Mayor Rob Ford may be on a collision course with the people who guard the city’s purse strings.

The mayor seems ready to start dismantling the lucrative land transfer tax and fulfill one of the planks in his election mandate of 2010.

First, Ford will have to navigate a city council that is skeptical of the move. Next, he must expect a mano-a-mano fight with finance staff, who have carefully insulated the issue from Ford’s hatchet since they heard him talk about ending the tax during his election campaign.

The tax is a huge boon to city coffers, yielding $1.26 billion since it was implemented under former mayor David Miller in February 2008.

The tax is one of the most jealously guarded elements of budget-making at city hall. Even before Ford took office, finance staff and the city manager were plotting how to protect it from Ford’s clutches.

The mayor got elected promising only a few things. He’d improve customer service, cut the size of government, end the war on the car, and cut spending.

Ford saw the vehicle registration tax as a war on the car. He sees the land transfer tax as unfair and unnecessary. Staff disagree with him on both, but they offered up the vehicle tax as the sacrificial lamb. Meanwhile, every budget presentation lists the land transfer tax as inviolable — an essential revenue source as Toronto marches towards fiscal sustainability.

Without the tax, Toronto would have continued to struggle with balancing its budget, finance staff claim. They opposed ending the vehicle registration tax of $60 per vehicle, but that was so politically toxic that staff gave up on saving it. Besides, it’s small potatoes compared with the land tax, which will yield upwards of $350 million this year.

City council immediately abolished the car tax as one of the first acts under Ford. But council is more reluctant to touch the land tax.

City manager Joe Pennachetti is too savvy to say, for attribution, that he will fight the mayor on this. But read between the lines of his comments.

He hasn’t received any budget directions from the mayor so he can’t comment, Pennachetti said yesterday, except to say this:

“Any direction from mayor or council to reduce the land transfer tax by 10 per cent would be a challenge if council wants to keep property tax increases at 2 per cent and maintain city services,” he said.

So, yes, theoretically, it can be done for one year. All staff has to do is make up a few numbers, like how much they expect to get in investment income or the price of oil or how many riders will take the TTC, and you can generate $34 million — the equivalent of a 10 per cent cut in the land transfer tax.

Of course, what terrifies Pennachetti is that Ford’s stated intent is to abolish the entire tax. He’s only starting at 10 per cent to make it palatable to city council.

The goal is to cut 10 per cent for the 2014 budget, go back to the electorate in October 2014 with a promise to abolish the rest of the tax — if you only send me tax-averse councillors at city hall — and the rest of the tax is history.

Who doesn’t want to abolish taxes?

It is the same gambit that got Ford elected. The reprise comes in 2014 and the first few bars of the same old song are being played now, as city staff begin to turn attention to the 2014 budget.

As it stands, new budget chief Frank Di Giorgio will have to find some $200 million just to cover the cost of inflation. It would be worse if not for user fee hikes, a TTC fare increase, a property tax jump and a great year for investment income. Why make the hole $34 million deeper?

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This is the most pernicious of the mayor’s election campaign claims. And it is the one likely to generate the most heat among councillors, because they know what it means — lower service levels, disguised as “less government” and the end of waste.

The coming debate will bring into focus one ongoing issue: The mayor’s mandate — is it sacrosanct or disposable? More on that later.