You could say it’s yet another example of City Hall being “out of step” with reality.

For eight years, Adi Astl said he watched both seniors and young kids trying to manoeuvre down an embankment with rocks and only a yellow rope to help them to access the south end of Etobicoke’s Tom Riley park.

This section - right off of a Green P lot on Bloor St.- is used for soccer games and contains the beautiful Horizons community garden where a variety of people, especially seniors, own plots and plant vegetables.

Worried about safety, the 73-year-old Astl approached his councillor, Justin DiCiano, a few months ago about installing steps.

“We had a lady in our garden group who broke her wrist falling on the rocks ... we’ve had numerous people fall,” says Astl’s wife, Gail Rutherford.

The verdict from the city’s Parks, Forestry and Recreation department?

It would cost anywhere from $65,000 to $150,000 to install a staircase of eight steps.

With contributions from the community garden members and some of his own money, Astl, a former mechanic, built eight wood steps in 12 hours for $550.

He told me Tuesday, during a visit to Tom Riley park, he installed the steps on June 22 with the help of a 45-year-old homeless man.

“Last night (Monday night) I was here gardening and in an hour and 15 minutes I counted 35 to 40 people using the steps,” says Rutherford.

But it’s not nice to step on the toes of city bureaucrats, it seems.

A few days ago, city parks officials turned up and put up yellow caution tape over the steps and placed two orange pylons - one at the top and the other at the bottom.

“They’d rather you go up a slippery slope than use the stairs that were just built,” says Di Ciano.

“If you saw what was here before ... it was a very dangerous situation, especially with all of the rain,” he adds. “This is a much safer alternative.”

However, Di Ciano’s office was informed that Astl better remove the “illegally built stairs” by this past Monday or he’d be charged under the City of Toronto Municipal Code Section 608 (which covers rules for parks).

Tammy Robinson, spokesman for the city’s municipal licensing and standards division, said the “illegal steps” came to their attention from one of the city’s park supervisors (and there are many parks supervisors).

Robinson said no decisions have been made as of yet whether to lay charges.

Matthew Cutler, spokesman for Parks and Rec, said their staff feel the current staircase is unsafe and “cannot be easily fixed” but they have reached out to a city engineer to see if work could be done on it to make it more “usable” - before they take any action to remove it.

Cutler said the quotes relate to the kind of infrastructure required for a “public space” project that would last 20 years. The range in quotes depend on whether the staircase is made of stone or a “fully engineered” heavy duty steel staircase, he says.

“They were definitely designed to be more durable than what the community member installed,” he said.

Asked why Astl’s wood staircase is considered unsafe as opposed to the yellow rope and no staircase at all, he said people “climbing up and down a hill on their own” is a much different situation than a staircase “that invites people to climb it.

“The expectation of safety is different between a hill and a staircase,” he said.

Shhh. Let’s not tell him they’re both in a city park.

Anne Hodgson, who uses the park regularly, said the stairs seem “perfectly safe” to her.

Her 11-year-old son, Sam, said it will cost money to take the stairs out and Astl’s “hard work” would have been for nothing.

Di Ciano said it’s “gross” that city officials would consider spending so much money for a simple project.

“Instead of just building a simple staircase so the vast majority of people can use it, they want to build the Taj Mahal,” he said. “It boggles my mind ... if it’s going to cost $150,000 to build a simple eight-riser staircase, what does it take to build heavy duty infrastructure projects in the city?”

SLevy@postmedia.com