Michelle Holland (Ward 35) has done a service to ordinary taxpayers by taking issue with the vague nature of money collected by the City from developers and just how it is spent. It appears these enormous wallops of cash, currently amounting to more than a quarter of a billion dollars, are stashed in piggy banks within the wards where development has occurred. As the linked story by Sue-Anne Levy of the Sun makes clear, some wards have millions of dollars to spend, others have none. Holland’s Scarborough ward couldn’t generate a penny’s-worth of such Section 37 and Section 45 dollars. Kristin Wong-Tam’s glass-tower wonderland known as Ward 27 has nearly $64 million on hand. It makes no sense but as is often the case, human nature is at its worst when it comes to sharing. The case may be made that dense wards with intense commercial activity have special problems. But it cannot mean that the larger community is deprived of benefit from what is, in the end, just another form of taxation. Toronto Sun
