[URBAN NOTE] "TTC wants to get out of ‘hellhole’ headquarters"

[rfmcdonald]

I pass under the TTC headquarters daily as I commute to work. I can easily believe that, as Tess Kalinowski describes in the Toronto Star, this elderly building might well be unpleasant.

The CEO of the TTC describes the transit system’s Davisville headquarters as a “Stygian hellhole” with some employees working in spaces akin to “veal crates.”

His boss, TTC chair Josh Colle, agrees that some of the working conditions are “deplorable.” He wants the transit board to take the politically perilous step of recommending the transit agency move out of the 1958 McBrien building into a modern space large enough to accommodate the system’s 3,000 office staff under one roof.

It doesn’t have to be glitzy. It doesn’t even need to be a new building. But having staff scattered among Davisville, which accommodates only about 400, and a half-dozen leased offices around the city doesn’t make sense and costs the TTC more than $8.4 million a year, he said.

“We need to find a new home for the TTC. There’s some existing buildings around we could move into. That’s the best possibility. But just to have different leases and spaces, some owned, some in terrible condition, is just so inefficient and costly,” said Colle.

It’s not clear what the TTC would have to spend for new digs, but Colle thinks it would ultimately save the agency money.