I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we media opinionators love us a government expense scandal.

Forget scandal ; virtually any news about public dollars that doesn’t demonstrate poverty-level parsimony will do for a talking point.

The response to such stimuli in the species Newsmedius Commentarius happens in the reptilian core of the brain — it doesn’t need to pass through the reason centres, it’s as automatic as the physical fight-or-flight impulse you feel when you realize a spider has crawled onto your nose. The commentator’s body instinctively reacts by simultaneously typing and shouting: “Spent how much? On what? TAXPAYER DOLLARS! Pigs at the trough.”

Some policians and readers appreciate the instinct. But it seems to me this response has evolved without including the capacity to make a pretty important distinction.

For example, during discussion this week about the cost of improvements to Queens Quay carried out by Waterfront Toronto , some poked around at the price of the granite sidewalks. There’s the Toronto Sun headline: “$11.9 million granite costs for Queens Quay defended.”

We know granite. Those are the countertops you install when you want to pump up the price of your house. Luxury material. Fancy. A columnist feels the reptilian brain perking up, in much the same way as when Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong and former mayor Rob Ford started talking about the $12,000 umbrellas Waterfront Toronto installed while building Sugar Beach.

You can feel the blood pumping. This must be in the same category of news as politicians throwing themselves $12,000 retirement parties and expensing cappuccino makers for their office, right? The column starts to write itself: Don’t these arrogant folks spending other people’s money get it?

But wait. There’s an important distinction between granite sidewalks and an expense-account overpriced glass of orange juice. The fancy sidewalks are being bought for us . For the benefit and enjoyment of the people of Toronto. And that is — dare I say it? There’s a tingling in my brain as I type — a good thing.

In so many cases where expenses are legitimately enraging, the trouble lies with whom public money is being spent to benefit. An expensive car to drive a politician around or a first-class trip overseas represent more public money than necessary spent on the comfort of those public servants responsible for spending it . A magnificent piece of infrastructure put in place to last a generation or more is public money is spent to improve the city .

That’s what public money should be spent on, and more often we ought to insist public servants spend the dollars necessary to do the job right.

Eighty years ago, R.C. Harris spared no expense in outfitting a water treatment plant — a water treatment plant! — like a palace, with brass fixtures and marble floors and bas-relief frescoes lit by domed skylights. Earlier in his career, building the Bloor viaduct, he insisted on spending extra money on a picturesque steel-arch design with a subway tunnel roughed into it, despite an outcry about his extravagance. Both projects stand as beloved (and still essentially useful) landmarks in Toronto almost a century later.

In Yorkville in the 1990s, park designers paid to ship in a 650-tonne hunk of granite from the Canadian Shield over objections about the price, and it is a defining, delightful element of that neighbourhood today. Even facing material shortages during the First World War, those building Union Station went to great lengths to ensure the great hall in that building would be an awe-inspiring place, and it remains so today. The building of Toronto’s City Hall in the 1960s reportedly went more than 20 per cent over budget, but its architecture redefined the image of the city.

Spending well — not extravagantly, per se, but magnificently — on public places like these, and on things like parks and sidewalks, sets an enduring tone that spurs the private developments around it. They create wealth by making a place where businesses can set up shop and people want to live or visit. And great spaces improve the lives of everyone who interacts with them, all the people who work and live nearby or visit the neighbourhood, every day over the course of lifetimes. Building those places is no time to cheap out.

Asked about those granite sidewalks, Waterfront Toronto’s chair, Mark Wilson, said, “You get to do your waterfront once a century if you’re lucky. You do it right.”

He’s right. In fact, a key reason to be outraged by legitimate spending scandals is that they take public money away from the things it should be spent on — things with broad public benefits like amazing parks and infrastructure that will last generations. That we, and our governments, don’t instinctively understand that by now is something actually worth getting outraged about.

Correction -January 14, 2015: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant was built more than a 100 years ago. As well, the article mistakenly said the Yorkville park was constructed in the 1980's and that the building of Toronto's city hall reportedly went 30 per cent over budget.



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Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca . Follow: @thekeenanwire

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