There are some things that you can count on, like a morning sunrise and piles of garbage in the alley behind the Knob Hill Plaza.

I’ve written many times about garbage problems at the plaza, on Eglinton Avenue East, near Danforth Road, that for years has defied all efforts by the city to force retailers to clean up around their properties.

So it was no surprise when I drove through the alley last week and found many piles of improperly dumped trash – some heaped around overflowing dumpsters – that were torn open by critters.

One pile was directly beneath a sign on a fence that said “garbage dumping prohibited” and suggested the alley is under video surveillance. It’s a great idea, but we looked for surveillance cameras and didn’t see any.

Large heaps of bagged trash were piled around the bottom of stairs leading to apartments above storefronts, while a layer of garbage coated a grassy area between the alley and a fence that separates it from nearby homes.

If there was a grand prize for the most disgusting trash heap, the hands-down winner would have been a huge pile behind a rickety fence, in an open area between buildings, next to 2627 Eglinton. It looked as if people had been firing bagged garbage into the space for weeks, if not longer.

Unlike most retail plazas, where storefronts are leased and tenants must maintain them to a standard, or run the risk of eviction, each of the more than 20 retail spaces at Knob Hill are individually owned.

It leaves the city’s Municipal Licensing and Standards staff to enforce city bylaws on many individual owners, which has proven impossible. Nearly two years ago, the city sent in a contractor to clean up the alley and billed the costs to store owners.

I bumped into a bylaw enforcement officer in the alley later in 2018, who was almost in tears over his frustrating inability to persuade store owners to clean up, even with the force of law behind him.

STATUS: The city sent me the following email: “The situation at the Knob Hill Plaza has been investigated and Municipal Licensing and Standards issued a notice of violation to the property owner of 2627 Eglinton Ave. E. on Feb. 28, 2020. The compliance date was Mar. 13, 2020. A waste contractor is scheduled to attend (Tuesday) to clean up 2627 Eglinton Ave. E. Bylaw officers from the city will attend the cleanup and will survey the rest of the properties to determine what action should be taken at other properties.” I went back Wednesday and found that the big garbage next to 2627 Eglinton was gone, but the rest of the alley was as deplorable as ever.

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