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Homes with regularly flooding basements in the Beach and Leslieville will be seeing some short-term relief from city water staff, but long-term fixes for the problem will likely be a year or more away.

That was the word this week from Lou Di Gironimo, Toronto's water and wastewater general manager as he prepares to present a report to executive committee on Sept. 2 on plans to alleviate the frequent occurrence of sewage backup from basements in North York and Scarborough.

That plan will see the city's wastewater division spend about $195 million to deal with serious flooding issues in the city's north end. Issues that Beach residents have been having with flooding - particularly this summer - are absent from the report.

But according to Di Gironimo, that's not to say water staff is ignoring the problems that have plagued homes in the Woodbine Avenue and Hubbard Boulevard neighbourhoods, and further east at Dundas Street and Greenwood Avenue.

"There's a different type of issue that we've found in that area (compared to further north)," Di Gironimo said. "Down in that area there's a lot of infrastructure - our large sewers work through there, all of the interceptors out of town come through, there's the Coxwell trunk sewer and the lakefront storm water retention tanks. And we've got a higher water table this year because of an extremely wet summer and lake levels are high as well."

Di Gironimo said water staff believe it's the high-lake levels that have been responsible for throwing silt and some marine life into the large retention tanks underneath Kew Beach. The tanks are designed to collect storm water on its way through the storm sewer system to the lake, retaining pollutants and overflow sewage there rather than pumping it out into the lake.

But the silt and marine life may be clogging the system, Di Gironimo said, causing a backflow into some basements.

"So in the interim what we are doing already is increased inspections," he said. "We have to step it up if we do see this silting. We also have to see whether there are any improvements we can make about the way the retention tanks function. But we can do interim measures to assure the pumping down of the pumps."

In the longer term, the city will likely have to look at finding ways to isolate small local sewers from the big trunk along Coxwell, which deals with flow from across the city - and in determining a more long-term fix for the retention tanks.

That, Di Gironimo said, will take some doing. He and Ward 32 (Beaches-East York) Councillor Sandra Bussin have come to an agreement to move forward as quickly as possible on the matter.

"I have a commitment that this is a priority," Bussin said. "My only worry is that in the environmental assessment process, once you get into the water and fish getting into the sewer system, you're engaged not only with the provincial government but the federal government. Fisheries could get involved because they may have to do certain structures along the beach to stop the silt from coming back, and to stop other things like fish getting in there."