Contempt of City Council: 819 Yonge Street
Welcome to Contempt of City Council, an ongoing presentation of IllegalSigns.ca where we show you how advertising companies maintain illegal signs after City Council rejects the permit for those signs.
Today, we take a look at Titan Outdoor’s illegal sign at 819 Yonge Street at the Church/ Davenport intersection.
In 2000 CBS/Mediacom erected a fascia sign on the north wall of 819 Yonge and in March 2000 Blair Murdoch, Mediacom’s real estate manager and sharp political fixer made a variance application to legalize his company’s illegal sign.
In the planning department’s staff report, Planner Norm Girdhar, who produces a good report once in a while, noted that the sign would contribute to a tawdry visual appearance for the intersection of Yonge and Church:
Community Council received oral and written deputations from the following people:
After considering the thoughts of the deputants, Councillor Bossons moved to reject the variance and then moved another motion (at minute 2.6 of this document):
We could not find any record of the planning department responding to that motion.
Here is the official City Council decision rejecting the variance:
In 2004, CBS sold the sign to Titan Outdoor. This is what the City Council rejected sign looks like today:
We filed a freedom of information inquiry asking for all documents that Municipal Licensing and Standards has with regards to illegal signs at 819 Yonge Street, and any response MLS took Councillor Bossons’ motion. According to this letter, MLS has no files and never investigated this property until we complained about it.
Those deputants, including Mr. Murdoch, have reason to wonder why they even bothered showing up to that meeting. And the Councillors, too.
March 28th, 2007 at 11:47 am
The more I think about how to respond to the continued occurances of re-erections, the more I believe we need to offer a positive vision for what to do with liberated spaces, especially the ones in which fascia signs stood. Perhaps we can learn from Winnipeg, which has wonderful murals around the city. How lovely would it be to have local artists jazz up these walls with non-commercial creativity. It would also make it much more difficult for the Titans of the world to keep disregarding the law, of which there appears to be a shameful lack of enforcement.
Midland, Ontario has a collection of 34 historical murals painted on downtown buildings.-Rami