TORONTO –Brighton residents are riled over new bylaws requiring anyone who wants to sell items at a garage sale to have a permit.
Brighton – located about 150km east of Toronto – enacted the bylaw in an attempt to deter residents who make a business of repeatedly selling goods from their home.
The new regulations prohibit anyone from having garage sales more than twice a year or for more than two days per sale. Sale items cannot encroach sidewalks or roads and a permit for the sale must be displayed.
The regulations also require any signage for the sale to be limited to the property where the sale is occurring. They can’t be bigger than 6ft. by 4ft.
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Any violation of the bylaw carries a $100 fine.
“I thought it wasn’t very necessary, to be honest,” said Roger McMurray, a Brighton resident who “enunciated” his views in a letter to the editor in the local paper.
“All you had to do prior to this was to make a call to the bylaw department or the municipal public works place and say, ‘I’m having a garage sale tomorrow,’” he said.
McMurray calls the reasoning behind the bylaw “patently incorrect,” and hopes to see the bylaw rescinded.
Other Ontario cities carry similar bylaws regulating the sale household items from the steps of residences.
Under Toronto’s municipal licensing, residents are only permitted two garage sales per year. Items sold at the garage sale must be household items.
Technically, Mississaugans can have as many garage sales as they want. But the city asks residents to report neighbours having multiple sales per year.
And in Midland, residents who contravene the “garage sale” bylaw, prohibiting anyone from having a sale without a permit, could be fined a minimum of $500 up to a maximum of $100,000.
-With files from Jennifer Palisoc
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