No one at risk over glitchy radio system, city says
Backup measures can handle outages flagged in auditor-general’s report
The safety of Montreal citizens and its emergency responders are not at risk because of the glitchy radio-telecommunications systems that failed several times in 2016, city authorities said Tuesday.
Members of Mayor Denis Coderre’s administration were responding to an annual report by the city’s auditor-general that found the city’s attempts to upgrade the dated multimilliondollar radio communications system for the city’s police and fire departments was poorly managed and vastly over budget, leading to outages seven times in 2016, some as long as three hours.
In her report, which is required by provincial law to ensure the city’s finances are being properly handled, auditor-general Michèle Galipeau also singled out the city’s management of its emerald ash borer crisis, drinking water conservation and traffic-light upgrades for criticism.
“Note that the public security of citizens is not compromised by the present state of the (radiocommunication) system,” Pierre Desrochers, president of the city ’s executive committee, said at a news conference.
“The system itself, the measures put in place as a contingency plan and the application of a remedial plan will assure the continuity of public security.”
Plagued by technical and management difficulties since it was launched in 2014, the system was mostly saved due to a remedial plan put in place by the city’s information technology department, but the miscues and reboots swelled the budget by $51 million to $129 million. Galipeau found the revamped system still lacks geolocalisation capabilities so police officers and firefighters can be traced once they leave their vehicles. As well, the current radio service cannot penetrate large public buildings, like concert halls or hospital complexes, or underground spaces with the exception of the métro system, potentially cutting officers off from communications.
Harout Chitilian, the executive committee member responsible for information technologies, said the city has organized a backup system in the event of outages that includes the use of cellphones, and has not had any outages in six months. It is also looking into obtaining geolocalisation capabilities and improving signal penetration, he said.
WATER MANAGEMENT
Although Montreal has reduced the distribution of water per person per day by 26 per cent over the last 15 years, residents of the island still waste a huge amount of water. While the Canadian average for drinking water distribution per person per day dropped to 466 litres in 2013, it stands at 823 litres per day on the island of Montreal. This is in part because Montreal is an old city with old infrastructure, so an estimated 31 per cent of its water supply leaks from its cracked and aging pipes. (This is an improvement over 10 years ago, when the figure was 40 per cent, but still far above the Quebec Strategy for Drinking Water Conservation that calls for municipalities to hit a maximum leakage loss of 20 per cent).
While most major Canadian cities like Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, Edmonton and Winnipeg have a water-meter installation rate of 100 per cent, Montreal sits at 23 per cent. This means most of its citizens are not taxed based on the amount of water they use, and thus are less careful. Desrochers said the city is pressuring its institutional, commercial and industrial clients to install meters, with the aim of 100-per-cent compliance by 2023, as compared to 30 per cent now. So far, 12,000 meters are in use. The city has been spending a record amount of money on fixing its ailing water infrastructure, Desrochers said, shelling out $91 million in 2016 as compared to $16 million in the early 2000s, and it plans to increase spending to $143 million a year from 2017 to 2021.
TRAFFIC LIGHTS
Galipeau noted that the city’s 2008 Transportation Plan called for the upgrading of its traffic lights at 1,400 intersections at a cost of $42 million. But by 2016, fewer than 750 intersections had been upgraded, at a cost of $81 million. Desrochers said the delay and cost overruns occurred because the city updated the initial norms, requiring sound signals for the visually impaired, pedestrian signals, countdown timers and preferential measures for buses.