City building services

So yesterday my girlfriend went to the city’s building services to get the zoning designation and the by-laws applicable to 159 Chisholm Avenue. It took her nearly 3 hours in waiting time to get that information on a simple sheet of paper with a circle around the zoning designation code. Being that I work in the information technology industry, I know that all of this would have taken just less than a minutes if the information is simply searchable online. Yes, I am aware that once the current draft zoning by-law is passed, the information will be searchable via online services offered by the city. But for the time being, in order to be certain that the information is correct, we still need to go to the city hall for that purpose. She also said to me that the information desk has 5 booths all staffed, but she never seen more than one booth with an employee there ready to service the next person in line. She was 15th person on the list, 5 booths and 3 hours, a simple math would indicated that it took an average of 60 minutes per person per employee. I don’t know what was done for those 15 in front of her, but she certainly didn’t take more than 5 minutes of their time. And I was certainly expecting much higher efficiency than this.

And for those looking at the draft zoning by-law’s interactive map, you can go to http://www.toronto.ca/zoning/ and click on the Interactive Zoning Bylaw Map.