E-Blast: Spring Cleaning, Repairing and Preparing
- 11 minutes ago
- 5 min read
At a recent neighbourhood Town Hall in one of Don Valley North’s oldest high rise condominium complexes, many residents raised concerns about the cleanliness and upkeep of our parks, roads, and public spaces. It is, after all, that time of year when finally it is still light out when you walk the dog after dinner. You are my eyes on the streets and in our parks when you get outside with the Springtime.
I want you to know that these concerns are being heard, loud and clear. Some of what you raised is already being addressed proactively by the City, and I am glad to be able to share that progress with you. Other issues are ones my team will be following up on directly to make sure the response is local, specific, and actually gets done.
And the timing matters. Summers in Toronto are never quiet, between Blue Jays games, Toronto FC, the exciting new Toronto Tempo, concerts, marathons, and street festivals, the city is always buzzing from June through September. Add in high construction season, and you already have a full plate before we even account for the thousands of additional visitors expected for FIFA World Cup 2026 events. The City of Toronto is preparing for a genuinely jam-packed summer, and that means getting ahead of things now. Here is what we are doing to get ready:
Keeping Toronto Beautiful
The good news is that the City has officially launched this year's "Keep Toronto Beautiful" initiative 2 months earlier than last year to support spring clean-up efforts. The cleanup campaign will see around 400 staff carry out targeted weekend “blitzes” from May through October, focusing on high-need areas across the city. Keep Toronto Beautiful work includes:
- Removal of litter, weeds and graffiti from streets, sidewalks, parks and other spaces
- Installing new garbage and recycle bins
- Intensified enforcement and clean-up of illegal dumping hotspots
- Street sweeping and clean-up of boulevards and laneways
- Repairs to potholes, bike lanes, and bike rings
- Repainting pavement markings, including crosswalks to improve road safety
- Tree maintenance
I want to thank every community group that helped kick things off with an April clean-up in their corner of DVN. Thanks to your reporting, my office has already begun to identify areas across Don Valley North that need a bit of extra care. Please keep letting us know if work is needed in your neighbourhood.
Seasonal Park Amenities Reopening
By now, all seasonal park washrooms should be open across Toronto so residents can enjoy our parks safely and comfortably through spring and summer. Starting this weekend, the City will be opening 140 splash and spray pads, and all water fountains, bottle filling stations and dog fountains will be open by Monday May, 25. Can’t wait to see you all at the parks!
DVP and Gardiner weekend closures
I know the maintenance closure on the Don Valley Parkway was a real frustration last weekend. I hope we can all remember that allowing important infrastructure work to be completed efficiently and safely over the weekends is the best remedy.
These maintenance closures are planned months, sometimes years, in advance in order to get the best contract price for design and execution of state-of-good-repair work. It is not always possible to know exactly what sports and events will also be on.
During the closure, City crews and contractors worked simultaneously across the corridor to get done what would otherwise take months of nightly lane closures to complete. Here is what that looked like in practice:
guardrails were repaired across the corridor;
drainage structures and potholes were fixed;
160 catch basins were cleared;
735 square metres of graffiti were removed;
30 overhead signs were repaired or replaced;
215 metres of bridge expansion joints were cleared of debris and winter road salt;
six crash attenuator systems were rebuilt;
major excavation work was completed at the DVP and Ontario Line crossing;
and structural coating was applied to the underside of the Eastern Avenue bridge.
That is an extraordinary amount of infrastructure work packed into a single weekend, the equivalent of more than 30 overnight lane closures. For drivers, that translates to up to 150 fewer hours of disruption over the coming months. For the City, coordinating this work together rather than piecemeal delivers cost savings of up to 25% compared to running multiple overnight closures.
There have been some suggestions that staff should have scheduled the closures for this holiday long weekend, but I feel pretty confident that there would be equal frustration from residents trying to get in and out of the city for Victoria Day had we done that. There will never be a perfect weekend. Every scheduling decision involves trade-offs, and someone's routine will always be affected. But longer, coordinated closures save money and mean that overall commuter disruption is shorter.
I’m just so glad that we were able to have every one of our uniformed traffic wardens out directing traffic at key pinch points, including some that came up to help us along Sheppard Ave and at 401 access points.
Sheppard Ave Reconstruction Update
At the recent town halls, Sheppard Ave came up often, and I understand why. The condition of the road is not good right now, and I hear the frustration from drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists alike. Here is where things stand:
The Sheppard Ave East Complete Street reconstruction between Bayview and Leslie has been in the works since 2021, and over that time the city held multiple rounds of community consultation to shape the design together with residents. This is a major project, a complete rebuild that would deliver road safety improvements, new cycle tracks, and upgraded public spaces. Projects like this happen once every 75 to 100 years, so getting it right matters enormously.
City Council approved the project in June 2023. Since then, however, the Province passed Bill 212 — the Transportation for the Future Act, 2024 — which now requires Toronto to obtain Ministerial approval before installing bike lanes that reduce vehicle lanes. The Province has not yet released the regulations needed to make that process clear, leaving critical road repair work in limbo as we wait to get certainty about whether the City could proceed as planned, or whether infrastructure might need to be removed down the road. That is not a risk worth taking.
In response, I brought forward a member motion to make sure that uncertainty does not result in a half-built street or infrastructure that gets torn out after the fact. The motion directs City staff to pause the tender until we have formal written approval from the Ministry of Transportation, and to use that time productively, developing a plan to deliver this reconstruction comprehensively, efficiently, and durably when the green light finally comes.
For the stretch of Sheppard Ave E. from Leslie to Victoria Park, reconstruction is still a few years away and design work has not yet begun. If and when it does, I will be calling consultation meetings with you before anything is finalized.
In the meantime, I am not simply waiting. If there are specific areas of Sheppard that need urgent patching for your safety, please contact my office and we will work to get action on it.
Thank you to everyone who has opened their doors, joined a roundtable, called or emailed my office or attended a consultation. Your input shapes the priorities I bring forward at City Hall, and these conversations are the best part of this work.
