Miller vows to increase city's economic focus

[alklay]

I realize that miketoronto appears to be the only one voicing any concern in this area, and I sometimes feel he is unduling picked on with weak arguments, there is little doubt that the city has been missing out on economic activity and jobs (and that something has to be done for the health of the city):

Miller vows to increase city's economic focus
Apr. 20, 2006. 01:00 AM
JOHN SPEARS
CITY HALL BUREAU


Toronto needs to sharpen its efforts to bring jobs and investment to Toronto, Mayor David Miller acknowledged yesterday.

He promised to involve business leaders more in the city's campaign to grow its economy in the face of flaccid performance in recent years.

A report to city council last fall noted that Toronto has lost about 100,000 jobs in the past 15 years while 800,000 jobs have grown elsewhere in the Greater Toronto Area. A report last month to the economic development committee showed that the city's marketing efforts attracted just 10 firms (two of them were one-person operations) with a total of 280 jobs in 2005.

"Yes, we need to do more to attract and retain business," Miller said in response to reporters' questions after his "state of the city" address to the Toronto Board of Trade at an east-end Toronto hotel.

Miller pointed to the city's fledgling economic competitiveness advisory committee, endorsed by city council last fall.

It includes the mayor and three key councillors, plus 20 high-profile business leaders who will offer advice, pass on business leads and promote Toronto. The committee is still being formed. Glen Grunwald, chief executive of the board of trade, agreed that the city can do more. "I think we need to be a little bit more aggressive in attracting new business," Grunwald said in an interview. "We need to compete like other places are competing."

Toronto hired a permanent director of economic development only in February, after letting the post sit vacant for two years.

Councillor Jane Pitfield (Ward 26, Don Valley West), who is running against Miller for mayor in November's election, criticized Miller's speech as lacking direction.

"I heard instead more of an election platform," Pitfield said in an interview.

The city missed its chance to improve the business climate when, under Miller, it approved a plan to lower its high property taxes on businesses over a 15-year period instead of in a much shorter time frame, Pitfield said.

Miller spent much of his speech emphasizing how the city has obtained more money and enhanced its status with provincial and federal governments during his tenure as mayor. He made no mention of the board of trade's strong support for both initiatives dating back to the 1990s.

Miller insisted the city remains a "very good business destination."

The MaRS medical research centre is a magnet for bio-tech activity, he said, and the city has just developed a strategy for the information and communications technology sector.

Miller also said that the Toronto Stock Exchange "each year moves up the ranking in exchanges" although a spokesman for the TSE said the exchange's ranking of seventh in the world is little changed in recent years.

With files from Steven Theobald

 

[TdotTrickyRicky]

"A report last month to the economic development committee showed that the city's marketing efforts attracted just 10 firms (two of them were one-person operations) with a total of 280 jobs in 2005."

This made me laugh. So sad.

 

[Ed007Toronto]

The city missed its chance to improve the business climate when, under Miller, it approved a plan to lower its high property taxes on businesses over a 15-year period instead of in a much shorter time frame, Pitfield said.

While 15 years is a long time I would still give him high marks for doing this. It is a step in the right direction and will slowly start making a difference as each year passes. No politician could have swung an immediate cut in business taxes. The resulting impact on residential taxes would have been political suicide.

 

[afransen TO]

What exactly does TEDCO do, then?

 

[Darkstar416]

I realize that miketoronto appears to be the only one voicing any concern in this area

Everyone is concerned, we are just not easily swayed by his sometimes fuzzy numbers and the sky-is-falling paranoia.

Toronto's business taxes continue to be high in order to supprt services that should have never been downloaded onto the city in the first place. Fixing that is probably the major stumbling block to Toronto regaining its competitiveness.

 

[mpolo2]

I think, to some extent, all the GTA got 'downloaded on' - so, while it hurts Toronto more than say, Oakville, it is not the only problem here. The problem is that this issue is not really on the radar of Torontonians who dont demand it from their politicians, and the type of politicians we elect, from Rob Ford to Howard Moscoe, just dont get it either. Sure things could be worse (insert meaningless reference to Detroit here), but unfortunately I just dont think we are at enough of a crisis to see a real change. It is nice that Miller is tossing out some soundbytes but he will still be leading the May Day parade this year and I wouldnt expect him to make any sacrifices in social programs to try to improve the climate for business here in the city - and unfortunately we dont really have the resources to do both (though Toronto does have some of the lowest residential property taxes out there, and yet no shortage of residents wanting to move in). Business activity does have a real impact on the city from being able to live an work in the same location to thetax base and life on the street. Governement plays a role - taxes and red tape hurt, and all the live theatre in the world isnt going to change that.

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

mpolo:

Why single out social spending? A good chunk of it is provincially mandated (thus beyond the control of council) while the police, TTC and fire are the top 3 in expenditure (not including debt charges).

www.toronto.ca/budget2006...arch30.pdf
p. 3

That said, I am all for rebalancing the tax loads onto the residential sector (which Lastman never managed to do over his years, in spite of his supposed fiscal credentials) and rationalizing the city workforce. But either way, the locational advantage offered by the city will always result in higher costs for businesses.

AoD

 

[miketoronto]

Toronto must attract business. People don't think about it, but the central business district area of downtown while small in land area, generates a huge amount of tax revenue for the city.

I don't have a stat for Toronto, but I remember reading that for Philly the downtown tax base makes up something like 40%-50% of the entire city tax base in a one square mile area or something.

I am sure for Toronto it is the same. Something must be done.

Actually Toronto life has an interesting article on the DVP in this months issue. And it states that when the DVP was built, something like 64% of all jobs in Metro Toronto where in downtown.

Now we are down to like 35%. Not good. Thats tax revenue we are losing to the 905.

 

[Ed007Toronto]

Mike when the DVP was built probably 64% of the people lived downtown. Don Mills was still mostly farmland in 1961.

 

[miketoronto]

Ed007Toronto, again with the excuses.

I am glad the city is finally starting to wake up about the issue of business flight. However we are still not proactive enough. We need a mayor like the one in Chicago who has a plan to increase downtown employment by over 150,000 thousand in the next decade or something. As he says "city residents need jobs in the city".

Toronto is on a thin line right now, where we are either going to turn around and still be a city you can work in. Or we are going to go to the other way and downtown will not matter a place to work, and we will turn into a bedroom community to the suburbs.
Toronto actually is in the same spot Philly was in a decade ago. Within a decade Philly's downtown went from the main office district of the entire region with over half the regions office jobs, to less then 30% of jobs today.
Toronto is on that verge right now. Philly is losing 70,000 jobs a year to the suburbs, due to taxes, etc. And Toronto is going that way if we don't wake up.


By the way, did you guys know State Farm left Toronto this month. Yep they vacated their Scarborough Headquarters. Off to Aurora for them. Yet another company that has left Toronto city limits and its taxes, etc.

 

[TdotTrickyRicky]

While it is somewhat progressive to shift some burden away from business property taxes, really we are not moving forward in the sense that both business taxes and residential taxes are increasing, just one at a higher rate then the other. There are definately cost inefficiencies significantly influenced by the demands of the public sector unions but the primary issue is on the revenue not expenses side. Rather then bickering about federal or provincial downloading or jursidiction the real issue is the fact that income tax and sales tax revenue should be levied directly by the city. This is normal practice elsewhere in the world. I'm not talking about tax increases but senior government vacating tax room. Toronto has always been able to muddle through and therefore there has never been much drive to become competitive but this will increasingly not be the case. Forget about regional shifts like business flowing from the 416 to the 905. These arguments are largely irrelevent as the GTA is effectively a single economic entity. We face stiff competition from domestic and international city region competitors. The very success of Toronto will cause us to be uncompetitive on a pure cost base with cheaper Canadian city regions which means our real path to success is to compete globally.

 

[bizorky]

Toronto must attract business. People don't think about it, but the central business district area of downtown while small in land area, generates a huge amount of tax revenue for the city.

I don't have a stat for Toronto, but I remember reading that for Philly the downtown tax base makes up something like 40%-50% of the entire city tax base in a one square mile area or something.

I am sure for Toronto it is the same. Something must be done.

Actually Toronto life has an interesting article on the DVP in this months issue. And it states that when the DVP was built, something like 64% of all jobs in Metro Toronto where in downtown.

Now we are down to like 35%. Not good. Thats tax revenue we are losing to the 905

With respect to business in the downtown, people actually do think about it. You just happen to believe that other people don't think about these things. And if you are concerned about a tax base, every one of those spanking new condos makes a contribution.

Regarding the comparison between Philly and Toronto, this is an apples and oranges example. These are different cities, so making a comparison of numbers is meaningless. One could conceivably have a downtown generating only 25% of a tax base and still be healthy by all measures. It has nothing to do with the numbers by themselves.

As for the distribution of population, things change over time. Suburban populations have grown, but so has the city population as well. There is no doubt that the suburbs have grown at an extreme rate, but Toronto is not unique with respect to this fact.

I think you have to do more than look at just the gross numbers. Economic development, quality of life issues, creating strategies for a viable downtown area and pursuing and generating jobs that have an ideal fit with the downtown life are actually complex issues. That type of research is necessary and important, and is being carried out. But to suggest that nothing is being done, or that nobody cares, is simply wrong.

 

[TdotTrickyRicky]

I totally agree with this article. Toronto has been in economic la la land for a decade and as much as I want to believe in Miller he is not strong on the economic file. Not that he has control over the greater factors influencing the economy but he certainly doesn't display leadership where he can.

From the star

What Miller should have promised
I would have unveiled property tax relief for employers and co-ordinated economic development, columnist David Olive says

Apr. 22, 2006. 09:46 AM
DAVID OLIVE


In his third annual "State of the City Address" last Wednesday, Mayor David Miller sugar-coated problems whose solutions — as in 12-step programs — begin only after wrenching oneself out of denial. So here's the State of the City speech I would have given.

Dear friends:

With a municipal election just seven months away, I can't help recalling my inaugural address, when I asked my fellow councillors to "cast your minds ahead three years. ... What will we do together to make this a city that works again for all its residents?"

The verdict today is that we have not done enough, and that the 28 months since I took office has been a time of stalled progress. Of too little to show by way of job creation, industrial renewal, enhanced R&D prowess, and rehabilitation of the waterfront — a birthright which, if rehabilitated, could ignite a lasting economic and social renaissance in our city, as the examples of cities as varied as Boston and Barcelona have shown.

During our siesta of the past few decades, as we waited idly for industry to come to us, the head offices of Shell Canada, IBM Canada, Suncor Energy, Molson, Stelco, Abitibi-Consolidated, Imperial Oil and many of our other flagship employers defected to the 905 region, to Calgary, to the United States. Industrial leaders like Magna International, ATI Technologies and Research In Motion — maker of the renowned BlackBerry — went directly to 905 or the emerging "technology triangle" of Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge and Guelph.The success of the ETR was a missed signal that people were increasingly commuting from Oakville to Markham, rarely visiting Toronto; while 905 shoppers began to opt for ex-urban campuses of big-box stores over Yorkville and the Eaton Centre.

For many of you, the image of me carrying a broom aloft when the votes were counted in 2003 symbolized not only an end to City Hall corruption, but a new imaginative spirit among leaders who affect life in Toronto — at City Hall, Queen's Park and in Ottawa. There was much talk of a "New Deal for Cities" in which finally we would achieve the world-class leadership long within our grasp. Yet collectively we have not worked hard enough to end the curse of complacency.

I recall that prior to the 1995 amalgamation, the civic motto of the old City of Toronto was "industry, intelligence, integrity." It was a spirit of industrial progress that made Toronto the nation's principal city. But was it industry that prompted me to approve a tourism marketing campaign last year, "Toronto Unlimited," with its hopelessly incoherent message? Is it industry that finds me still recruiting prominent business leaders for an "economic competitiveness committee" yet to get off the ground? Or to leave vacant for two years, until February, the post of director of economic development? Or, in the media capital of the country, to only now be creating a strategy for our information and communications technology sectors?

Given that lack of urgency, it was hardly a surprise to learn last month that Toronto's economic marketing efforts attracted just 10 firms to the city in 2005, creating a grand total of 280 jobs. Over the past decade and a half, Toronto has lost about 100,000 jobs, while our neighbours elsewhere in the GTA have gained 800,000.

It's true that cities are beholden to higher levels of government for financing many initiatives but the time has come to stop waiting on the whims of Queen's Park and the new regime in Parliament. My urgent agenda for a second Miller term includes the following:

Targeted property-tax relief for employers in the service and tech sectors to ramp up our existing strengths in financial, accounting, legal, architectural and advertising services; in biotech; and in information technology, with the goal of nurturing truly global centres of excellence. If that model works, as I believe it will, Queen's Park might follow by selectively reducing Ontario's 14 per cent corporate tax to curb defections to Alberta, with its 10 per cent corporate tax and absence of a retail sales tax.

Cutting civic red tape to accelerate the transformation of abandoned historic buildings and other so-called "brownfield" sites for industrial, commercial and residential use.

Co-ordinating the city's economic development efforts with universities and colleges across the country to promote Toronto as home to small businesses incubated on campus and ready to be spun off.

Lobbying for the right to issue U.S.-style tax-free municipal bonds as an essential, additional source of revenue, so that we don't have to close swimming pools and playgrounds to fund the bulking up of our most promising job-creation sectors.

Creating self-financing "authorities" with the power to fund their activities from revenues they generate. I will push hard for an authority to replace both the ineffectual Toronto Port Authority and the failed experiment of the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp. Together these agencies can claim a legacy of condos walling off the lake from the city, and not much else. We need a decisive waterfront authority that can devise and execute a vision of a waterfront in the model of Chicago's civic "front lawn," consisting of parkland, bike and walking trails, amphitheatres, ice rinks, swimming pools, ceremonial gardens and other amenities — a crown jewel to spur the local economies of the dozen or so neighbourhoods, from Leslieville to Parkdale, that are currently cut off from their lakeside birthright.

Finally, I would ask the business sector to do its part. For more than 30 years, leading corporations in Minneapolis — Target Corp., for example — have committed themselves not only to donating a minimum of 3 per cent of pretax earnings to local philanthropic activities, but to making their top executives and middle managers available to help guide the development of major civic projects. Atlanta owes its status as business capital of the U.S. South to the pioneering civic leadership of Coca-Cola, later joined by other locally headquartered firms such as Home Depot and United Parcel Service.

The GTA has more corporate head offices per capita than almost any urban region in the world. While the philanthropic contributions of individual tycoons have been considerable, the managerial skills of Canada's largest corporations have been conspicuously absent-without-leave in forging a better future for the place Canada's Big Five banks and other leading corporations call home.

In seeking a partnership with business, I invite it merely to share the spirit of responsibility exhibited by the tens of thousands of Toronto volunteers without whom the city could not function.

We know from both ancient and modern history that a dynamic city centre generates a "halo effect," stimulating growth across an entire region. Conversely, the hollowing out of downtown, as with Detroit and Buffalo, erodes a city's identity and its ability to attract the workers and the work of tomorrow. We need true teamwork to create a vision for Toronto. I pledge to lead that effort. A mayor of this city has no other choice. For as it says in the Scriptures, "Where there is no vision, the people perish."

 

[miketoronto]

During our siesta of the past few decades, as we waited idly for industry to come to us, the head offices of Shell Canada, IBM Canada, Suncor Energy, Molson, Stelco, Abitibi-Consolidated, Imperial Oil and many of our other flagship employers defected to the 905 region, to Calgary, to the United States. Industrial leaders like Magna International, ATI Technologies and Research In Motion — maker of the renowned BlackBerry — went directly to 905 or the emerging "technology triangle" of Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge and Guelph.The success of the ETR was a missed signal that people were increasingly commuting from Oakville to Markham, rarely visiting Toronto; while 905 shoppers began to opt for ex-urban campuses of big-box stores over Yorkville and the Eaton Centre.

What a sad quote. Maybe we should come the terms that we will be commuting to 905 to work. I wonder if there is anything Toronto can ever do, to regain itself as the main employment hub of the region and centre of the region.

When you read things like that, it shows how far we have fallen. The City of Toronto is really not even on the radar of most people in the GTA anymore. They never have to come in anymore as they don't work or play in the city anymore. What do they care if we have head offices downtown or not.

The less people that work downtown and in our core city. The less people of this region will be connected to each other and want to look out for everyone as a region together.

No wonder we have the problems we do in this region. No one has a common place they anymore to go to work in and feel like it belongs to everyone.

 

[miketoronto]

I also want to know why Toronto has no downtown business improvment district whos mandate is to go out there and attract and retain business is our core??

Every other major Canadian city has a downtown development corportation except Toronto. Every major US city also has one.

Toronto has to get proactive.

Here are some downtown development corporations and assoc's, that are working to regain downtowns as the great areas they are.

Check some of them out and see what Toronto should be doing.


*****DOWNTOWN CALGARY ASSOCIATION.*******

Downtown Calgary gets a special mention here, because Calgary has been able to build what is called North America's most centralized city even in the face of suburban development. Calgary is the main employment hub and shows that modern cities can keep jobs downtown and make a centralized city work.

www.downtowncalgary.com/



DOWNTOWN SASKATOON

www.downtownsaskatoon.com/



DOWNTOWN ALLIANACE OF NEW YORK CITY.

www.downtownny.com/


CENTRAL PHILADELPHIA DISTRICT.

www.centercityphila.org/home/default.aspx