Cheap Gas Motion Held Over

A number of folks have contacted me to ask if I got anywhere at council with my inquiry about the gas sale line-up problem. They continue to breath the fumes at night and pay over a dollar a litre for gas by day and are getting fed up. Unfortunately, a number of difficult items protected under the confidentiality section of the Municipal Act ate up a lot of our time. The item has been held over. We have a special meeting to try to finish the agenda on Tuesday and I will try to get the motion in the hands of staff then. General Manager of Municipal Licensing and Standards, Pam Coburn helped me write it and is ready to deal with the issue so there should be little resistance to forwarding it as a quick item. There was a letter in a recent North York Mirror which may have confused the issue for some. The complaints to our office are not with regards to the motorists themselves but rather with the Gas Station owners. My motion reflects the residents' wishes and asks for staff to report on what influence MLS can have over how the owners arrange their line-ups and whether we can require the station owners to ask their customers to turn off their cars in the line-up. There was never any intention, as the letter tries to indicate, to attack individual motorists, but rather to try to help Ward 33 residents who are concerned about the fumes from stations close to their backyards. In any case, the sale practice seems to be waning. We have noticed that the sale price has risen from the original 75.9 to as high as 85.9 on sale nights. Curiously, at some stations the daytime high price of 101.9 doesn't seem to be falling quite as fast. Oh well, we all love our free enterprise system. At the end of the day, with respect to all idling situations, we ask that drivers remember that automobile manufacturers' studies show that the gas needed to restart your car equals the amount of gas needed to idle your car for 30 seconds.