Paul Moloney,city hall bureau<\/p>\n
A controversial plan to give Astral Media Outdoor LP the job of providing the city’s street furniture \u00e2\u20ac\u201c benches, transit shelters, garbage bins and the like \u00e2\u20ac\u201c is up for final approval at city council tomorrow.
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\nSome councillors are concerned about the proposed 20-year contract where Astral pays the city $21 million annually and gets to sell ads on bus shelters and information pillars.<\/p>\n
But Councillor Shelley Carroll, the budget chair, said she’s confident safeguards are in place to protect the public interest.<\/p>\n
“I expect it to be a long debate because for some councillors the fact it’s a 20-year deal is a cause for concern,” Carroll said. “I’m satisfied the lessons learned from previous contracts will be incorporated into this contract.”<\/p>\n
Carroll said she has no problems with the design of the furniture. “I was always looking for something that complemented our modern transit shelters,” she said. “This does.”<\/p>\n
Council is also being asked to approve:<\/p>\n
A $160 million plan to build 10 affordable-housing projects that would accommodate 1,500 people. Money to build the units would flow primarily from the Canada-Ontario Housing Program, a federal-provincial agreement signed in April 2012.<\/p>\n
A 50-cent-per-hour increase in parking meter rates, pushing the top downtown rate to $3.50 an hour. The rate hike, proposed by the Toronto Parking Authority, would be the first since 1999.<\/p>\n
Setting up an assessment centre for the homeless in the Entertainment District. Staff are suggesting spending $4.7 million to acquire a former nightclub at 129 Peter St. but real estate people say much cheaper sites are available.<\/p>\n
Carroll said she expects lots of discussion over a plan for the city to lend $132 million toward a $159.5 million office building to be built on city-owned waterfront land for a private tenant, Corus Entertainment.<\/p>\n
The Toronto Economic Development Corp., a city agency, would chip in $15 million and $12.5 million would come from the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp. to build the seven-storey structure just east of the Tate & Lyle (formerly Redpath) sugar refinery.<\/p>\n
“This is really a bold new step in which the city is a developer on this one,” Carroll said. “We’re not building a public building, we’re building commercial office space.”<\/p>\n
But the deal ensures jobs stay in the city, creative jobs that are key to waterfront redevelopment, by providing employment opportunities for nearby residents, she said.<\/p>\n
“We’re talking about kick-starting an area and ensuring we end up with a live-work neighbourhood. It’s a growing firm in a creative industry, and the area is already full of people who work in that industry.<\/p>\n
“This is city-building. But it’s expensive and I know councillors are going to be nervous about it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Paul Moloney,city hall bureau A controversial plan to give Astral Media Outdoor LP the job of providing the city’s street furniture \u00e2\u20ac\u201c benches, transit shelters, garbage bins and the like \u00e2\u20ac\u201c is up for final approval at city council tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-furniture-world-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4079\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}