Contentious urban planning program tabled
“It’s like we’re building a new city,” Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue Mayor Paola Hawa said during a recent meeting about the town’s plans for an undeveloped portion of its northern sector.
This week, the vision the town has for the 93.3 hectares north of Highway 40 took one more step toward fruition with the adoption of the regulatory project — an administrative necessity as council prepares for the outright adoption of the special planning project for the sector. A final public consultation is scheduled for May 25 at 7 p.m. Location to be determined. Hawa said the SPP should be adopted sometime in the first week of June.
Council took its time putting the project together. It commissioned a stack of impact studies, consulted the public through focus groups and public consultations and then hired urban-development firm Provencher_Roy to create a document which crunched the data and created a picture of what the development might look like.
There will be three zones — industrial, commercial and residential — with an eye on maintaining the environmental integrity of the area as much as possible. The industrial sector will focus on green technology. There will be three pockets of residential development and green buffer zones separating the delicate environmental zones from the development. The sector will also function as an entry point to the l’Anse-à-l’Orme ecoterritory.
A plan put forward by the previous administration in 2012 was rejected outright by residents worried about the swell in population and the negative impact on the environment and the traffic flow, so Hawa said they made sure to have the studies in place and to listen to what residents had to say.
A trio of developers who own land in the northern sector have been watching carefully as the town moves toward adopting the SPP. They are opposed to the development restrictions outlined in the draft plan and have said they will sue the town if it is adopted in its current form.
In January, under the title Développement immobilier Ste-Annede-Bellevue, the trio launched an information campaign describing the reduction of the amount of land they would be allowed to develop as “disguised expropriation.” Postcards were mailed to residents saying the town would be forced to buy the land back for millions of dollars which would result in exorbitant tax hikes.
Hawa described the campaign as a “fear tactic” and the projected hike in taxes “an outright lie.”
In a prepared statement, DISAB spokesman Pierre Tessier cited a recent Quebec Court of Appeal case involving the Ville de Lorraine and developers which ruled that the city had abused its power in the application of zoning bylaws and that the result was disguised expropriation.
Ste-Anne director general Martin Bonhomme said that if the developers strictly adhered to the green-friendly criteria detailed in the SPP the base number of 400 units could swell to a maximum of 550 units.
To see the commissioned studies and the SPP document compiled by Provencher_Roy, visit www. ville.sainte-anne-de-bellevue.qc.ca/en.