The Toronto Sun’s Shawn Jeffords got a scoop out of City Council’s budget committee on Tuesday.

Thanks to his careful reporting, we now know exactly how long managers are going to stall when it comes to finding savings in the Police Service’s ballooning billion-dollar budget.

Council was told that nothing in a recent savings report could be implemented in time to save money in 2016. The Toronto Police Service’s Chief Administrative Officer told the Council Committee that he was “looking at maybe three years down the road.”

So there it is, in black and white. After ragging the puck for a year by hiding a $200,000 KPMG savings study, police managers now hope to stall for the remaining three years of Mayor Tory’s term.

Weeks ago, City Hall announced it was forming a panel to do a study of the KPMG study. It’s another pointless delay, but at least the idea was that we’d see savings when that panel reported back at the end of this year. Now, the Police CAO openly rejects that one-year timetable. That’s Mayor Tory’s timetable, remember. And the CAO rejected it in public testimony to a public committee.

Why are savings needed quickly? As I noted in the Sun last year, the police budget has grown twice as fast as inflation, even as violent crime rates kept dropping.

If the Chief delivered just one of the half-dozen bigger changes proposed in the KPMG study, it’d be enough to replace a 1% property tax increase, forever. Whether you’re a fiscal conservative who wants to keep her money or a fiscal liberal who wants more spent on transit service, most of the money you spent in higher city taxes in the last few years went to pay for uncontrolled spending growth in the Police Service instead.

So it shouldn’t take three years to get started. It should take three hours.

Draft a motion directing managers to get on with it, pick a few savings ideas and go. Does it really take three years to change police shifts, to trim excess real estate, to merge redundant administrative divisions, or to find cheaper staff to do the stuff that isn’t real police work? No, no, no and no. Changes like these can deliver savings in months, at most. The only reason the Police Service even has a “Chief Administrative Officer” is because Toronto’s Police have their own payroll service, their own accounting service, their own facilities management service, and so on.

Most other City Hall departments have been asked to find savings in recent years with less time, less hedging and fewer excuses. Surely the men and women running our police service are tough enough and smart enough to find a few million dollars of waste in a billion-dollar budget without the help of yet another study?

The only thing holding them back: we need someone with the political will to tell them to get on with it, today.

- Kelcey is a Toronto-based urban affairs consultant. He previously served as budget adviser to the Mayor of Winnipeg and as a senior political advisor at Queen’s Park.