Financing policy
How would you finance your Municipal Policies?
All of my Municipal Policies are built within the ~$19 Billion Dollar Toronto Operational Budget. My policy budget proposal would first establish a list of The Top 30 issues we as a city want to spotlight (ex., Cost of Living would be within the Top 10; and then Safety and Economic Opportunity would become the next most immediate focal points).
Once we have our Top 30, I would then prioritize each policy in the order of how much value a solution to that problem would offer us (ex., defining the return on investment for the working class). Adjacent to this, I would then valuate the opportunity cost of not solving the problem (ex., how much money we lose due to the problem continuing as it is).
This prioritized Top 30 Policy List would then have a percentage of our Operational City Budget allocated (ex., 0.25%, 1%, 3%, 5%, 10%, et al). That percentage would correspond to how much of our Toronto City Operational Budget we want to allocate to each policy in dollar figures.
Each policy starts off as a piloted policy in a three wards, and then scales across three layers (ex., 3 wards, 5 wards, 10 wards and then city wide) once pre-defined key performance indicators are achieved.
This scaling framework allows us to spend money in accordance with how much we valuate both the solution to the problem (ex., the return on investment to the working class Policy ABC offers), and the financial and or social opportunity costs of not solving the problem (ex., the money we lose and or plight we endure as a city by not intervening at all).
The secondary benefit of this approach: no policy is over committed to or budgeted. The dollars we assign to the policy correspond to the order of priority in the Policy List and the Valuation we place on each one.
ADDENDUM:
It's worth noting that some policies also introduce revenue generating opportunities (ex., a TTC open until 4am creates more advertisement monetization opportunity, because a TTC that is open longer with more traffic/attention creates more opportunities for ads to convert TTC riders into customers of AB and C businesses those ads correspond to.