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I'm not sure whether it says more about councillors or the rest of us, but facts are facts: the one consistent moral yardstick we've applied to politicians in amalgamated Toronto these past 10 years has had more to do with stamps and dinners out than it has the actual application of public policy.

Never mind how councillors manage the city's multi-billion dollar budget: the way each one of 44 spends their $53,100 discretionary office budget has been the measure we use to make heroes and villains of them.

Ward 2 (Etobicoke North) Councillor Rob Ford would not have half the penny-pinching profile he enjoys if he hadn't hit the ground in 2000 spending just $2 of that office budget. Ward 7 (York West) Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti would have a different profile as well, had he not spent considerably more than $2 on everything from long-distance cab fares to sports memorabilia - then set in motion a push to force Ford to spend more of his budget. And there you have it. Ford - tax-saving hero. Mammoliti - tax-spending villain.

The white-hat, black-hat approach to assessing municipal politicians' worth has long been a source of irritation and embarrassment to most of Toronto Council. When they meet later this month, those councillors will be making a belated attempt to put the issue to rest when they debate and quite possibly approve a detailed set of rules for how that office budget gets spent.

The rules are good ones.

Councillors who want to expense a lot of boozy dinners out won't be able to spend more than $500 a year on those meals, and buy their booze out of pocket. Would-be ward-bosses who curry favour with community organizations and sports teams through sponsorships will be out of luck. Cab fares between a councillor's house and city hall are off the table, as are legal bills incurred by councillors trying to undermine city positions. And all of a councillor's expense reports will be posted, in detail, on the city's website for all to see.

Councillors on Toronto's executive committee knew exactly how delicate that work is when they sent those rules on to council without any significant modification.

There were some close votes on amendments - Ward 44 (Scarborough East) Councillor Ron Moeser wanted to be able to sponsor some sports teams; Ward 28 (Toronto Centre-Rosedale) Councillor Pam McConnell wanted to expense $1,200 worth of meals a year - but the only one that actually passed was one by Ward 15 (Eglinton-Lawrence) Councillor Howard Moscoe, requiring that travel expenses be reimbursed by the city within 10 days.

If council as a whole can avoid the temptation to support those modifications or adding any other perks to the stew, they'll paradoxically have done themselves a great favour. One of the reasons the rest of us like the office budget metric so much is that it's one of the few areas where councillors' conduct has been unbound by any consistent, external rules.

When councillors asked for rope, city staff obligingly gave them enough to hang themselves.

The rules, if applied as-is and followed scrupulously, won't put an end to that entirely - councillors still have their $53,100 office budgets to spend, and there will always be those who spend more and who spend less, and plenty of resentful constituents for whom $53,100 is still a lot of money.

But for most of us, the office budget will get a lot less interesting, than that other often-neglected measure of a councillor's worth: namely, their voting record.