Mayor Rob Ford is taking aim at Toronto city councillors who he thinks have been riding the gravy train for too long.

During an executive committee meeting at city hall on Wednesday, Ford questioned the expenses of several councillors who have spent tens of thousands of dollars from their general expense budget to cover personal expenditures such as mobile phones.

The general expense budget, which is available to all city councillors and is separate from their personal office budgets, has no set cap.

The biggest spenders of the fund included councillors John Filion ($79,086), Anthony Peruzza ($51,243) and Giorgio Mammoliti ($44,900).

“To me it’s absolutely off the wall,” Ford told reporters at city hall. “This is what you call the gravy train,” he said.

Coun. Mammoliti defended his spending decisions, telling the executive committee his expenses were all warranted.

“If I want to order a letterhead, if I want to order chairs, they are decisions I make and I take heat for that,” he said.

Ford vowed to ask council to axe the fund altogether.

He also took aim at the travel expenses of some city councillors.

“I’m not going to name names. A councillor went to Vietnam,” Ford said during the meeting.

That councillor was Denzil Minnan-Wong, who said the trip was largely paid for by an outside body.

“It has to be prudent, careful and reasonable – no sixteen dollar glasses of orange juice,” Minnan-Wong told reports on Wednesday.

Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly, fresh from a trip to Taiwan, urged caution against any cutbacks.

“We’re a world class city, living in an international world and you’d want to ignore that reality and curb or restrict travel by councillors puzzles me,” Kelly said.

Ford’s budget battle comes on the same day the executive committee voted against a motion calling for a 12 per cent pay raise for councillors and the mayor.

Instead, the committee voted on a raise in line with inflation, somewhere between 1.5 per cent and 3 per cent.

City council will debate the proposed raise at its meeting scheduled for May 7 and the change would go into effect in January, if approved.

With a report by CTV Toronto’s Natalie Johnson