Selling off assets

Taking Down Words has a posting that mentions how Ontario sold off its tollroad and regretted its actions.

The Toronto Star has an article on how the Toronto Transit Commission plans on selling off assets. Several points caught my eye. The first one is this:

But Councillor Adam Giambrone, the TTC's 29-year-old incoming chair, now wants the sell-off to proceed in earnest. In December, TTC commissioners even formed a special committee to propel the disposal – a committee that will meet for the first time later this month.

"This committee will probably meet monthly," says Giambrone. "The idea of the committee is not just to talk about it, but to drive the process forward, like a working group.

"If you say there's a problem around zoning, this committee needs to work through those issues, tackle them head on and resolve them to the extent they're resolvable, compromise where compromise is needed and just generally push the whole file forward."

How unlike our Governor's thoughtful process of "Gee, I think this sounds like a good idea!" An actual group of government officials who sound like they are willing to work out problems instead of just ordering them done.

The Canadian commission also seems to be thinking and looking ahead:

Public policy has also helped fuel demand. With as many as 150,000 people moving into the Greater Toronto Area each year, both provincial policy and the city's official plan call for intensive residential development around subway stations and major transportation corridors – a way of curtailing urban sprawl.

But while Wong says, "the potential is there" for the TTC's coffers to get a boost, he's not sure the sell-off will amount to anything like the giant windfall some councillors might have in their dreams.

It's not just the peculiarity of some sites, like having to build over top of a subway yard at Davisville station, that makes predicting prices difficult. (The High Park deal involved a land swap.) There's also the need, in many cases, for potential developers to accommodate existing and future TTC operations. The buses, after all, still need to get to the station.

Hmmm, no toll road skirting suburban Toronto to ease congestion? They want to curtail urban sprawl? Can we sent MM and his RV to Canada instead of Japan for his next trip because the next point seems the anti-thesis of MM's governing style:

Nor is raising immediate cash the sole aim for either the TTC or the city, notes Vincent Rodo, the commission's budget chief. "When we're trying to develop these properties, we've got several goals. One is, obviously, proper utilization of a public asset. You want density over subways. We're hoping to get ridership out of it."

There's also elevated property tax revenue for the city in future. But in many cases, a sale would mostly help defray the costs of something the TTC would have to do anyway, such as replacing the original bus terminal at Eglinton station, which had to be closed several years ago after engineers deemed it structurally unsound.

I have ridden on the commuter train into Toronto and it is wonderfully clean and efficient. In short, it had all the appearance of a well run business. All of these points might also want to be considered when we talk about light rail for our area.