensure that staff bring a fiscally responsible budget to us," he said. "Council will make those decisions but we want to ensure that we have a property tax rate that’s reasonably low. I think we have to allow staff to bring that to us at some point in the future."
Don Valley East Councillor Shelley Carroll was budget chief under Miller when the new taxes were imposed. She said it makes sense to look at revenue tools again at this point, and she noted that many of her colleagues seemed open to the idea.
"What’s new today is new council members were asking a lot of questions about revenue tools," said Carroll.
She said the most sensible revenue tool would simply be to give the city a share of the HST.
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