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What’s On City Council’s Agenda: July, 2011
In which we highlight key items from the month’s city council meeting—which you can also watch live.
Photo by Michael Chrisman/Torontoist.
City council is meeting today (July 12) and tomorrow (July 13). Here are a few items from this month’s agenda that have been in the news, or should have been.
City council will weigh whether or not to:
Remove bike lanes on Pharmacy Avenue, Birchmount Road, and Jarvis Street
The big fight will be over the Jarvis Street lanes, whose removal was sneakily added to an omnibus bikeway package with a last-minute amendment. Even the best political oddsmakers can’t say which way the vote will go (though we’d say the odds are that they will, in the end, be removed). We shall see.
Start the process of building those long-promised protected bike lanes and off-road bike trails
Denzil Minnan-Wong’s plan to bring protected bike lanes to a (very) few downtown streets will hit its next approvals hurdle at this week’s council meeting. If everything is adopted as written, it would mean protected lanes on the Bloor Viaduct by the end of this year, and staff-led studies of other protected lane sites for 2012. Staff would also report on the feasibility of implementing Rob Ford’s campaign promise to build 100 kilometres of off-road bike trails, in hydro corridors and so forth.
Help homeowners deal with the coming ashpocalypse
The emerald ash borer, a type of small, highly destructive invasive insect, will likely have eaten its way through most of Toronto’s ash trees by 2017, according to City staff. If this member motion gets the two-thirds vote it needs in order to make the floor, council will decide whether or not to ask staff to find ways of helping homeowners find good arborists to treat or remove ash trees on their property. (The City will be taking care of trees on public property at its own expense.)
End its third-party capital loan guarantee program
In the past, the City has provided loan guarantees to nonprofits who do things that benefit the public. This helps those nonprofits get more favourable rates from banks. Bixi benefitted from the program, as did the Evergreen Brickworks, as did Artscape, and so on. But after a recipient of one of those guarantees threatened to default on their loan, leaving the City on the hook, Executive Committee voted to put an end to the practice. Council will have final say.
Ask the province for transit subsidies it will never, ever give to us
If this member motion by Councillor Raymond Cho (Ward 41, Scarborough-Rouge River) gets its two-thirds vote, council will decide whether to call on all three provincial political parties to restore funding for public transit that was eliminated in the late ’90s by the Mike Harris government. Probably not going to happen! (So far only the NDP has signed on.) The question is: would it hurt to ask?
Move closer to building a pedestrian tunnel to the Island airport
The City is dead serious about building a pedestrian tunnel linking Billy Bishop Airport to the rest of the city, and this proposal to hammer out the real estate arrangements with the Toronto Port Authority is proof. Council will decide whether or not to proceed.
Arrange a happy ending for the Maclean House
The Maclean House, near Casa Loma, was originally the residence of John Maclean, founder of a publishing empire that included the magazine we now know as Macleans. After he died, in 1950, the house was split up into apartments. Earlier this year, a developer applied to city council for permission to demolish the property, but was denied on heritage-preservation grounds. The building has since changed hands, and council will decide whether to let the new owner develop the site, as long as its heritage attributes are respected in the process.
Fix the flawed design of those “InfoToGo” pillars
Those InfoToGo pillars on downtown streets were implemented as part of the City’s street furniture deal with Astral Media—the same company that brought you shitty garbage cans with defective foot pedals. The info pillars themselves have had their share of problems: they’re hard to maintain, and their touch screens are rapidly becoming obsolete, now that everybody is getting iPhones. Council will decide whether to let Astral scale back the features a little.
Approve a new graffiti plan that sounds suspiciously like the old graffiti plan
The City’s new graffiti plan is really disappointing! Council will weigh whether or not to approve it.
Admit that it can’t serve 50 per cent local food in City facilities
In December 2010, the City received a grant to help them look into ways of putting more locally sourced food on menus at City facilities. They spent some of the money on a consultant, whose results will be presented for council’s approval this week. The report says that achieving the initial goal of 50 per cent local food purchasing is unrealistic, and that the City will need to take smaller steps before it can get there.
Limit the sales of dogs and cats in pet stores
A deferral from last month’s agenda, this item would impose restrictions on the sales of dogs and cats in pet stores.