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As the city struggles to balance its 2021 budget in the face of a worsening pandemic, advisors are struggling with a sharp drop in revenue from one of its major moneymakers: the Toronto Parking Authority (TPA).
The agency was supposed to pour nearly $ 60 million into the city’s coffers this year. But the sharp drop in demand for downtown parking means the amount has plummeted to just $ 4.1 million. And the amount it plans to contribute in 2021? Zero.
Those numbers, however, do not shock the Council. Brad Bradford, representing Ward 19, Beaches-East York and sits on the board of TPA.
“They are astounding, but they are not surprising,” Bradford said. “If … people don’t pay for parking and you do it for several months, it’s no surprise that revenue will drop.
Several October reports from TPA staff – two of which were received by the city general government and the licensing committee on Monday – indicate that the agency lost millions of dollars a month in the early months of the pandemic.
The number of people parking downtown began to increase in the summer, as the first block loosened. But a report warns that “recent evidence has shown a decline in transactions and revenue with the emergence of the second wave of the pandemic.”
A report going to the meeting on Monday shows that revenues from some of the TPA’s off-road lots plunged more than 300% in April, compared to 2019.
Traditionally, the TPA covers its own expenses, so it transfers most of the remaining income to the city. After property taxes, which cover roughly 86 percent of the city’s $ 13.5 billion annual budget, the TPA is the third largest contributor, data shows.
“The key here is not necessarily to look at just what happened in light of a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic, but to look to the future, how we rebuild, how we respond and how we move forward as an agency and as a city,” Bradford told CBC Toronto. .
In 2021, the report warns, the city’s financial picture is even more bleak:
“The net income forecast for 2021 of TPA should be zero”, reads the report of 19 October, “reflecting the hypothesis that the pandemic will continue to have an impact on the entire business year”.
“Absolutely essential”
City initiatives such as CafeTO, ActiveTO and CurbTO, designed to alleviate the impact of the pandemic on local residents and businesses, have chewed on more than 800 paid parking lots while courtyards and cycle paths have taken over preferential lanes. But Bradford said the benefits of these initiatives far outweighed the $ 2.5 million cost of the paid parking removed.
“I think it was absolutely essential to get us through the summer months of the pandemic, in an unprecedented period,” he said.
With the city already facing a $ 1.8 billion deficit in its 2021 budget calculations, Bradford said he and other advisers will look for ways to make up for the gap created by falling parking demand.
“We have to fill in those holes,” he said. “We have to think about service levels. We have to think about income tools. We have to work with the provincial and federal government to fill that gap.”
But he said the average person probably won’t notice a difference in the level of service provided by the Toronto Parking Authority.
However, next year drivers may need to search more carefully for places to park – one of the reports suggests that paid parking spaces lost due to the accelerated expansion of ActiveTO’s cycle path could be replaced by converting free spaces to a now in paid parking lots.
“TPA has identified approximately 1,660 potential paid parking spaces that fall into this category,” the report reads.
A bright spot during the pandemic was the Toronto BikeShare program run by TPA.
Motoring continued to rise this year, Bradford said, as people sought alternative ways of getting around the city.
“It was a godsend during the pandemic,” he said. “We have historical numbers of bikers and people are leaving.”
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