LEVY: City slow to move on bylaw complaints

Torontosun.com
Sept. 9, 2019
Sue-Ann Levy

Biking to work, I noted the sound that one hopes not to hear on a Sunday, or on a statutory holiday -- the banging of workers redoing a roof.

According to Toronto’s recently updated noise bylaw, such construction noise is not permitted on Sundays or stat holidays.

Nor are leaf blowers after 7 p.m. weekdays or lawnmowers before 9 a.m. on Saturdays.

Loud partying after 11 p.m. on weekends is not acceptable, either.

However, as a report to last week’s licensing and general government committee clearly showed, enforcement by the city’s municipal standards and licensing officers is spotty at best, downright non-existent at worst.

The report shows that some 50% of the complaints the division receives are related to property standards -- keeping one’s property free of litter, debris, graffiti or ice, for example--or to excess noise.

Yet the department’s own figures indicate that enforcement officers are responding to complaints within five day, just 50% of the time. That’s five days from the time the initial call comes into 311.

That’s an average. If you put in a noise complaint, officers only actually get to the complaint within the required five days 47% of the time.

According to the report, Toronto Animal Services seems to be doing a better job of meeting many of its priorities: It has been getting to issues related to pets and wildlife requiring medical assistance within two hours 81% of the time and picking up stray animals within five hours 93% of the time.

Still, they, too, are far less efficient about enforcing leash, dog tag and poop and scoop laws, getting to complaints about those issues within five days only 43% of the time.

That said, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that by the time MLS officials respond to a complaint, the loud party is a thing of the past, the roof has been finished, the lawn mowed and the dog poop, well, let’s not go there.

Ditto for those who leave construction debris, litter or other eyesores on their properties. They know MLS does not have imperative to deal with such complaints in a timely manner, either.

In fact, I would suggest given the city’s lackadaisical approach to ensuring their own road and watermain contractors remove those pesky orange-and- black cones and construction debris in a timely fashion, why should property owners be concerned?

Councillor John Filion was told at committee, when he asked, that there are no performance standards set for how long it takes for a file on a complaint is resolved.

“It appears to me that basically there are no performance standards for actually accomplishing anything,” he said.

Still, there are more than 500 staff in MLS and their own report indicates they have filled 62 vacancies between last year and this one.

One of the big issues is that they’ve not been the slightest bit nimble. MLS has essentially been a five-day-a-week operation with few bylaw officers scheduled in the evenings and none on weekends when many of the issues occur.

The report states that over the past two years, adjustments have been made to the shifts for bylaw and animal control officers to ensure there is some city-wide coverage from 6 p.m.-1 a.m -- but it’s clearly not enough. The city plans to deploy a noise control squad, starting Oct. 1.

As Councillor Stephen Holyday also pointed out, MLS is not really establishing priorities for what constitutes urgent and less urgent complaints.

Filion told the rather sheepish MLS officials that occasionally things will work well but things at MLS are “fairly chronically bad.”

He said he’s been trying to sit down for years to come up with standards for MLS.

“It’s like nailing Jello to the wall, you can’t get any standards,” he said. “And if we don’t have any standards, how do we know whether we’re doing an OK job or not?”