Politicians promise to eliminate waste, lower taxes and improve services. But Richmond Hill’s biggest financial problem may not be hiding in City Hall. It may be buried beneath our streets.
By Saeed Vahid | Commentary
There is apparently a magical gravy train running through Richmond Hill.
It’s loaded with wasteful spending, unnecessary bureaucrats, questionable contracts and, perhaps, a few politicians helping themselves to the buffet.
Stop that train, we’re told, and wonderful things will happen.
Property taxes will fall. Services will improve. Potholes will disappear. Perhaps we’ll even have enough money left for a few more pickleball courts.
Rainbows and unicorns, all courtesy of better management at City Hall.
Sound familiar?
In 2010, Rob Ford rode precisely that train all the way to Toronto City Hall. His famous campaign slogan, “Stop the gravy train!”, was a political masterstroke.
The message was wonderfully simple: Toronto didn’t have a revenue problem. It had a spending problem. Get rid of the waste, cut taxes, protect services. Everybody wins!
And then Ford became mayor.
His administration commissioned consultants to examine municipal services and identify all that supposedly abundant gravy.
The inconvenient discovery? Approximately 90 per cent of Toronto’s municipal services were classified as core services. (Toronto Core Service Review, 2011)
The search for savings soon involved proposals affecting libraries, childcare, transit and other services residents actually depended on.
Apparently, not everything politicians call gravy is gravy.
But the train wasn’t finished.
In 2018, Rob’s brother Doug arrived at Queen’s Park promising approximately $6 billion in government efficiencies, without laying off workers. (2018 election coverage)
Cut the waste! Save taxpayers’ money! Make government work!
Yet years into his premiership, Ontario’s Auditor General reported record government advertising spending of $111.9 million in 2024–25, raising concerns about the partisan character of some campaigns. (Ontario Auditor General, 2025)
To be fair, both Ford administrations made spending changes and identified some savings. But governing proved rather more complicated than campaigning.
The gravy train, it seems, is much easier to spot when you’re standing outside government than when you’re responsible for running it.
And now, as Richmond Hill approaches another municipal election, the same familiar melody is playing again.
Cut waste. Eliminate excess. Lower property taxes.
But what if the biggest financial problem isn’t how City Hall spends its money, but how we’ve built a city that requires so much money to maintain?
Yes, waste matters. But so does arithmetic.
Let’s be clear: governments should be held accountable for every dollar they spend.
If Richmond Hill can save money by eliminating an unnecessary printed newsletter, it should. If procurement rules can be tightened to get better deals from contractors, absolutely. If programs aren’t delivering results, review them. If there’s evidence of misconduct, investigate it.
But there’s a difference between demanding efficiency and pretending that inefficiency explains all our financial problems.
A few thousand dollars saved here, or even substantially larger savings from better contracts, would be welcome.
Yet you cannot cancel enough newsletters to replace a failing sewer system.
And that brings us to the much bigger problem.
The financial problem we built for ourselves
Richmond Hill manages approximately $13.8 billion worth of infrastructure assets: roads, sidewalks, watermains, sewers, parks, public facilities and more. (Richmond Hill asset management information)
That number isn’t debt. It represents physical assets the City is responsible for maintaining.
And every one of those assets has a lifecycle.
Roads need resurfacing and eventual reconstruction. Underground pipes must be replaced. Public buildings deteriorate. Even those popular pickleball courts come with maintenance and renewal costs.
Some bills arrive every year. Others don’t appear for decades.
A new subdivision looks wonderful on opening day. The roads are smooth, the pipes are new and the houses are selling.
But what happens 30 or 40 years later?
Who pays to reconstruct the streets, replace the aging pipes and renew everything residents have come to depend on?
That responsibility often falls to the public.
If the property taxes and other revenues generated by a development cannot cover its long-term costs, we’ve created a financial problem for future residents.
This is at the heart of what Strong Towns calls the Growth Ponzi Scheme: a development model in which short-term financial benefits can conceal long-term infrastructure liabilities.
The hidden price tag of growth
Richmond Hill needs more housing. But not all new housing has the same financial consequences.
Consider two scenarios.
In the first, several new homes are added along an existing serviced street. They share roads, pipes and other infrastructure already in place, although some upgrades may be necessary.
In the second, the same number of homes is spread across a newly developed area, requiring additional roads, sewers, drainage facilities and other infrastructure.
Both create housing. Both generate property taxes.
But their infrastructure costs per home—and their long-term financial consequences—can be very different.
Now consider our enthusiasm for reducing or eliminating development charges (DCs).
Lower charges could help small local builders add homes to existing neighbourhoods, where modest projects often face significant financial barriers.
But across-the-board reductions also benefit large developers building extensive subdivisions with substantial new infrastructure requirements.
Large developers naturally seek to reduce costs and maximize returns. That’s their job.
The City’s job is to ensure that private development doesn’t leave the public with obligations it cannot afford.
In June 2026, Richmond Hill Council considered a three-year, 50 per cent reduction in residential development charges as part of a federal-provincial infrastructure funding program.
The objective is understandable: encourage housing construction and help finance growth-related infrastructure.
But there’s a question missing from many celebratory announcements:
After the new infrastructure is built, will the revenue generated by that development cover its lifetime costs?
A grant can help pay for construction. Development charges can help finance growth-related capital costs. Neither automatically guarantees that future maintenance and replacement will be affordable.
And if developers also seek to shift the cost of necessary infrastructure upgrades onto taxpayers, the public deserves to know who benefits and who ultimately pays.
Not every subdivision necessarily loses money, and not every infill development is financially productive.
We should calculate the costs and revenues, make those calculations public, and favour development that strengthens the City’s long-term finances.
But developers aren’t the only ones with incentives to keep building. Our political culture has its own addiction to new projects. We reward politicians for what they add to the city, rarely for what they preserve—or wisely decide not to build.
More ribbon cuttings don’t make a stronger city
There’s another gravy train we rarely question: the political competition to build something new.
A new park. A new recreation centre. Another road expansion. Another shiny facility bearing a commemorative plaque.
Each comes with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, photographs, speeches and an opportunity for elected officials to add another accomplishment to their political résumés.
And, of course, another asset for taxpayers to maintain, operate and eventually replace.
This is not to suggest that Richmond Hill doesn’t need new public facilities or investments. Some are necessary, and some will make our city substantially better.
But why do we so often measure political achievement by what gets built rather than by what gets maintained?
Imagine a councillor finishing a four-year term without having championed a single grand new project.
Instead, the streets in their ward are in better condition. Sidewalks have been repaired. Parks are clean and well maintained. Aging infrastructure has been renewed before it fails. Existing facilities are used more effectively. And the City’s long-term financial obligations are more manageable than they were four years earlier.
Would that councillor have accomplished nothing?
I’d argue quite the opposite.
Keeping a city in excellent condition is an achievement in itself. Preventing a financial problem is just as valuable as solving one—and often far less expensive.
The difficulty is that preventive maintenance rarely makes headlines.
Nobody organizes a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a sewer that didn’t collapse.
And no politician gets much applause for an unnecessary project they wisely decided not to build.
Perhaps we need to change our definition of political success.
Instead of asking councillors, “What new things did you bring to Richmond Hill?” we might ask:
“What have you done to make sure Richmond Hill can afford to maintain everything it already has?”
That doesn’t mean standing still. It means improving our neighbourhoods incrementally, making better use of existing infrastructure, and refusing to treat construction itself as evidence of progress.
Because a city doesn’t become stronger simply by accumulating more things.
It becomes stronger when it can afford to take care of them.
The future nobody wants to discuss: municipal triage
Richmond Hill reports that most of its infrastructure assets are in good or very good condition. That’s encouraging.
But the condition of our infrastructure today is not the same as its financial sustainability tomorrow.
What happens if a city keeps expanding its obligations faster than its capacity to pay for them?
Maintenance gets postponed. Reconstruction projects are delayed. Services are reduced. Taxes or user fees rise. Aging infrastructure deteriorates faster than it can be renewed.
Eventually, the question stops being How do we maintain everything?
It becomes What can we afford to maintain, and what will we have to let deteriorate?
That is municipal triage.
It isn’t an inevitable prediction for Richmond Hill. It’s the future we risk if we keep making long-term commitments without adequately accounting for their costs.
And no amount of hunting for minor administrative waste can make those obligations disappear.
Follow the money—and the pavement
In this municipal election, candidates promising to cut waste deserve to be asked for specifics.
Which spending? How much will be saved? Will services suffer?
But candidates promising new facilities, lower development charges, more roads and frozen property taxes deserve equally tough questions.
What is the lifetime cost? Who pays for maintenance? Where will the money for eventual replacement come from?
And could we accommodate more housing and economic activity while making better use of the infrastructure we’ve already paid for?
This isn’t an argument against growth. It’s an argument for financially productive growth.
We need more housing, more opportunities for small builders, and more productive use of our existing neighbourhoods and commercial corridors.
We also need effective procurement, responsible spending and accountable government.
Those goals aren’t in conflict.
The mythical gravy train offers an entertaining election story, with a simple villain and an equally simple solution.
But Richmond Hill’s financial future depends less on finding a few embarrassing expenses at City Hall than on the infrastructure decisions we make today.
The biggest financial mistakes may not be hidden in City Hall’s expense reports. They may be poured in concrete, buried underground and spread across kilometres of pavement.
And the bill is coming whether we believe in the gravy train or not.
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