Yule Heibel's Bookmarks tagged local_government →  View Popular

The quest to bring open-source software to real-world urban planning continued, following the clearance of a key hurdle: Before you can build a transportation model, you need to know where the roads are.

While public, that data was locked by private software used by public organizations and suffered from an overall lack of standards. Thus was born GeoServer, an open-source, Java-based software server that lets anyone view and edit geo-spatial data. Road information can now be painstakingly imported once from proprietary systems or entered from scratch, double-checked by other users, and rolled out to anyone who needs the data.

"It didn't really exist before," said Gorton. "Most of the data was run on software from a company called Esri. Government agencies have this data, but it's all running on proprietary systems and you couldn't get access to it, or it was very hard to get access to it." GeoServer now runs in thousands of places around the world for all sorts of reasons, according to Gorton, whenever an online app needs to know where roads are.

Existing online platforms share data about the more powerful elected officials, such as federal and state lawmakers. Congresspedia allows wiki-style editing of pages about members of Congress, while OpenCongress allows several ways for users to interact, including writing blog posts about specific bills.

And for detailed information about lobbyist activity and campaign contributions, there are sites that track such spending, including one for members of Congress and another covering major state elected officials. Such databases attempt to better organize information that is already available for public scrutiny but is cumbersome to obtain.

Against great odds and in the face of trenchant hostility, the amalgamation of seven governments into one unified Toronto has survived its first decade. Barely.

Happy anniversary, megacity.

Never has a forced union been so universally detested and excoriated – every outflow, offspring or offshoot smeared with the "bastard" tag: unwanted, unloved, unappreciated. And yet, alive, if not well.

Some wounds are only now healing, 10 years later. And considering what it's been through, it's a miracle Toronto is still standing.

"It's been a real body blow to the city," says Sewell, still defiant. "I fear for the city's future."

"A disaster," adds MPP Michael Prue, East York's last mayor.

Kathleen Wynne, now education minister, was Sewell's right-hand person back then. Her analysis? "I've knocked on tens of thousands of doors since I got into provincial politics, both in 2002-2003 and 2006-2007, and I have yet to meet anyone who says they think the amalgamation of the city of Toronto was a good idea ... Maybe that's a lie. Maybe I've met two people."

The idea did not infuriate everyone. Opponents hiss that the newspaper editorial boards and many other media were in favour. But others, like ex-mayor David Crombie, also saw value in it.

Proponents viewed amalgamation as part of a normal evolution that reduced the Toronto area to 13 municipalities by 1953, six by 1967. Others suggested one big Toronto would provide a citywide equity of services otherwise missing.

The province's position was that huge savings would be exacted. But once the entire Harris plan was unveiled – amalgamation plus a huge download of social services and an end to transit funding – opposition was cemented.

The city talks of Queen's Park owing it $700 million to $1 billion. On the other hand, it got a $1 billion asset in Toronto Hydro, and the province took on $600 million in education costs.

What is irrefutable is that the city was set on a path to fiscal failure. Amalgamation was supposed to deliver three main benefits: savings, greater equity and more clout.

"Savings" were wrung from the system, all right: thousands of jobs cut in the first three years. But that wasn't sustainable. At the same time, more staff were hired for police and transit to cope with growth.

On equity, the megacity has been a big success, spreading the social safety net across the city. York, the poorest of the old municipalities, has benefited most.

But as an experiment in local democracy, merger has been a huge failure. The megacity's continued survival is a testament mainly to the efforts of a great civic workforce. Its creation was too hurried. Too much was heaped on its head.

What now? Do we de-amalgamate, as the school board is now pondering? A few diehards have always harboured such thoughts. But the former mayors and Metro chairs, except Prue, say going back is not an option. Better to have the province fix the fiscal mess by taking back social services costs and giving Toronto some breathing room.

Mayor David Miller has staked his own political survival on the province riding to the rescue.

With a few exceptions, no one on council has started to think about Toronto as a whole. The system discourages that at the best of times, never more so than now. The result has been a sharp drop in civic self-confidence; a growing sense Toronto has entered a downward spiral. The blame extends well beyond city hall, but the low level of debate, divisiveness, bitterness and triviality of council meetings has led to feeling that we're no longer able to deal with the problems we face.

The psychology of amalgamation hasn't created more solidarity between neighbourhoods, but a masochistic, let's-hate-Toronto attitude. But Toronto is us, and we are Toronto. In the decade since amalgamation, we have become our own worst enemy.