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New development is essential to supporting a growing city but it also leads to added costs for municipal governments. New housing developments often require new or expanded infrastructure, including roads, sewers, and water treatment plants. There is ongoing debate on how cities should pay for this growth-related capital. Some argue that user fees and property tax revenues are sufficient to cover these costs, and that development charges on developers will likely result in increased housing prices.
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Municipalities across the GTHA face many shared challenges. Ahead of last year’s municipal elections, the Institute on Municipal Governance and Finance (IMFG) published a series of essays from some of the GTHA’s most respected leaders offering bold ideas to push the region forward on key issues. In this video, four of these leaders discuss their bold ideas.
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Whether institutional constraints are desirable is a debate that may alternatively be framed as one over the merits of local government autonomy. This paper contributes to this debate by empirically analysing the effects of local government autonomy on several outcomes, including the size of government, the ownsource revenue mix, and fiscal sustainability.
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Transit presents unique challenges for metropolitan regions. In tightly connected metropolitan regions several questions arise: who should make transit decisions? Who should run the system? Who should pay for it? On February 21, Michael Schabas explored how different cities and regions around the world have addressed these questions.
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Transit presents unique challenges for metropolitan regions. These varied demands raise important governance questions in tightly connected metropolitan regions: who should make transit decisions? Who should run the system? Who should pay for it? In this video, Michael Schabas, Patricia Wood, and Joe Berridge explore how different cities and regions around the world have confronted these questions.
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Chris Murray, Toronto’s City Manager, is a former planner who thinks of the future in terms of decades, not years. In this video of his address, Toronto’s Future: Who’s Paying?, he discusses the “elephant in the room” when it comes to municipal government: what kind of city are we leaving behind for future generations?
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Ontario’s Development Charges Act (DCA) provides the legal framework within which municipalities recover growth-related capital costs from the new development giving rise to such costs. While the purpose of the DCA is to ensure that growth pays for itself, the way the DCA is designed prevents it from achieving its obvious goal.
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On January 14, 2019, Matti Siemiatycki and Yoko Cecelia Pye presented new research on the diversity of the infrastructure sector, discussed how women and racial minorities are underrepresented in leadership positions in the industry, and shared strategies to overcome this diversity gap.
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