Item - 2021.BU32.2

The Budget Committee recommends that:

1. City Council receive the report (June 10, 2021) from the Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer for information.

The purpose of this report is to provide City Council with the City of Toronto capital spending for the twelve month period ended December 31, 2020.

As illustrated in Table 1 below, City's 2020 actual capital expenditure was $3.666 billion or 73.2 percent of the 2020 capital budget of $5.006 billion for the period ended December 31, 2020.

- Tax Supported Programs and Agencies reported capital expenditures of $2.503 billion representing 68.8 percent of their collective 2020 approved Capital Budget of $3.638 billion.

- Rate Supported Programs reported capital expenditures of $1.164 billion, representing 85.1 percent of their collective 2020 approved Capital Budget of $1.368 billion.

Table 1 - Capital Variance Summary

* Note: Includes 2019 carry forward funding and 2020 in-year adjustments

While further efforts to improve capital spending continue, divisional and agency improvements in capital planning along with refinements in capital budgeting have resulted in improved capital spend rates in 2020.

- 2020 spending rates on Tax supported (68.8 percent) and Rate supported (85.1 percent) are both greater than the 5 year historical average spend rates of 60.2 percent and 77.5 percent respectively.

- These improvements were achieved in 2020 despite the impact that COVID-19 had on capital delivery.  At the onset of COVID-19, due to the uncertainty of pandemic related financial impacts and the amount of financial assistance to be provided from other levels of government, delivery was slowed for capital projects funded by Capital from Current to enable potential funding offsets to experienced COVID-19 financial impacts.
 

Moving forward, the City will continue to plan annual capital projects in line with both affordability and achievability, based on the historical actual capacity. The strategy is expected to improve capital spend rate in future years; enabling funding capacity otherwise going unspent to be directed to capital priorities.