CONCRETE EVIDENCE
FROM OCTOBER 2021 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX
The driveway to the ML Ready Mix Plant on Judson Street is an unassuming gateway with little signage to mark it or warn passersby that heavy trucks drive in and out of the facility hundreds of times a day.
Three years ago, residents were promised that a concrete plant and its heavy fleet of mixers would be moved out of a residential pocket on Royal York Road. They want to know why one year and one pedestrian death later, they’re still waiting
The concrete plant in Mimico Village isn't easy to spot, hidden behind towering walls of green corrugated metal. Passing by it on Judson Street, heading east toward Royal York Road, you might not see it – until one of its large trucks comes rumbling out of the gate, trailing clouds of concrete dust and diesel smoke.
The question pedestrians in the neighbourhood are asking is, Will that truck notice you?
The plant was supposed to be gone by November 2020. Following years of complaints from Mimico residents about the volume of industrial traffic entering and exiting the site, the City of Toronto used $5 million in municipal funds to purchase the land at 29 Judson Street from ML Ready Mix (formally Remicorp Industries Inc.) in 2019. The tenant was given one year to complete its move to a new location, at 545 Commissioners Street in the Port Lands. But that same year, on November 20, around 5 p.m., as John Offutt was riding his bike south down Royal York, the ML Ready Mix batching plant was still very much operational. One of its trucks was turning right off Royal York onto Judson, just as the 65-year-old was cycling past. Had the plant been moved on schedule, the truck wouldn’t have been there to hit him. A white bicycle stands at the intersection, memorializing Offutt, who died from his injuries.
“ML Ready Mix was operating again within hours of the accident,” says Dan Irwin, who has lived across the street from the plant since it opened in 2007, and has been objecting to it ever since. (Two other neighbours back up the claim.) “It’s outrageous,” says Irwin. “Why are they allowed to keep doing this?”
The complaints against ML Ready Mix are varied. In a letter to Ward 3 Councillor Mark Grimes dated June 23, 2021, the Mimico Residents’ Association (MRA) lists a handful of them. It asks for updates from the Ministry of Transportation regarding a call for an investigation into road safety and driver competence, and the presence of large trucks entering Judson from Islington Avenue to the east – technically a no-truck zone. It calls for investigations by the Ministry of the Environment into compliance with environmental regulations limiting the number of aggregate trucks (typically dump trucks) permitted to enter and leave the plant per hour, and others that concern the containment of “fugitive dust.” City Transportation is called on to investigate concrete and gravel spills along the trucks’ routes. These pile atop complaints about air quality, noise, idling trucks, structures built illegally on site, and ML Ready Mix breaking bylaws that restrict its window of operation (7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays; 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturdays). On the Ministry of Transportation’s five-tier carrier safety rating scale, Maple Leaf Equipment Rentals, the trucking subsidy of ML Group, currently has a rating of Conditional – a status assigned when carriers have exceeded a set violation rate. It’s the second-lowest score, just above Unsatisfactory.
“We call it out, nothing happens,” says Irwin, who has a file several inches thick full of articles, records and other documents he’s amassed during the 15-year fight to hold ML Ready Mix to account for what he says are ongoing violations that go ignored by Councillor Grimes. “We go to the integrity commission, we go to the ombudsman. Every complaint I make to every department, they tell me, ‘The initiative has to come from your councillor.’” Irwin has gone so far as to contact the OPP’s anti-racketeering unit in an attempt to get them to investigate Grimes. He says Grimes’ office has stopped answering his phone calls, and both he and the MRA speak of a frustrating bureaucratic goose chase, a road with no end in sight.
The stretch of Judson Street that runs east toward Royal York Road is a nightmare for visibility. A long, straight run leads into a sloping curve that terminates at Royal York, across from the pedestrian steps to the GO station. One side of Judson is residential; that’s where Dan Irwin’s house is. On the other side, at the top of the curve, is the driveway to the ML Ready Mix plant, an unassuming gateway with little signage to mark it, or warn passersby that heavy trucks drive in and out of the facility hundreds of times a day. Driving or cycling along Judson, you might not even realize the plant is there until one of those trucks pulls out.
“Over the years, complaints have involved driver competence, environmental compliance, truck volume, hours of operation and “fugitive dust””
The spot where Judson terminates at Royal York is just south of Mimico Village’s commercial strip. The area sees steady traffic, including trucks from the Judson concrete plant on their way south to Lake Shore Boulevard, or north to reach the QEW. But it’s not just cars that crowd the area. On weekends, the main strip fills with pedestrians, including those on their way to SanRemo Bakery, a longtime neighbourhood favourite that draws heavy foot traffic across Royal York. Churches, schools and a community clubhouse are all within walking distance. Visit the benches outside SamRemo on a Sunday, and you’d assume there was a street party going on.
And density in the area is set to increase: Vandyk Properties’ Grand Central Mimico development will bring nine new condo towers and 1.85 million square feet of living space to Newcastle Street, just around the corner from the Judson plant – part of a “transit-tailored community” plan based around the revamped Mimico GO station.
Before the towers, however, will come more trucks, with plenty of concrete needed for the development.
According to Mike Majeski, the president of the MRA, there are ongoing discussions among community members weighing the pros and cons of moving the plant if it will only mean trucking in concrete for the project from across the city. Some have suggested that the Vandyk development presents an opportunity to relocate the ML plant a little closer at hand – namely, across the street, on the Grand Central construction site itself. “These developments have on-site concrete all the time,” says Majeski. “It’s closer, and the trucks would have literally nowhere to go.” It would mean four more years of ML in Mimico but, contained on the construction site, the thinking goes, the operation would pose fewer traffic risks.
The latest communique about ML Ready Mix from Councillor Grimes’s office, issued on August 6 this year, blames COVID-19 on delays in preparing the new Commissioners Street facility. It says operations there are expected to begin in October 2021 but mentions nothing about the closing of the Judson Street plant, save a promise that “there continue to be obstacles to overcome – but rest assured, it will get done.” When asked to comment for this story, Grimes’s office instructed us to talk to the City of Toronto instead.
In reply, the city spokesperson noted, “the councillor has erected an interdivisional working group to ensure that the balance of steps remaining in the process occur within the timelines prescribed for each,” but conceded that “the majority of this is within the construction schedule for the new facility at Commissioners St.” The city’s note added that work is on schedule and that the new site will be ready for ML Ready Mix to take possession on November 15, 2021. As to getting out of Mimico, the city indicated that “ML’s construction plan anticipates the batching operation to be relocated by spring 2022. This means that there will no longer be any concrete batching activities occurring at Judson after that date.”
This August, after a dump truck hit and killed 18-year-old cyclist Miguel Joshua Escanan on Avenue Road near Bloor Street, The Toronto Star analyzed 15 years of data and found that dump trucks or cement trucks were involved in 11 per cent of all pedestrian deaths and more than 25 per cent of cyclist deaths in the city.
Dave Edwards, a cyclist and advocate who tweets for BikeTO, says regulations on trucks are too lax and that the rules that do exist aren’t being followed or enforced. According to reports in The Toronto Star and corroborated in a summary by the Toronto firm Smitiuch Injury Law, the driver who killed John Offutt in November 2020 had several Highway Traffic Act violations on his record before the incident – and added three more in the four months following Offutt’s death.
“This is the frustration,” Edwards says. “It’s a lack of political will. [A death] happens, there’s a big outcry, and the mayor says, ‘We’ll investigate this, we’ll make change.’ But it takes so long for anything to actually happen, if it happens at all, that they just become another memorial, another white ghost bike at the side of the road.”