Today: a (hopefully) very short Toronto City Council meeting—Community Council stuff and a couple extras! Will do my best to follow along.
Discussion
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Currently Cllr Michael Thompson is giving a somewhat stilted speech about famous Black Canadians for #BlackHistoryMonth #BHM. Gives a shout-out to downtown bookstore A Different Booklist and associated Blackhurst Cultural Centre (which moved to its current location 9 years ago today). Also recounts the recent success of the Jamaican-Canadian Association's Hurricane Melissa relief fund (supported by the City), which has raised almost $700,000, and the donation portal will be closing in about a month.
Cllr Bravo announces she has brought pastries from Progress Bakery and says the clerks are also welcome to help themselves.
Note that you can track the progress of the meeting and the current item in the Meeting Monitor. Warning for my fellow vertigo-afflicted: it automatically scrolls and you have to turn the scrolling off with a toggle near the top right.
Finally got done with finishing the Order Paper (figuring out which items will be automatically passed and which ones debated). I'm going to make tea
Just heard Cllr Chernos Lin mention "permeable pavers" and my ears perked up. bitches love stormwater management (i'm bitches)
No context: "...when the [Scarborough] subway opens in the 2030s..."
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Current item: visitor parking requirements for new developments.
Cllr Cheng is concerned about the future availability of enough visitor parking near areas provincially designated as transit hubs. Gripping stuff
Cllr Pasternak is also concerned about visitor parking. I would like to remind the audience that this is specifically about areas that are immediately near public transit.
(This is important to him, and other councillors, because it's an old people issue. Old people vote in high numbers and often own property, hence why they're worth extra consideration. Many councillors are themselves old as shit and presumably there is also some level of [acceptable] self-interest or ability to relate to old people issues.)
Cllr Saxe argues that people with disabilities are not being sufficiently accommodated by parking limits, suggests limits on parking conflict with AODA. I will charitably assume her concerns are genuine
Cllr Perks obliquely argues via questions to staff that the study allows for loading areas to be used for passenger drop-offs as well as deliveries, and could take the place of some visitor parking.
City Solicitor(?) replies to Saxe's argument and says the AODA does not require parking be provided, only that if parking is constructed, (some of) it must be accessible.
Cllr Cheng argues that visitor parking is a loneliness epidemic issue.
Cllr Colle is in full on "come on Zeyde, let's get you to bed" rambling mode.
I have to admit, I cannot relate to these people whose friends won't visit them for lack of parking or (as Cllr Saxe says) live in the same place for 30 or 40 years.
edit: I have a friend who lives abroad but stays with her parents in the suburbs when she's in town. We meet up downtown. Like?? She takes the bus???
"A thing that some of you might not know, because you don't come to all the planning meetings," begins Cllr Perks. I came here to have a good time and honestly I'm feeling so attacked right now
(He argues that the province's drive to upzone employment [industrial] areas to mixed-use/residential is simply about making the developers and land-owners richer: "turning the City of Toronto into a machine to generate money, not a place to live.")
With 15 minutes to lunch we're on to Scarborough Centre development.
edit: oh never mind, Cllr Thompson just had an amendment that passed easily and the item as amended breezes by. CAN WE GO FOR LUNCH EARLY
Lunchtime! Back at 2 p. m. Maybe I'll leave the house??
I stopped at the pet store to look at kittens on the way back from an errand and straight up missed the entire other special meeting, whoops
Back to previous meeting. Cllr Fletcher has a motion on the item related to the 1631 Queen St. E. development near Woodbine Park, looking to continue trying to integrate child care centre Applegrove & TCHC. The item as amended passes unanimously.
Cllr Bradford apparently referred to the Harvey's next door as "sterilizing" the site. The franchise has come a long way since a young Paul Godfrey lambasted a particularly rowdy Harvey's as the "Sip'n'Sex".
Cllr Morley is now speaking passionately about conversions (industrial to mixed/residential) encroaching on two key Employment Areas, the Ontario Food Terminal and the Humber Wastewater Treatment Plant (https://secure.toronto.ca/council/agenda-item.do?item=2026.PH27.11). As discussed earlier in the meeting, developers and land-owners want upzoning/land use changes because real estate is much hotter than industry and increases the land's value, and often seek it even if, say, a new condo would be right across the street from a stinky wastewater treatment plant, with all the accompanying headaches. The City's industrial areas have been steadily chipped away at over the years.
While in previous decades the impulse has been to rely on trade and outsourcing and make Toronto's economy reliant on office jobs, service work and an endlessly accelerating real estate market (I may be being a bit snarky here), recent developments (tariffs, trade war, line no always go up) have caused some to reconsider the wisdom of this approach.
Cllr Perruzza says something has piqued his curiosity about the issue. I yank my earbuds out and go to put the kettle on.