At least $200 million of Rob Ford’s claimed $1 billion in “savings,” and possibly more than $500 million, is not made up of actual spending cuts, the city’s top bureaucrat says.

The $1 billion boast is central to the embattled mayor’s fiscally focused campaign message. But it is dubious: a line-by-line Star analysis shows that about half of Ford’s claimed $606 million in “efficiencies” is made up of reductions to services, phantom “savings” that were not savings at all, and various measures that did not make the city any more efficient.

On Monday, City Manager Joe Pennachetti said “at least half” of the Ford-claimed efficiencies are indeed “expenditure reductions and true cost savings.” Much of the rest, he acknowledged, might be composed of changes other than spending reductions.

“We still call it ‘budget savings’; we’re not going to back off of that, but you might argue, and I can understand the logic, that it’s not an expenditure reduction. I get that,” Pennachetti told reporters at city hall.

The Star analysis found numerous non-reductions among the $606 million. In 2013, for example, the police force originally proposed a budget $21 million higher than the city’s target, then was forced to trim its proposal to meet the target. The $21 million adjustment was included in the $606 million.

The $606 million also counted $36 million the city saved because interest rates are low, more than $25 million from cases where the city paid costs from reserves rather than from the current year’s property tax haul, and $69 million from “base budget reductions” in which the city simply adjusted a department’s budget to better reflect actual spending in the previous year.

Next to the $606 million in “efficiencies,” the second-biggest chunk of the $1 billion is the estimated $200 million Ford says he “saved” by eliminating the vehicle registration tax.

Pennachetti said Ford is looking at “savings” from the perspective of taxpayers. Therefore, he said, the mayor can reasonably count the $200 million: he kept that money in the hands of car owners by keeping it out of government coffers.

But Pennachetti also conceded the obvious: the $200 million cannot be counted as a “budget saving” to a government that will not collect it.

“There’s two pieces: there’s budget savings, and then there are monies that are now back in the pockets of taxpayers worth $200 million,” Pennachetti said in an interview. “One’s a property tax budget savings, and the other one is freeing up money for the taxpayer.”

The mayor himself has never drawn a distinction between the $200 million from the vehicle tax and the other “savings.” At a Monday meeting of the budget committee, his brother, Councillor Doug Ford, separated the two groups for the first time.

Pennachetti said the city has found $155 million in new “budget savings” for 2014, bringing the claimed total from $606 million to $761 million during the Ford administration.

“Can you confirm once and for all,” Doug Ford said to Pennachetti, “that this administration under your great leadership and the mayor’s, has saved the taxpayers $800-million-plus, and — I know you don’t like including it — plus the $240 million car registration tax, which equals $1.04 billion? Once and for all, tell the media back there that twists the stories, that we have saved over $800 million plus the $240 million.”

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Pennachetti declined the opportunity to publicly endorse the $1 billion figure.

“I agree with your comment that the $200 million for the VRT (vehicle registration tax) is really something separate, but yes, the savings are around $800 million,” he said.