Suburban mayors continue push for agglomeration reform
Determined is how the president of the Association of Suburban Municipalities Beny Masella described the ASM’s push for agglomeration reform.
With the provincial election just around the corner the ASM — which represents 15 municipalities including all the demerged West Island suburbs — is hoping to sit down with Montreal to discuss possible changes to the way the Montreal Agglomeration Council functions with the goal of coming to a consensus and presenting the potential reforms to the new government to get its legal blessing.
The mention of agglomeration reform may make some eyes glaze over, but Masella said the current situation is unfair to all citizens of demerged municipalities.
Demerged municipalities pay at least 50 per cent of their operating budgets to the agglomeration for shared services including transportation and police and fire services. They also pay a lump sum of $8 million a year to the development of the downtown core, but have no say as to what projects will be funded by the contribution.
And because the Montreal mayor and borough councillors make up 87 per cent of the agglo and the suburban mayors only 13 per cent — the suburban mayors have zero impact when it comes time to vote on monetary issues.
The quote-part (amount owed) by a demerged suburb for services is based entirely on property value. Masella said that needs to be reviewed. He said a hybrid of property value and population might be a more equitable way to calculate what is owed by each suburb.
“Take Westmount, for example. It has expensive properties, but its population is small,” Masella said. “We’re not reinventing the wheel. These (hybrid calculations) exist in other parts of the province.”
In the past, suburban mayors have complained about having to pay a portion of the budget for citycentre events which do not necessarily benefit suburban citizenry.
What Masella doesn’t want is an all-out war with Montreal.
“We represent 237,000 people, but we don’t want to demand. We want to be partners,” he said.
The pressing issue right now is the budget and the ASM is hoping to participate in its preparation.
ASM mayors were blindsided in 2017 when Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante’s administration hit them with tax hikes as high as 9.8 per cent after promising during her campaign to keep tax hikes to around two per cent. The mayors scrambled, digging into their surpluses to keep citizens’ tax hikes to a minimum.
Masella doesn’t want a repeat performance and after last year’s tax brouhaha, Montreal promised to consult. But he said there hasn’t been much in the way of consultation, to date.
Whatever the template for agglomeration reform Montreal and the ASM might manage to hammer out in the weeks or months to come, it would require the legal blessing of the Quebec government to become law. Montreal is not the only city with an agglomeration council in the province. Longueuil and Quebec City also have agglomeration councils, but Masella said each agglomeration would have different issues to tackle.