Mayor Rob Ford and his on-again-off-again comrade Giorgio Mammoliti added another chapter to their book of discreditable conduct this week with a poorly disguised attempt to change the channel on their own personal problems.

As is their custom, they picked on the defenceless city worker.

Mammoliti obtained a photo of a worker who appears to be nodding off on the job. Without substantiating or explaining the context, he and the mayor held a news conference to condemn the worker as the pervasive, stereotypical slacker of a civil servant, and demand he be fired.

This is a civic embarrassment worthy of a public shaming, if not flogging, they claimed. Torontonians were not aroused. They have grown used to these two rooting around in the muck.

The mayor has a guy in his office, an old friend and football buddy, a person whose job description is so blatantly non-specific as to read “logistics.” Part of Dave Price’s job, apparently, was to seek out the video the appears to show the mayor smoking crack. And he gets paid six figures. Of taxpayers’ money.

Price is no boy scout. Complaints have been filed against him for being abusive to attendants at a GO station. He’s made derogatory comments to a CBC reporter. But ask the mayor about Price and he ducks behind the veil of confidentiality, citing, y’know, “personnel matter, can’t talk about it.” For the average city worker, though, the mayor and his scandalous sidekick afford no such courtesies.

Nobody should cheat the taxpayer out of a full day’s work. Now, if only taxpayers could check on how many times they failed to get a full day’s work out of their mayor, frequently absent from city hall with no accounting for what he is doing and who he is seeing.

If only they could tabulate the thousands they’ve paid to keep Mammoliti on the public dole — and we’re not talking about his six-figure salary.

Mammoliti rarely passes a public trough without stopping for a long draught. For years his office expense budget maxed out at or near the top of list at city hall. And when other councillors tried to rein in such spending, this little piggy was always among the first to squeal.

So addicted is he to spending that Mammoliti once led the charge to investigate then-councillor Ford and Doug Holyday for spending too little of their office budget.

Councillors use their office budget as a re-election slush fund. Mammoliti perfected the scheme. In one mid-January expense claim, his cellphone bill topped $2,300; the next month, $3,617.

Quarterly expense reports exposed Mammoliti’s disregard for taxpayers’ money. One report had him expensing a $660 limo ride, plus the cost of late-night cab rides from downtown to Bolton and Woodbridge, where he neither lives nor works. And one $200 cab fare to an undeclared destination.

When a citizen requested an audit of his 2006 election expenses, he and other councillors fought a staff legal opinion saying the politicians must cover the legal defence out of their own pockets. A court ruling upheld the staff opinion.

After the 2010 election, Mammoliti was again in trouble. An audit found he overspent his election expense budget by 44 per cent, and he is now fighting that in court.

Before Mammoliti came to city hall, he was an MPP, known at the Pink Palace as Hot Wheels because he managed to claim more in travel expenses from his North York riding to Queen’s Park than MPPs who lived across the far reaches of the province.

Columnist Jim Coyle’s 1998 summary needs no addendum:

“Mammoliti would have had to drive pretty nearly 16,000 kilometres to warrant such a claim. That would be about 390 trips to and from work, a world-class performance given that the year has but 365 days and the Legislature sat only 82 of them in 1994-95.

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“Notwithstanding this near constant commuting, Mammoliti also managed to claim in his final year as an MPP $4,769 for travel within his riding. Which, given the normal speed limits of an urban constituency, must have had him at the wheel darn near round the clock.”

Few city workers have cost taxpayers this much. Stick your fingers in your ears when Mammoliti speaks.