Markham man feels weed-whacked by treatment from city staff

YorkRegion.com
Aug. 17, 2017
Tim Kelly

Markham resident Gene Kwan feels he's in the middle of a circular, bureaucratic nightmare.

The only place the homeowner can go for help is the City of Markham but when he tries to get answers he fails, or worse, gets hammered with fines from Markham's bylaw department.

The issue is a four-year-long saga over Kwan's Russell Court front lawn and its snaggle-toothed, weed-stricken condition, a problem he squarely blames on the city.

It all started, Kwan said, when he needed to have a wasp nest removed from a city-owned crab apple tree on his lawn. The old, diseased tree was removed and the stump left behind subsequently removed. The city replaced the crab apple tree with a lilac, Kwan said, and the new flora that replaced it is choke cherry, which he said promotes weeds and the kind of growth, "that damages my lawn mower," Kwan said.

In order to deal with the damaging new weeds and what he said was the City's refusal to plant a replacement tree for the lilac, Kwan decided to lime the weeds away.

Then, it got worse. He was planning to reseed the empty spots with grass seed when the City's Works department came to dig up the lawn to put a water pipe through, but unintentionally cut the Rogers cable line, Kwan said. He said Rogers took more than a year to fix the problem. Kwan said the delay was only caused because the City took its time granting a permit to complete the cable reburial.

And then the weeds returned -- and with them, fines from the city's bylaw department for having a lawn not in keeping with the Keep Markham Beautiful Bylaw.

Kwan can't take it anymore.

"It takes me four hours to pull the weeds out of my lawn by hand every one to two weeks. To restore the lawn to its original condition before the City of Markham performed their work would result in thousands of dollars and must be done commercially to remove the roots and re-sod the lawn," Kwan said.

He said he has tried to get information from the city about his case but has consistently been rebuffed and hasn’t been able to get help from his local councillor either.

When asked about Kwan's issue and his case, the City of Markham would only issue an official statement that reads in part:

"Since 2013, Mr. Kwan has contacted the City several times regarding the maintenance of his property. The City received a request from Mr. Kwan in September 2013 to remove a wasp’s nest from the tree on his front lawn at 7 Russell Court, and upon arrival, also determined that the old and decaying tree needed to be removed. The tree was removed in the same manner that all City street trees are removed. Any small roots that were left after the tree removal would have decomposed over time if the lawn had been regularly maintained by lawn mowing each week as recommended by the City’s Keep Markham Beautiful Bylaw. The small shoots that grew throughout the lawn from the remaining roots, left unattended, then matured and became quite large. This was the result of the grass not being regularly maintained by the property owner. Any tree shoots, when left for a prolonged period of time, became hard and woody and thus, more challenging to cut with a lawn mower."

Kwan's response: "It's a farce."