I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. Does the City of Toronto have a lower standard of maintence than other municiplaties? What I’m trying to get here is that the city seems to have lower standards for quality of projects and maintence.
I can't compare to other municipalities instantly it would take me a bit of time to look up those standards.
I can say certain standards in respect of flower bed maintenance and grass cutting have indeed been lowered over the years.
Others have not been, but have accrued ....'execution problems' over the years due to changes in delivery.
As example. Boulevard lawn-mowing in Toronto used to be done by the Parks department. It was paid for by Parks in their budget, and it was the same crews who did parks.
At some point, it was decided that departments had to do charge-backs for services offered to other departments. In this case, Parks had to charge Transportation for mowing the boulevards.
Not long after that happened, the service was contracted out to save money.
Now here's what happens that's different. Previously (decades ago now)........if a constituent noticed that a section of boulevard was overgrown for any reason, they phoned their Councillor, and Parks immediately redirected staff to prioritize that bit and mow it, as soon as the next day. It was just done...
Now, however, what happens is that usually, an omission is the result of a mapping error in the contract tender.
So the contractor demands, understandably to be paid for doing the additional mowing. This takes time and requires approvals.
As a result, what was once a same-day/next-day fix, may now take weeks (or longer)...
Even worse, staff often don't actually fix the underlying mapping error/contract error, and so the same problem repeats year after year.
There is also one less mowing per year than when the City amalgamated.
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Horticulture (gardening) is also leaner than it used to be, with many beds converted to perennials vs annuals, and yes, that is done to lower on-going maintenance, sometimes with a measure of success, sometimes not.
For instance, the City seems to use native plants and grasses as an excuse to let weeds grow rampant without any maintenance.
Could you provide examples of this please. In my experience Toronto rarely, if ever, does native plant streetscapes. They do re-naturalize/forest areas of parks, which I fully support.
That's different.
But for streetscapes, most maintenance issues occur due to neglect of some form; sometimes in beds that are meant to be perennial, but not particularly native.
Example:
When Victoria Park Station was re-done, a landscape bed was put in on the west side of VP avenue, which looked like this:
That's some form of Juniper, I'm not sure which one they chose; it could be native, but is mostly likely a landscape cultivar, the plan was clearly for it to be the only plant in this display and to 'own' the planter.
Its a common choice in the landscape trade.
However, the City, so far as I can tell, neglected to ever assign any department to maintain this planter. Not Parks, not Transportation or the TTC.
As a result........you get this:
100% Dog-Strangling Vine, a non-native, invasive plant has completely over-run the planter.
Entirely preventable with 2x per year weeding/bed maintenance. In fact, if you were strategic with some landscape cloth and some mulch, maybe once a year would do. Sigh.
This is nice on paper but in reality it can easily turn a streetscape and landscape to look very shabby in no time (Nathan Phillips Square).
What section of NPS are you discussing here?
The Peace Gardens aren't pure native, but I think they've turned out decently, overall:
So I read that the wrapping will likely change in a year and they will keep using artists from the city to design all of them, I like that part.
urbantoronto.ca
The worst part of the NPS landscape are the out-of-date, uglier than all flower pots all over the place; and the trodden over sod along Queen.
A function of design choice and under-investment.
Or even the finishing of sidewalks and curbs and roadways. If this was in York Region ( personal work experience in the industry), they would have their own personnel and a third party consultant overseeing every step of construction and mandating quality control test results.
There is third-party quality control and/or City quality control on many, many projects. The quality of said control varies widely.
