Ward 40 - Scarborough-Agincourt (Click here to see the Ward Map )

The Return Of The Village

Community Based Services

When I drive around the ward and through the city, I see debris and garbage blowing in the wind, dying trees unattended, trees and shrubs badly in need of pruning, grass on public boulevards knee-deep, parks choked with weeds, shopping carts in creeks, and derelict vehicles in driveways and on streets. Garbage bins overflow, houses decay, yards are ignored, front yards are paved over for more parking, the ranks of absentee landlords are growing and their unattended rooming houses spring up everywhere.

I am not the only one who notices this. My office is deluged with calls from anguished constituents and residents who are seeing their neighbourhoods decline. My heart goes out to people who have invested many years and money to live in a community of their choosing only to have to stand helplessly by and watch its unabated decline.

Old-time residents are tired of their concerns going unheeded, so they pack up and move out. Going with them is the social glue that holds communities together: knowledge, personal relationships, and community ties.

Over the past 6 years, the media and advocacy groups have primarily focussed on Toronto's high debt load, its poor revenue base and the indifference to its financial problems of its political master, the Province of Ontario. This finger pointing, excuse manufacturing and hand wringing has not and will not solve our problem of a decaying urban landscape.

There are several courses of action, all related, that I intend to advocate consistently in the next term in City Council, and that are reasonable and actionable without involving the province or changing the tax laws, or any of the other non-starter solutions that have been advocated in the popular media.

They are:

Bring urban renewal to the top of the public agenda and make it one of the first priorities in the City's budget.
Change the mindset of the bureaucratic managers by stressing "service" values.
Require frontline workers to be proactive in protecting the community and its public assets. Replace the "complaints based only" response with a return to the "values of the village". If frontline workers see a problem, they fix it when they see it; they don't wait for someone to notice and complain about it. If they see apparent breaches of the bylaws, they take action - they issue notices to offending businesses or homeowners, they carry out inspections on the spot-they do not wait for the situation to deteriorate.
Re-organize the civil service:

Move administrative staff to the frontline and place the base of their operations in locations convenient to the communities they are serving, like the Stephen Leacock Community Centre, for example, our area;
Organize the frontline workers into multi-tasked Community Service Teams (CSTs) of three or four individuals, (one CST per ward), with a truck and on-board computer and other modern wireless communications, whose jobs would be to travel through the communities and cut grass and trim trees on city property, pick up loose trash in the streets, act as bylaw inspectors, and identify situations that need a major response from central city departments. In essence, they would determine the work load of a neighbourhood and centralized administrative staff would have to answer to them instead of to superiors at City Hall who crunch numbers but don’t have a "feel" for life in the communties.
Make decision-making a street level priority -- not a top-down directive from some remote Commissioner or Director sitting in an office far removed from the actual problem;
Give frontline workers the power, authority and responsibility to carry out their jobs without having to "check it out upstairs" first or to follow some slavish, ivory tower policy that promotes administrivia ahead of results;
Operate the service 7 days a week;and,
Grant the frontline CST teams the power to call out city equipment and personnel as required to meet the standards and the goals.

4. Establish a system to measure resident satisfaction to monitor the performance level achieved in the "return of the village", and build in a reward system for superior performance.

These are all practical, relatively simple changes that can produce very big results in protecting our neighbourhoods and renewing civic pride in our community. Getting this established will be my personal mission in the new City Council.

I would greatly appreciate your comments on these plans. An easy way to pass them on to me is to use the Feedback section of my web site normkelly.com .

Your Opinion

If you wish to share your thoughts on any matter of community interest, please fill in the form with your questions, comments or ideas and press "Submit". We welcome any suggestions.