Public Commons

Blog: Henrik Bechmann's Blog

It's well known that our society has become urbanized over the past 150 years.

(source: Statistics Canada)

Note that it's not that the rural population has shrunk (by and large) - rather it's that the urban population has grown much faster.

Today (2012) the population of the City of Toronto is about 2.6M and the metro area about 5.6M.

So how does such a dense population area work? We can get a general sketch from City of Toronto Budgets. But the City of Toronto notoriously categorizes its programs (mostly) into Citizen Services "A" and Citizen Services "B", which is singularly uncommunicative. Here's my take of a framework that makes more sense:

Re-cast Toronto Operating Budget

Personal Assistance

Personal Support

Public interventions to help or support people's lives. Basically Health, Education, and Welfare, including Toronto Housing and Public Health. (The Boards of Education and even Doctors and Hospitals would be included here for a broader analysis.)

Personal Security

The well-known Police, Fire, and Ambulance (EMS) services, though police services go well beyond emergency services.

Public Support

Public Works

Infrastructure and operation of important services that keep the city running: Transportation (TTC and Roads + Parking), Water, Sewage, Waste. (Energy -- Electricity and Gas -- and Telecommunications infrastructure would be included here for a broader analysis.)

Public Commons

This is our area of interest, including Parks (Parks, Forestry, and Recreation), Community Centres, Rinks, Cultural Centres and events, and Libraries. Streetscapes and Town Squares should be included as well. Whereas Personal Assistance are interventions, Public Commons provide support for public initiatives.

Administration

Municipal Administration

Everything else, including Municipal Bylaw enforcement, Internal Administrative Services (Hiring, Finance, etc.), Tourism, Governance, and more. Generally, stuff you'd go to City Hall for.

Municipal Finance

Mostly Finance costs (I need to look into this in more depth).

Here's a summary of the 2011 budget according to this scheme:

(Source: spreadsheet)

... and the detail of how I've organized the line item categories from the City budget:

These programs amount to over $10B per year (without the many other services not provided by the city, like schools).

But that's roughly the context. This website wants to focus on the Public Commons area of the action - what we view as part of the glue that holds us all together.

Here's the staffing budget for 2011, to deliver these services (over 50,000 people):

(Source: spreadsheet)

Incidentally, about two thirds of the costs are recovered through direct fees and government transfers, leaving about one third to be collected through local taxes.

... though I need to research how the finance costs are "recovered"...