Review slams plan for west Pierrefonds
87% opposed to constructing housing on site, public consultation office says
Montreal’s public consultation office says it’s sending the city back to the drawing board to come up with an acceptable vision for the development of western Pierrefonds.
It’s the main recommendation offered by the Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM), which released an 89page report on the future of the Pierrefonds-Ouest sector on Friday, following three months of hearings that attracted more than 400 people this spring.
“The present report notes a major problem in terms of social acceptability of the vision submitted by the city,” the OCPM, a body of independent experts who are arms’ length from the city, said in a statement issued with its final report.
The OCPM’s president, Dominique Ollivier, said in an interview that 87 per cent of those who offered an opinion on the administration’s vision of allowing housing construction on the site were opposed to it.
What’s more, several questions remain, including the actual number of endangered species in the area, the impact of construction on the potential for area flooding and the provincial government’s plans for a future extension of Highway 40 to provide access to the site.
“At this point, we do not have all the elements to decide whether the vision is viable or not,” Ollivier said. “What we’re saying to the city is that most (of the) people who came to the consultation, most people who were reached, are against the proposed vision. So you should go back to the drawing table, keep doing an upstream planning process that would allow them to see more scenarios than the only one that was on the table at this consultation.”
At issue is a 360-hectare area of natural space with wetlands, meadow and woods in Pierrefonds-Roxboro borough. Developers who acquired most of the land over the years want to build a 5,500-unit housing project, dubbed CapNature, on about 180 hectares of it, while an adjacent 180 hectares — about the size of Mount Royal Park — would be conserved as nature space.
However, the administration of Mayor Denis Coderre didn’t ask for a consultation on the project or on a special planning program for the site that the developers themselves told the OCPM they’ve been negotiating with the city and borough for the past 10 years to support their housing proposal. The developers revealed that nearly two dozen versions of the special planning program — known by its acronym in French, PPU — have been drafted behind closed doors in that time.
Instead, the administration mandated the OCPM to consult the public on the principle of building housing.
But a consensus around a vision of what to do with a site is normally sought before a PPU or a specific project are proposed, the OCPM says in its report.
“The commission questions the apparent lack of transparency of the planning process carried out over the past 10 years, and exposes the confusion clearly expressed by participants regarding the object of the consultation, which omits the Cap-Nature real estate project, to the great dissatisfaction of land owners, developers and citizens alike,” it says.
In fact, the developers told the OCPM they too were dissatisfied because the administration didn’t submit their project for consultation.
The developers didn’t respond to an interview request on Friday.
And opponents, including environmental groups, told the OCPM they think the consultation process is a sham because the administration seems ready to greenlight the developers’ plans.
The tension wasn’t lost on the members of the OCPM, who noted in their report that a climate of mistrust prevailed at the hearings.
The OCPM received a record number of opinions for this type of consultation, including 272 written briefs. It also heard from 73 individuals.
“We could see a very strong opposition to only putting a development vision forward,” Ollivier said. “They wanted the conversation to also include a possibility of conserving the entire 360 hectares of land.”
The report was released a week into the campaign for the Nov. 5 municipal election.
Russell Copeman, a member of the Coderre administration in the mandate that is ending and the city executive committee member responsible for urban planning, called the OCPM report a “very welcome contribution to the debate.”
“I wouldn’t say we’re being sent back to the drawing board,” he said. “The first recommendation of the OCPM is to continue the planning, but to ensure greater involvement and greater citizen participation.”
A future Coderre administration would continue to support housing for the site but allow for adjustments to the density and type of residential construction, he said.
“The position of the administration hasn’t changed,” Copeman said. “We believe that this an appropriate and propitious site for residential development while protecting those areas of sensitivity in terms of wetlands.”
The only alternative is for a public authority to buy or expropriate the land for a park, Copeman added.
Justine McIntyre, an opposition councillor in Pierrefonds-Roxboro who is now running for mayor of the borough as leader of Vrai Changement pour Montréal party, said the report is a rebuke of the way the borough and the city have handled development of the territory.
“It doesn’t seem like a genuine approach,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like it’s being done in good faith.”