Hazel McCallion may still be the mayor of Mississauga, but it’s the end of an era in the city over which she has presided for more than 30 years.

The suburban dream of high lifestyle and low taxes has come crashing to earth. The old model of growth-by-development-charges no longer applies. Although it is unfolding first in Mississauga, the same fate awaits any number of sprawl cities in the GTA and beyond.

While McCallion nattered on this week about Halloween parties, the price of ice time and parking fees, Mississauga’s new reality was making its nasty presence felt.

Perhaps she hoped her performance would create an appearance of fiscal responsibility, but when it came to the hard issues — proposed service cuts, crumbling infrastructure and staff recommendations that would have had a genuine impact on tax hikes — the mayor fell eerily silent.

In the end, though, was the stark truth of a 7.4 per cent city property tax increase (before the regional increase is factored in), something that doesn’t sit well in a jurisdiction that long prided itself on being the next best thing to free.

But as Mississaugans are about to discover, you get what you pay for. And in their case, the money they thought they were saving has come back to bite them in the pocketbook. And if you thought it would have been expensive back then, wait till you see what it costs now.

The truth, of course, is that under McCallion, Mississauga has been mismanaged beyond the point of no return. Bankrolled by decades of barely controlled development, Canada’s sixth-largest city never had to grow up or face the consequences of its heedless rush to suburbanize.

Despite its relative youth — Mississauga was incorporated in 1974 — it has hit middle age with a thud. The city whose main claim to fame was that it had no public debt is now looking for $450 million to stay afloat.

In the meantime, infrastructure is starting to fall apart. Built as cheaply and quickly as possible, it was intended to allow for growth, not accommodate a community. Little wonder, then, that Mississauga’s infrastructure deficit is expected to hit $1.5 billion in the next 20 years.

Even the city’s roads department — that holy of holies — faces cuts. Though traffic numbers are going up drastically, future projects will have to be curtailed by $25 million, and the annual $2.8 million funding gap for road repairs will soar to $8.2 million by 2016.

To make matters worse, Mississauga handed itself over to the car early in the game and let public transit languish. Though plans for an LRT have been bandied about for years, there’s still little to show for all the talk.

But as Mississauga’s commissioner of planning and building, Ed Sajeki, points out, “The key to the transformation of Mississauga is transit.”

Failure to provide sufficient alternatives to the automobile has left Mississauga poorly equipped to make the transition from suburban to urban, a change Sajeki believes is critical.

“Our intention is to create a walkable, livable public realm,” he insists. “This was put into Mississauga’s new official plan.”

However, he quickly adds, “Many of the single-family neighbourhoods where people live won’t change.” Indeed, the main exception is the area around Hurontario and Burnhamthorpe at Square One. Throughout much of the rest of Mississauga, where subdivisions prevail, this won’t be practical.

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In other words, there’s only so much that can be done to keep Mississauga livable and bring it into line with the new priorities of the 21st century. In less than 40 years, its moment has come, and it now seems, gone.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca

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