Too many bureaucrats take up space stores and services need

There’s too much city-hall intrusion Downtown. Bureaucrats are parking themselves in prime properties and depriving us Downtown of what recently deceased and much-missed local hero Mike Comstock termed, “Main Street businesses.”

By that Mike meant the independent small retail and service businesses that once set up shop in our Downtown retail areas. They are fewer and fewer as big-corporation franchise outfits take over our Main Streets.

And where they aren’t, city hall seems to be. Years ago in an outrageous vandalism of our history, the Real Estate department at city hall confiscated the second floor of St. Lawrence Hall, stripped it of its history, installed drop ceilings, fluorescent fixtures and other accoutrements of 21st Century bureaucracy solely to serve City of Toronto civil servants.

There are a large number of small storefronts lining the south side of The Esplanade just west of Market Street.

They are perfect for small, independent businesses of the sort that help sustain community and promote diversity of buying opportunities for Downtown residents and visitors.

But for many years they were battened down by the city’s bylaw enforcement bureaucrats and now are empty.

Councillor Pam McConnell had asked without success that those retail spaces be reserved for small, independent businesses in the same way internationally acclaimed St. Lawrence Market is preserved from big-corporation intrusion and set aside for independents.

The planned North Market redevelopment in a red steel-and-glass anachronism will have more bureaucrats planted here in the form of traffic courts and a cop shop. That’s more than enough.

Really, it’s too much.
So now is the time for our suburban-run city hall to do something for Downtown. Lease out those precious retail spaces on The Esplanade in the same way St. Lawrence Market is leased and plant bureaucrat butts somewhere beyond our Downtown communities.