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Weekend Newsstand: January 17, 2015
January is more than half over! It's a brave new 2015 world and we're almost past the worst month of it. In the news: the TDSB has some hard work to do, the Liberty Village shuttle project is finished, and the many uses of Section 37 funds.
The Toronto District School Board, long a hotspot of municipal dysfunction, is receiving increased attention from on high. Ontario education minister Liz Sandals has given the board 13 changes to make by Feb. 13, and has implied she’s not afraid to come down hard if the board fails to make those changes on time. Since amalgamation in 1998, the TDSB has “spectacularly failed” to form a cohesive unit, according to Sandals. Ward 16 trustee Sheila Cary-Meagher told the CBC that the problem is with financial instability and trustees fearing for their jobs, not with egomaniacal, power-mad people running their section of the city like a “fiefdom.” “The reason they may lose their job is because the money isn’t there,” Cary-Meagher told the CBC. “It’s not about trustees pushing people around.”
Organizers behind the privately funded Liberty Village shuttle bus, which would have better connected neighbourhood residents to the downtown core, have decided not to move forward with their plans for the service. The notice comes after the organizers’ legal counsel advised the shuttle might be in contravention of local transit regulations. They had done a crowdfunding campaign and the permanent service was supposed to start Monday; a pilot project was run in 2014. Money will be returned to those who donated.
At the Toronto Star, Ed Keenan outlines some of the uses of Section 37 funds. Those are the funds developers pay in order to bend zoning rules to get the buildings they want, and they’ve been used for everything from public art to affordable housing.