City council not rushing to solve damaged telecom boxes

If Toronto city council has any interest in making sure that damaged telecom boxes are fixed, it is doing an excellent job of disguising it.

We’ve been on a campaign to hold telecom providers responsible for the shocking number of damaged equipment boxes on city streets. Until rules are imposed on them, it’s clear that they won’t do anything about it.

Council had an excellent opportunity to lay down the law at its meeting last week, in the form of recommendations in a report on universal placement guidelines for telecom equipment. It instead deferred the report, most of which dealt with locations for new equipment, and ignored a request that telecoms label boxes with their names, along with a phone number that could be called to report damage.

Community associations provided substantial input on the report, including a recommendation from David Crawford of the St. Lawrence Neighbourhood Association that all equipment be labelled, which seems quite reasonable. Not only did it not adopt Crawford’s recommendation — which we’ve also been pushing — city officials don’t seem to even be aware of the problem.

We interviewed Carly Hinks, an acting director of transportation services who wrote the report, and could only conclude that she is indifferent to the issue.

Hinks said telecoms “do have a requirement to maintain their equipment,” but said the city’s authority to impose standards is limited by federal communications legislation that supersedes municipal rules.

“We can suggest, we can request,” but if telecoms such as Rogers and Bell don’t like what is suggested or requested by the city, it can appeal it to the CRTC, she said. “Whenever we’ve been challenged by the utilities, we always lose,” Hinks said, adding, “universal guidelines are things we have never before gotten agreement from the utilities on.”

Hinks said city officials meet on a monthly or bimonthly basis with the telecoms on a wide range of issues and that she’d raise broken equipment boxes with them at the next meeting. That sounds like a nice way of saying nothing will change. If simply raising it with them would yield improvements, we doubt they’d need to be told.

If there was any legitimate interest on the part of city councillors or staff to hold the telecoms’ feet to the fire on maintenance, they’d impose standards as part of the guidelines and let them appeal it.

Imagine if Rogers or Bell was so dead set against doing the right thing that they’d appeal it to a higher power. It would amount to thumbing their nose at the idea of community responsibility.

The city should impose maintenance standards — if they have the will to do it — and let’s see how Rogers and Bell respond.

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