The first issue of Our Toronto -- Mayor David Miller's self-championing pseudo-newspaper -- landed on the doorsteps of Torontonians last week. While reading it, I was appalled, and I couldn’t help but question what he has actually done for the city. 

Miller reached the halfway point of his second term last week and after five years in office, what does he have to show for it?

Besides a 24-page newsletter, he doesn’t have much to gloat about.

“Miller's problem is not inactivity or laziness; rather, he has trouble closing the deal on major projects. And when that happens repeatedly – the 311-call system, food carts, renovating Union Station and Nathan Phillips Square – voters conclude the leader isn't delivering,” wrote Royson James, the Toronto Star municipal affairs columnist.

I agree with him. I don’t think Miller is foolish or apathetic. He’s just not playing his cards right and many city projects are falling through the cracks.

The street food project is one example. Although the project -- dubbed Toronto a la cart -- has a promising new report that will hit city council in early December, it is an issue that has been swinging back and forth in city hall for quite some time, according to city councillor John Filion, its chief engineer. The initial proposal called for the city to spend $700,000 on 35 carts; but the idea was touted by Miller and, since then, has dropped off the radar.

Then there’s Union Station, which Miller proposed to revamp with the addition of restaurants and stores. In 1998, Mayor Mel Lastman took a tour of the TTC platforms and Miller vowed they would be widened. However, 10 years later, they remain untouched.

Finally, Miller’s transit city plan – a revolutionary project for light-rail transit as described on pages four and five of Our Toronto – is yet another one of Miller’s unfinished projects. April Lindgren, a Ryerson journalism professor and former Queen’s Park Correspondent, describes the plan as “just big-time dreaming.” “There’s no cash to make it happen,” she said.

Maybe that’s because he wastes more than $800,000 on a newsletter that no one will read.

The list of failed projects goes on. It’s these kinds of transformative projects that Miller has failed to execute. Instead of getting results, Miller's team of city councillors spends their time bickering over coffee cup lids.

And to try to boost his image, he creates a newsletter that will hit the trash can before anything else.

“People want to see results,” Lindgren said. “[Our Toronto] is just a way of filling up the blue box.

But hey, at least it’s an environmentally friendly newspaper, as Miller says.