Cross-posted from Eye Daily.
If you are one of those people who question the quality of services that the City of Toronto provides, the Mayor would like to direct your attention to the 24 awards Toronto will receive for “outstanding achievements in public service†September 24 at this year’s Public Sector Quality Fair. Some of the programs the city will garner awards for include Streets to Homes, the Nathan Phillips Square Revitalization Design Competition, and the city’s Shelter, Support and Housing Administration Website.
Public Space advocates and others who enjoy thinking about urban infrastructure might be surprised to hear that the city received an award of excellence — excellence! — for its much-criticized Co-ordinated Street Furniture Program. Let’s review some of the main criticisms of the program:
1. Past attempts at ad-funded street furniture have been massive failures. Remember OMG Media and EUCAN? The city was supposed to receive $2 million a year from EUCAN. It got $500,000 instead.
2. The company that was awarded the contract, Astral Media, has repeatedly broken city signage bylaws. Back in May, city staff were investigating 175 complaints of illegal billboards; 23 of them belonged to Astral.
3.The street furniture program will increase the number of illuminated ads on Toronto’s streets — in total 4,552 more bus shelter ads worth of lighting.
4. The program could result in more ads on city streets, not less, as was originally proposed. At the time staff issued the Request For Proposals (RFP), they had only estimated the current square footage of street-furniture advertising on city streets and the RFP specified that advertising levels be no greater than this number. When staff later gathered more precise data, however, it was discovered that they had over-estimated. They then argued that the contract will result in fewer ads (but not necessarily less ad space).
Many of the politicians who voted in favour of the street furniture contract did so because they saw no other way to pay for much-needed infrastructure, such as garbage and recycling bins. They recognized the problems with the public-private partnership, but saw no way to avoid it. Turning to ad companies to design necessary amenities that we can’t afford to pay for ourselves may be clever, but is it worthy of an award of excellence?
