Monday, March 12th, 2007 ::: City Hall: Other

“The bureaucracy takes itself to be the ultimate purpose of the state.”
-Karl Marx

IllegalSigns.ca is made possible by our Research Team’s ability to access thousands of City documents that pertain to billboard permits by way of Freedom of Information inquiries.

It is safe to say that without our ability to scrutinize these documents, the City of Toronto would have never discovered the abuse this industry is committing to our streetscapes. City staff were shocked to learn the results of our research: the fraudulent permits, the fact that half the billboards in Toronto are illegal and the discovery that about 80% of the illegal signs that Municipal Licensing and Standards investigated in 2006 was declared legal by officers that don’t know what they’re doing. Our access to these documents has turned the City’s billboard enforcement upside-down: We have thus far filed complaints for 300 signs and requested revocations for over 70 illegally issued permits. Signs are coming down on every major downtown street because of the FOI process.

But now, we are in receipt of a letter from City Clerk Ulli S. Watkiss, in which the she states that the City will no longer release new billboard permit information to IllegalSigns.ca.

Here is the Clerk:

Section 5.1(a) of Regulation 823 was propagated by the Mike Harris era Savings and Restructuring Act, 1996. This regulation made it a little bit easier for a City to deny access to documents, but the burden on the City for showing that a request is “frivolous and/or vexations” is still pretty high. For example, the City must show that the requests are for the purpose of revisiting the same issue over and over again. This is exactly what the Clerk is claiming with respect to our requests for sign permits on individual properties across town.

The Clerk:

If a burden has been placed on any of these three departments by our FOIs, how does the Clerk explain that neither Planning, MLS nor Buildings have ever exercised their right under the Act to ask for a time extension for any of our 625 FOIs? There simply is no undue burden and staff have shown themselves to be more than able to respond to our requests. In fact, the Buildings Department’s systems are specifically set up to deal with thousands of requests a year for permits according to this Staff Report. Besides, during our one hour meeting with staff, the FOI issue was discussed for a grand total of about thirty seconds.

The Clerk:

The problem is, we’ve heard this all before too many times.

City staff have been promising appropriate action to deal with illegal signs before IllegalSigns.ca came along. In the September 19, 2005 meeting of the Toronto and East York Community Council, TEY CC passed a motion that Councillor Olivia Chow moved (in minute 7.19 of this document) directing Municipal Licensing and Standards to “remove any illegally placed signs in the Toronto East York Community Council area as soon as possible.”

In response to the motion, on November 8, 2005, MLS reported to Community Council in this Staff Report that “the Division’s Policy Unit is reviewing enforcement procedures with the goal of recommending measures and sanctions to deter illegal façade signs.”

For every Community Council meeting thereafter, in February 2006, April 2006, May 2006, June 2006, July 2006, until the summer of 2006, MLS supplied to Councillors the same disingenuous assurances that MLS was doing its best to deal with the issue of illegal signs. But IllegalSigns.ca knows otherwise, because we conducted over 75 audits, via the FOI process, of MLS’s actions during the time it was reporting to Community Council.

And we discovered that, in response to City Councillors’ motion to crack down on illegal signs, MLS’s officers went around town investigating signs and determined that about 80% of the illegal signs that they investigated were actually legal because they couldn’t tell an illegal sign from a legal one. And then, the illegal billboards that they did discover were re-erected shortly after they were removed - re-erected on the same illegal structures that MLS’s officers allowed the advertising companies to maintain. And after they were re-erected, what did MLS do? It continued to assure City Councillors it was doing its best while turning a blind eye to re-erection after re-erection; re-erections that even MLS’s officers must have noticed because billboards are specifically designed to be noticed.

We have the documents to prove this but only because of our access to the FOI process. It took IllegalSigns.ca and our filing of hundreds of FOIs to daylight the frailty of MLS’s assurances to Community Council. And now, Ms. Watkiss submits that our FOIs are frivolous and vexatious because we can rely on the assurances of staff who are “detailing an approporiate strategy,” the exact sentiments that MLS used in their staff reports to Community Council.

If anything is frivolous, it’s MLS’s assurances to City Councillors in 2005 and 2006 that it was doing something about illegal signs; if anything is vexatious it’s MLS’s mediocrity, uselessness, and ineptitude; mediocrity so robust that the outdoor advertising industry has invested tens of millions of dollars in sunk costs on the assumption that MLS’s mediocrity is un-rectifiable; uselessness so pervasive that Pattison Outdoor and StreetLife Media felt confident enough to install five illegal ground signs, under MLS’s nose, within spitting distance of City Hall; ineptitude that so permeates MLS that it comes accross as contempt of City Councillors’ motion when in fact it’s only incuriosity steeped in so much incompetence that the only way to get these Keystone Kops to do anything right is to do it for them and pray they don’t screw it up afterwards.

The Clerk:

We suggest the Clerk is being presumptuous. We are now to believe that seeking to discover whether a billboard on a property is legal is a frivolity because the City is embarking on a proactive strategy to do just that. Yet no Staff Report has been prepared and no public consultations announced. Ms. Watkiss is the Clerk, not the Mayor, yet she asks us to rely upon the outcome of an uncertain political process.

The Clerk:

The Clerk claims: “the high volume of your requests appears to be for the sole purpose of revisiting enforcement policy matters that City enforcement staff have already addressed with you.” In fact, the high volume of our requests is due to the high volume of properties in Toronto that have illegal billboards on them; this high volume was created because the bureaucracy was operating without scrutiny. The Clerk’s decision, if upheld, would shut down that scrutiny.

For these reasons, we appealed the Clerk’s decision to the Information and Privacy Commissioner. We were unable to resolve our differences during the IPC’s mediation process. This is the Mediator’s report. The case has been transferred to an adjudicator.

Now, read John Sewell’s article in Eye on how the City’s previous head of Freedom of Information, Rita Reynolds, lost her job. Read John Barber, too.