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“The strike was an act beyond the reasonable control of the City,” the city claims in its defence.

“Those things [Silver Bins] were just horrible,” Mr. Blackett said. “The entire premise was not built on capacity to store garbage, it was to get eyeballs looking at them.”

“Advertising on garbage bins is ridiculous and unneeded,” he said. “When you start to give a secondary purpose to a piece of street furniture like that, that purpose ends up becoming more important than the actual real function of it. If a garbage bin is to collect garbage, that’s what it should do, right? It should not be positioned in a way that makes it better for advertisers to sell their products, and that’s what was happening, and it was happening all over the city.”

Since 2007, the city has had a 20-year agreement with Astral Media to provide about 25,000 pieces of street furniture, including transit shelters, garbage bins, benches, info pillars, and public washrooms.

“Some issues” are currently being re-negotiated, but the city calls it an “innovative partnership” of “unprecedented” scale, which has already brought in $70-million and guarantees the city at least $429-million over 20 years. A $200-million capital investment has grown in value by 50%, the city reckons.

“We were able to take advantage of the fact that all of these contracts [for different kinds of street furniture] had expired and put it together into one contract with a co-ordinated system of street furniture,” said Elyse Parker, director of the public realm section of transportation services. “Astral has been providing their revenue as set out in the agreement.”

In a recent decision of Ontario Superior Court, EcoMedia was granted permission to amend its statement of claim. Now, barring a settlement with the city, the next step is to set a date for trial.

No matter what the eventual cost to the city, however — whether mere lawyers fees or millions of dollars in damages — it will be just the latest bill come due in Toronto’s endless street-level garbage game.

As Mr. Blackett described the city’s history with its pedestrians and their waste: “It’s truly been a hodge-podge of stuff that’s come down the pipe.”

National Post

jbrean@nationalpost.com