City steps in to clean up illegally dumped renovation trash: The Fixer
The junk had been on Manville Rd. since last spring and was a magnet for other garbage dumped under cover of darkness.

thestar.com
By Jack Lakey
Aug. 30, 2016

It didn’t take the city long to get rid of a big pile of illegally dumped renovation trash, after a reminder about it.

Our Aug. 17 column was about a heap of garbage - including a bathroom sink - dumped on the city road allowance at the entrance to a vacant property on Manville Rd., in a secluded industrial area.

We first spotted the mess last spring and told a city manager about while speaking to him about illegally dumped trash on nearby Hymus Rd.

The other stuff was promptly removed, but apparently the trash on Manville was overlooked. We checked back recently and found that it had only grown larger; when illegal dumping is allowed to languish, it becomes a magnet.

Within a day of reporting it to Bob Taylor, who’s in charge of right of way management in that area, the garbage was gone.

Last Saturday, we reported on a reader’s complaint about the stuff anchoring a temporary sign in a raised median in the middle of Lawrence Ave. W, just east of Keele St.

Heavy-gauge plastic bags filled with sand were used as weight around the base of the sign, which the reader said looked like garbage bags mistakenly put out on the median for collection.

After looking on Google Street View, we noticed that a no-left-turn sign for drivers exiting a shopping plaza at the southeast corner of Lawrence and Keele had gone missing. Without it, drivers would be courting an accident.

Allan Pinkerton, who’s in charge of city traffic signage, emailed to say that a temporary no-left-turn sign was put up right away, and that the garbage bags holding the other sign in place were swapped for orange ones that don’t look quite so trashy.

On Aug. 10, our column was about a very old car that had been parked in the same few spots on Balliol St. for at least 18 months, often in the same place for weeks at a time, thanks to a disabled parking pass.

A neighbour who knows the rules - even with a disabled pass, vehicles cannot park in the same spot for more than 24 hours - told us about the car, and sent us an amusing note a couple weeks after we wrote about it.

“Nothing happened for a few days after your column, so we decided to put a copy of your column under his windshield wiper. Two days later the car was gone, hopefully for good.”