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Post by Max on Aug 22, 2007 15:42:04 GMT -3
$ would be uploaded by the province under his leadership.
Another failure and broken promise.
He got 3.4 million. Only 46.6 more million to go for the bus driver.
Good luck with that.
City nets $3.4-M under uploading proposal
Denis St. Pierre
Local News - Wednesday, August 22, 2007 @ 09:00
The City of Greater Sudbury will reap a $3.4-million windfall next year and more than $5 million in 2009 from a provincial government decision to pay the full cost of two social programs.
Greater Sudbury Mayor John Rodriguez said Tuesday he was relieved to learn there will be a net gain for the city from a new funding policy announced by Premier Dalton McGuinty.
McGuinty told a conference of municipal politicians Monday that his government was assuming the full cost of the Ontario Drug Benefits Program and the Ontario Disability Support Programs.
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Post by Max on Aug 22, 2007 15:46:10 GMT -3
City's share will rise to $5M in 2009.
Local News - Wednesday, August 22, 2007 @ 09:00
A share of the costs of those programs were downloaded to municipalities in 1998, in what McGuinty termed Monday as one of the "worst misjudgments" of the previous Conservative government.
However, politicians from Greater Sudbury and other small and mid-sized municipalities initially were not sure how to react when McGuinty made his announcement at the annual conference of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario.
Municipalities such as Greater Sudbury currently receive offsetting grants from the province, essentially as reimbursement for their share of the costs of the drug benefits and disability programs.
Larger, assessment-rich cities do not receive offsetting grants and therefore will enjoy significant savings when the province assumes the full cost of the social programs.
When McGuinty made his announcement Monday, he did not specify if municipalities such as Greater Sudbury would lose their offsetting grants once the province assumed the full program costs. But on Tuesday, the municipalities received the good news from the Liberals' Minister of Municipal Affairs, John Gerretsen.
"The minister clarified today that they will not claw back" the offsetting grants, Rodriguez said Tuesday from Ottawa, where he is attending the AMO conference.
"So we will get the $3.4 million for 2008," the mayor said. The city will gain about $5.3 million in 2009, he noted, given that the full scope of the provincial policy change will be implemented in phases. The $3.4-million gain next year could be used to knock two-per-cent off a possible increase in property taxes, or to spend on roads and infrastructure or other priorities, Rodriguez said.
"It will be up to council as to how they want to use that," he said. Given that a provincial election will be held in October, the policy change announced by the Liberal government is not etched in stone. But it is highly unlikely that any of the other provincial parties would take away the savings projected for municipalities, Rodriguez said.
New Democrat Leader Howard Hampton already has pledged that his party would go even further in "uploading" costs that were previously downloaded to municipalities, he noted. Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory also has pledged to reform the fiscal relationship between the province and municipalities and indicated he would expedite the completion of a review by a provincial task force on the issue.
The task force, which was appointed by McGuinty to study the provincial-municipal fiscal relationship, is scheduled to submit its recommendations to the government in the new year. McGuinty had insisted for months that his government would wait for the panel's report before making changes to the current system.
However, it appears the positions of the other two main party leaders in the run-up to the election pressured McGuinty to make some kind of uploading announcement early, Rodriguez said.
"Because there's an election coming and what Howard Hampton and John Tory have said, Mr. McGuinty and his government decided they had to do something now."
Although he welcomed McGuinty's announcement, much greater reforms will be needed in the months to come to balance the provincial-municipal fiscal relationship, Rodriguez said.
"I'm satisfied, but this is only the start," he said, noting that the city currently bears a $21-million net burden for the cost of downloaded services such as social assistance, child care and public housing.
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Post by Max on Aug 22, 2007 15:48:52 GMT -3
Mayor not ready to celebrate news
St.Pierre, Denis
Local News - Tuesday, August 21, 2007 @ 09:00
Since he began campaigning last fall, Greater Sudbury Mayor John Rodriguez has been hell-bent on convincing the province to reassume funding responsibility for services downloaded onto the city over the last decade.
Greater Sudbury is financially crippled by having to pay nearly $50 million a year on provincially mandated services and programs such as social assistance and public housing, Rodriguez argued.
Under his leadership, however, that would change, he vowed - not only during his mayoral campaigning, but also in the aftermath of his election last November.
Over the last several months, Rodriguez has worked diligently to try to make good on his pledge. Among other things, he has helped strengthen a coalition of northern mayors and municipalities that has sought to heighten the pressure on all provincial parties - in advance of this fall's Ontario election - to reverse the downloading trend and "upload" these services.
So one could have expected our mayor to be upbeat, if not ecstatic, when Premier Dalton McGuinty announced Monday the provincial government is taking over the cost of certain social programs now paid by municipalities.
Specifically, the province will assume the full cost of drug benefit and disability pension programs that it shares with municipalities, McGuinty said.
Furthermore, the change immediately becomes government policy and is not simply a campaign promise, the premier added. (However, the change won't go into effect until the new year and it will take four years to fully implement, so who's kidding who - it's a campaign goody).
In any event, campaign promise or not, McGuinty's announcement is good news for municipalities, isn't it? Something for which Rodriguez and other 'uploading' crusaders might want to take credit, perhaps?
Unfortunately, Rodriguez found himself unable to crow much about this particular uploading announcement - at least not yet, because there was no guarantee as of Monday that the change will benefit Greater Sudbury.
"I'm not quite sure," an anxious Rodriguez said Monday from Ottawa, where McGuinty made his announcement (to the annual conference of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario).
Unlike Rodriguez and the other Sudbury delegates to the AMO conference, municipal politicians from larger cities were quite happy with McGuinty's announcement. That's because their assessment-rich cities will automatically reap multimillion-dollar savings from the policy change - Mississauga, for example, would reportedly enjoy a $20-million annual windfall.
Greater Sudbury pays an estimated $5 million annually for its share of the cost of the two social programs, but the city city ultimately is reimbursed for those costs through provincial grants. So the city will gain from Monday's announcement only if the province decides to continue to giving those grants to the municipality even after it assumes the full cost of the social programs.
Richer cities such as Mississauga have no such worries, because they do not receive such grants.
Although he could not quite celebrate Monday's announcement, Rodriguez indicated he has a positive outlook about the prospects for greater, overall uploading by the province following the next election.
McGuinty has all but assured municipal leaders that further uploading will occur after he receives the recommendations of an expert panel he appointed to comprehensively study the issue, Rodriguez said.
McGuinty "did say his intent is to take those (costs) back," he said. "He's committed to uploading, but he's going to do that with the guidelines he will receive from this panel." The panel is scheduled to deliver its report in the new year.
Meanwhile, Ontario NDP Leader Howard Hampton already has pledged major uploading of costs, which would save Greater Sudbury several million dollars per year, Rodriguez noted. Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory also has said the downloading experiment was a mistake and that he will improve the provincial-municipal relationship, he added.
Tory and Hampton are scheduled to address the AMO conference Wednesday.
Still, it would appear each provincial party has a long way to go before either has committed itself to uploading the nearly $50 million in costs Rodriguez has insisted must be removed from the city's operations.
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