In bygone eras, the enemy of small business used to be less complex. In the City of Toronto, the daily grind of keeping the doors of a business open meant fighting off the competition, big government, changing trends. The new enemy of the millennium is City Hall.
Nowhere is city hall’s fight with small business more apparent than on Elm Street. Lures to tourists because of its magnificent restaurants, the lighting on the trees make Elm Street a magical place at night. The charm of its many businesses gives Elm St. a warm and cozy feel.
That all changed about a month ago. Now bags of garbage are strewn in every corner and back alley as litter and trash are left moldering for weeks before the city returns to pick it up. These days, Elm Street is also a boulevard of bonfires as persons unknown set fires to mounds of garbage left behind by city pickup.
Why this new blight on local urban life?
Pressed for cash, The City of Toronto has decided to make a 400 percent increase in garbage revenue’s work.
In the aftermath of that decision came a stench. It’s not just the stink of rotting garbage but the more evasive one that comes from a city administration that is trying to make a proverbial purse out of the sow’s ear.
In the former status quo, restaurateurs and the like were being charged $115 a week for five nights of garbage pickup. The city no longer maintains nightly pickup. And the new program with which they have tried to replace it causes chaos and confusion.
Here’s the new deal: The City no longer charges the business for daily pickup--unless the owner requests it and then pays for it at a greatly increased cost.
The City does not charge for organic pickup, including spoiled food etc. It picks it up twice a week. Business owners, restaurant operators in particular, are not happy with this arrangement. It wasn’t that long ago that they had to purchase the city’s green organic carts. The main problem was odour. With regular organic pickup on Thursdays and Tuesdays, for example, business owners are forced to store rotting organics on site for up to five days. This new deal seems to suit pests and vermin the most.
Enter introduction of the city’s highly contentious yellow bag. The new yellow bag comes emblazoned with the City of Toronto official logo. However, at $3.10 each, it doesn’t come cheap.
Fees for the `yellow bag project’ are divided up as follows: Twenty-five cents per bag goes to Home Hardware and P.C.L. Plastics, main suppliers of the bags. The remaining $2.60 goes to the city, to cover the costs of administering the program and waste collection.
It gets better. The City has a contract with P.C.L. to manufacture one million bags, with no deadlines or time frames as to when they should have the bags sold. The City projected the sales of approximately 70,000 bags per week. The number of actual bags sold is another story.
According to Guy Parry, spokesman for Toronto Solid Waste Management, the volume of bags being sold in one week is nowhere close to the projected 70,000. Parry told CanadaFreePress that garbage collection in the city is also down.
Could it be that garbage collection is not down, but that business people are not about to fork over $3.10, for a simple garbage bag, yellow or not?
Cost conscious business operators know that local stores sell 10 no-name garbage bags, coloured brown, complete with drawstrings for $2.19, or 21.9 cents each. Marketing aside, the supplier profits and the store profits.
We don’t have to wait for the first year to pass to see how the City missed the mark on doing the math. It was supposed to realize $9.46 million dollars a year from garbage bag sales (70,000 bags a week x 52 weeks @ $2.60). This was supposed to make up for a 400 percent increase in the costs of transporting Toronto’s capacious garbage to Michigan.
The number of garbage bags left in front of Elm Street restaurants is evidence that the
City is losing money since it no longer charges for daily pickup. Some of the businesses canvassed by CFP said they believe their costs are down from $115 per week to $9.30 per week. As this is the first month billing, one restaurant owner said perhaps a wait-and-see attitude is in order.
So how then does the City plan to make up for lost revenue?
It appears that the local breed of sanitation engineers have the most discerning of palates. They claim they can tell whose garbage belongs to whom. The same restaurant owners who think they might save some money are being fined $115 for putting their garbage out--in the appropriate yellow bag, on the right day--three feet away from their property. Noticed by collectors, they were refused pickup and a city inspector was ready with fine in hand when the operator opened for business the next day.
Instead of now picking up the garbage, the City wants to inspect your garbage instead.
Confusing garbage pickup is just one woe for small business operators in the downtown core.
The City is now confiscating sandwich boards-- surreptitiously.
One of the restaurant owners interviewed for this article was aware that one of her two sandwich boards had gone missing, but never thought it would have been taken by the City.
A member of the local BIA (Business Improvement Area) naively claimed that the City just wouldn’t do something like this.
Next question from the owners of missing sandwich boards: How much is the City going to charge the businesses to get their own sandwich boards back?
As long as town and city councils like the one in Toronto are represented by politicians who have no understanding of running a small business, garbage bags will be yellow and missing sandwich boards will be charged back to their owners.
Cindy Moustakis is a co-op student from East York Collegiate. She is learning the art of journalism at Canada Free Press.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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