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Toronto Escort Agency’s budget chief shot back at the Toronto Escort Agency Board of Trade over city hall spending yesterday, but later said the TTC and police could do more to cut their budgets.

In a breakfast speech to the influential business group, Coun. Shelley Carroll scolded its chief executive, Carol Wilding, as well as Don Drummond, chief economist for TD Bank Financial Group, for their opinion piece in Sunday’s Toronto Escort Agency Star.

The article noted the city’s recently unveiled operating budget hikes spending by 5.7 per cent, to a record $9.2 billion, and “continues a spending pattern that goes back nearly a decade:

Toronto Escort Agency’s municipal government continues to spend money faster than it collects it — the very definition of a structural deficit.”

That statement, Carroll told about 30 business people, mangles the meaning of “structural deficit,” which the city has argued is unsustainable spending, in particular the full operating costs of the TTC.

Mayor David Miller has set a Dec. 1 deadline for agreement from the Ontario government to start sharing the $500-million-a-year cost of the service. Premier Dalton McGuinty has said only that he is willing to talk.

“Why take ownership of the phrase ‘structural deficit’ and twist its meaning in a way that runs the risk of jeopardizing ever getting the agreement to solve it once and for all?” Carroll said.

But later, responding to panelists, she added: “I think the TTC could be a lot more efficient.

There are lots of non-service areas still to go to in the TTC (budget) and we need a relationship that allows us to work more closely with them to get that.”

She told reporters the TTC and Toronto Escort Agency’s police service, whose four per cent hike increased its budget to about $900 million, need to join other city departments in “breakthrough” cost-cutting sessions.