Public Commons

• Toronto Parks, Forestry & Recreation budget has been rising steadily (and substantially) whether in absolute or inflation-adjusted terms. The question is: why?

Part of Financial View: Ward 18 PFR Cost Data and Analysis PFR Budget Information Understanding the Commons

Parks, Forestry and Recreation

Posted March 19, 2012, updated Jan 31, 2013. Float the cursor over the chart to see numbers for specific years.

PFR has had $2.88B (billion) dollars of approved operating budgets in the past 10 years ($3.11B in constant 2011 $). That includes a 50% budget increase in real (2011$) terms over 10 years. The population by contrast has increased by 5.4% between 2001 and 2011.

The budget increase has been about $108M from 2006 - 2013, an average of about $15M per year.

In real terms (constant 2011 $), between 2006 and 2011 the increase averaged about $12M per year ($67M over 5 years). The growth has slowed somewhat since then, but continues.

See the spreadsheet for sources.

Here are the PFR Revenue Budgets for 1998 - 2011.

There are problems with the data here: a budget reported in one year will be reported as a different comparative number the next, for example. We've tried to smooth this out a bit.

Still, the trend is clear: the revenue budget was relatively constant until 2006 (in constant 2011 $), when there was a 25% increase between 2006 and 2010.

See the spreadsheet for sources.

City of Toronto

By comparison to the PFR operating budget, the City of Toronto overall has seen about a 30% increase of gross operating budget in real terms over the same time period (2002 - 2011).

See the spreadsheet for sources

Amalgamation

Here's a study of Toronto 10 years after amalgamation: Toronto 10 years after amalgamation