City hammers out deal with BIA

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City garbage trucks will duck behind Kingsway businesses again after Labour Day, after the city and the local Business Improvement Area (BIA) negotiated a test project that will return collection service to the level the businesses had enjoyed for years.

“That’s what we went to the meeting for,” said Kingsway BIA chair Henny Varga, when asked whether the new arrangement was satisfactory. She called the change in collection this summer “a silly notion.”

Businesses along Bloor Street in the Kingsway had cried foul after city trucks ended the long practice of picking up commercial garbage from the laneway that ran behind the businesses.

The change came after a new contract with Turtle Island Recycling came up for garbage and recycling collection in the Etobicoke district of Toronto. Previously, Turtle Island had handled collection of both residential and commercial waste.

When commercial collection came in-house, city-wide garbage collection practices became the rule, and that meant an end to the rear-door collection service that Turtle Island had provided.

Businesses complained that the new regime created a dangerous clutter of trash outside their businesses on the street. The city pointed to its policy of not doing so in other parts of the city, where laneways are frequently too narrow to operate a truck.

But last week, officials from the city met with local Ward 5 (Etobicoke Lakeshore) Councillor Peter Milczyn and BIA representatives to hammer out a deal.

And according to Geoff Rathbone, Toronto’s General Manager of Solid Waste Services, that deal will see more than half of the businesses serviced from the rear laneway – as part of an experiment there, on the Queensway and along Spadina Avenue, to try and provide the service there as part of a larger service change to the apartments above the stores.

Ultimately, said Rathbone, the plan is to combine commercial and residential collections along the strip, so that garbage trucks will pass by just two times a week rather than three.

“I think we’re going to start the movement back into the laneway right after Labour Day,” he said. “And then as of November 1, we’ll start the process of combining the services.”

November 1 is the date that the new pay-as-you-throw garbage utility fees will come into effect for homeowners. Multi-residential buildings have had a similar fee in place since the beginning of July. But the city has not yet devised a way to charge the fee to apartment-dwellers above street retail.

The new system tested in Etobicoke will, Rathbone said, likely become the norm across the city.

In the meantime, though, city collection will take place behind those businesses where a truck will fit.

That will leave out the south side of the district, where the laneway is not suited to the practice, but Varga said that’s an acceptable compromise.

“The south side all the way from Prince Edward to Humbervale won’t get it - but that’s all right,” she said. “Where the density is with the restaurants, all the collecting will be in the back.”