THEY TOOK HIS LAND AND NEVER TOLD HIM
What’s so important about a chunk of vacant land sandwiched between a nature park and a residential development in Pointe-auxtrembles? The city of Montreal won’t say. But it’s clear it wants all of it — and will use what several owners describe as ruthles
Gilles Labrèche was stunned to learn the city of Montreal now owns his vacant lot in Pointe-aux-trembles. He had no clue they grabbed it in 2017, claiming he was untraceable. They did the same to Christos Goulakos. Other owners, Linda Gyulai discovers, got jacked-up assessments and forms to sign away their ownership rights.
The letter that Rosemary Lafrenière received in the mail in 2017 read like a bad joke.
“We are pleased to inform you that the city of Montreal wants to be owner of two pieces of land shown on the plan,” the two-sentence missive from Montreal’s real estate transaction division said. The next sentence invited her to sign a document that was attached and return it by post or email.
The two pieces were vacant lots that Lafrenière had bought at public auction in 1986 with the hope of making a few bucks on re-sale down the road. Her parcels covered a bit more than an acre inside a 25acre field in Pointe-aux-trembles.
So how much was the city offering Lafrenière to acquire her lots 30 years later? Nothing.
The document she was asked to sign was a renunciation of her right and her heirs’ right to the land, and a renunciation of any right now or in the future to compensation or damages from the city.
“’We want to own your property. Sign this renunciation.’ It’s just so ridiculous,” Lafrenière said last week, summing up the letter and her subsequent exchanges with a civil servant who told her the city wasn’t offering to buy her lots and it wouldn’t expropriate her.
“You want to become owner? Then expropriate,” she said. “That’s the general rule when you want to take land back from a private citizen.”
Lafrenière didn’t hear again from the city — until two months ago.
In late April, in the midst of the COVID -19 pandemic, she received a “notice of correction” that suddenly increases the municipal assessment of her land.
Apparently, the city now thinks it has been wrong for the last three decades in assessing Lafrenière’s hemmed-in and unserviced parcels as worthless.
The city now evaluates the larger of her lots at $367,400 and the smaller one at $75,600. The change will cost her about $6,000 a year in municipal taxes.
It looks to her like the city is using the prospect of paying thousands of dollars a year in taxes as leverage to pressure her into abandoning her property.
Another owner in the field, Elena Krivosheeva, managed to extract a proposal from the city to acquire her two parcels in 2017. But when a civil servant offered her $9,876, she said no thanks.
Like Lafrenière, Krivosheeva received a municipal assessment “correction” out of the blue in late April.
The city now thinks Krivosheeva’s parcels are worth a combined $263,400 for taxation purposes. Yet it hasn’t boosted its purchase offer.
Still, Lafrenière and Krivosheeva seem to be the lucky ones compared to some other owners of lots in the field, which stretches from Sherbrooke St. E. down to the railway tracks just above Notre-dame St. E.
The city simply took Gilles Labrèche’s parcel of land in 2017 without telling him.
The Montreal Gazette tracked down Labrèche and informed him that the city filed a deed taking possession of his lot three years ago.
“It’s not fair,” Labrèche, who’s 87, said when the newspaper sent him a copy of the deed the city filed on his property at the Registre foncier du Québec declaring itself the owner. He’s promised the land to one of his daughters as an inheritance.
And Labrèche isn’t the only owner in the field who had his land taken away by the city behind his back.
So what is so important to Montreal about a hunk of land the size of about 18 football fields sandwiched between Parc-nature Pointe-aux-prairies and a residential development?
It won’t say.
But it’s clear the city wants all of the lots, and it’s using what several owners consider ruthless tactics to get it.
The city ’s real estate transaction division embarked on acquiring the privately owned parcels in 2017 armed with renunciation forms instead of cash.
The civil service spoke of being able to carry out the acquisition operation at “coût nul” (“zero cost”) to the city other than the fee to register the transfer deeds at the land registry office, according to information obtained from a confidential source at the city.
The acquisitions would cost Montreal nothing because owners would renounce their right to compensation by signing the form.
When the city wants to acquire land from big developers, it expropriates or invites them to negotiate land swaps or sales.
But small owners get forms in the mail instructing them to sign their rights away.
Most of the lots in the field belonged to the city in 2017. But 16 parcels were in the hands of six private owners or groups of owners.
One owner didn’t respond to an interview request and another spoke on condition that they not be identified.
The latter owner and Lafrenière received the renunciation form, and both refused to sign.
Krivosheeva, who had already repeatedly asked the city to buy her parcels since her property was hemmed in by the city’s lots, got the $9,876 offer.
And some owners, like Labrèche, didn’t receive a renunciation form, an offer or any communication from Montreal.
Instead, the civil servants filed deeds transferring ownership of their land to the city, claiming that certain owners were untraceable, according to the confidential information obtained by the Montreal Gazette.
The city’s legal department approved this method of appropriation where a “reasonable effort” had been made to find the owners.
But it seems the bureaucrats didn’t look hard enough.
It took the Montreal Gazette less than a minute to locate Christos Goulakos.
The 90-year-old said he was unaware the city had filed a deed taking his six lots in 2017.
“I received nothing, nothing from the city,” he said.
Goulakos was among a group of partners that bought the entire field in 1959. Most of his partners were companies, led by N. Levine & Son Inc., all of which are dissolved. Goulakos bought his stake in the land in his own name.
Goulakos said N. Levine & Son was the lead owner in the group and looked after the business affairs concerning the Pointe-auxtrembles land.
Records show that in the 1980s, the city seized most of the partners’ lots for unpaid municipal taxes.
That’s when the city began auctioning off the tax-foreclosed lots individually to folks like Lafrenière, Labrèche and Krivosheeva.
Every autumn, the city auctions seized properties to recover the outstanding taxes.
A housing development was planned for the site, Goulakos said, but he doesn’t remember what came of the project or how the partners were left with six lots.
Goulakos said he believes the owners of the companies have died. But the owners’ estates must have inherited the companies’ assets, his son, Socrates Goulakos, said.
At any rate, his father still coowned the lots in 2017, he said, so the city had no business taking them.
It’s like a stranger saying you weren’t home when they rang your doorbell, so they decided to take possession of your house.
In its defence, the city said it published a notice of the lot transfers among the legal ads in The Montreal Gazette and Le Devoir in 2017.
“Who’s reading the legal notices in newspapers?” Labrèche’s daughter, Chantal, asked.
“It’s taking advantage of senior citizens. It’s an unfair practice and they (the city) are not on the up and up.”
Chantal Labrèche also said she doesn’t believe the city made an effort to contact her father.
“The city screwed them,” she said, referring to Goulakos and Labrèche.
“The city was probably hoping they were dead.”
Montreal’s land-use plan earmarks the field for future housing development. The zoning has been residential for decades.
On the other hand, the field abuts the Pointe-aux-prairies nature park, and its conservation would double the size of the park.
Yet the field is also 500 metres from the Pointe-aux-trembles train station, built for the Mascouche commuter rail line that opened in 2014. The borough plans a transit-oriented development, or TOD, around the station.
The deed transferring properties owned by Labrèche and Goulakos to the city, like the renunciation form that Lafrenière received, referenced “Section 192 of schedule C to the City Charter.”
The section says the city has the right to own roads and alleys.
What roads and alleys could the city be referring to in a field of trees? They exist only on paper. The field was subdivided into lots on a cadastral map in 1912, decades before Pointe-aux-trembles was annexed by Montreal, in anticipation of housing development.
The city charter is a provincial law, and section 192 of annex C makes it simple for the city to take away people’s land with three “formalities.” The city has to pass a resolution identifying the lot number, publish a notice in a French-language and an English-language daily newspaper in Montreal once a week for three consecutive weeks, and register a deed of ownership at the land registry office.
The resolution approving the city’s appropriation of the land belonging to Goulakos, Labrèche and a third owner who didn’t respond to the Montreal Gazette’s interview request was adopted by civil servants behind closed doors.
The city charter doesn’t say the resolution must be public.
The city’s newspaper notice also satisfied its legal obligation to identify the lots it was taking.
However, the notice didn’t mention that the city was looking for the owners of the properties.
But, then, section 192 is silent on the city’s obligations when it can’t find the owner.
Lafrenière says she tried to explain to a civil servant after receiving the form that the city should expropriate or buy her land instead of expecting to get it for free.
“But it was like I was talking to a first grader about algebra,” she said.
The text of section 192 says it is, in fact, an expropriation that entitles the owner to compensation from the city. And if the owner and the city can’t agree on the indemnity, the matter goes to the Tribunal administratif du Québec to settle.
Defending its actions, the city told the Montreal Gazette it’s entitled to the lots under the city charter.
“In order to formalize its title deeds, the city of Montreal tried to communicate with the owners in question in order to obtain, on their part, a renunciation of their property rights, and this, before starting this process under the charter,” city spokesperson Linda Boutin wrote in an email.
The city won’t expropriate them, her email added, because it prefers to negotiate one-on-one.
“The lots belonging to the owners who have refused to renounce their property rights can be subject to a one-on-one acquisition process,” Boutin’s email said. “Negotiations are underway.”
Lafrenière, for one, said the city has never made her an offer.
The renunciation form said Lafrenière didn’t have the right to own her property.
The words still sting, she said. “The right-of-way of the said lane should have been handed over to the city,” the form said, “all the more so since this lane has always been developed and maintained by the city and that no tax has ever been imposed.”
The assertion that an alley existed on the site, much less one maintained by the city, was untrue. So was the city’s claim that it never charged her tax on it.
Lafrenière was a young entrepreneur when she heard about the city auction in 1986.
“It was a frenzy,” she said of the bidding. The city officials at the auction said a housing development was planned for the field, she said.
“I thought, ‘You invest in land, maybe it’ll be worth something some day.’ They showed you the streets and alleyways where development was going to happen.”
She purchased her smaller parcel for $725, and a stranger helped her bid on the larger parcel, which cost $5,800.
But for an unknown reason, the city auctioned off the lots that were mapped as streets and alleys on the cadastral plan. The city kept the ones where houses would be built.
The situation seemed to be reflected in the assessment of Lafrenière’s new lots. She received a notice from the city saying her land was worth $1 for taxation purposes.
It was the same experience for the other buyers.
Year after year, the city’s tax bill charged two cents in property tax on the lots.
But on the same bills, the city charged Lafrenière and other lot owners “local improvement taxes.”
Lafrenière’s old bills show she paid for construction of three main sewers in annual instalments. The number of instalments indicates they were built in the early to mid-1970s.
Lafrenière paid over $4,300 in local improvement taxes until 2005, when instalment no. 30 of 30 was paid on the last of the sewers.
Local improvements were only supposed to be charged to owners whose properties bordered and benefitted from the infrastructure.
So whose sewers did Lafrenière pay for? The land is forested.
The city has yet to clarify where the sewers are located.
After the sewers were paid for, Lafrenière, Labrèche and other owners say they stopped receiving a tax bill from the city.
Labrèche said he visited an Accès Montréal office around 2006 to find out why he hadn’t gotten an annual tax bill. The city employee told him not to worry because his lot was valued at $1, he said.
His daughter Johanne said she recently checked the city’s assessment roll online and thought all was fine. He’s still listed as owner of the land.
It turns out the city never updated its records after it appropriated the lots belonging to Goulakos and Labrèche in 2017.
Johanne Labrèche said she even asked the city in 2018 whether her father owed money because she didn’t see a tax bill for his land. The civil servant told her he was in good standing, she said.
Krivosheeva paid $1,840 for her parcels at a city auction, plus notarial fees. Afterward, she discovered the city had sold her lots that are designated as future streets and lanes.
“You can’t build on a street. Why would the city sell streets?” she asked.
The city didn’t sell Krivosheeva her parcels in some long-ago era. It was in 2004. And the city had already sold her lots at auction before.
The previous owner of Krivosheeva’s land paid $6,200 at the 1986 auction and his widow then lost it for non-payment of taxes.
“The city has to stop selling over and over again the same useless lots for non-payment of taxes and penalize its citizens for trusting the city,” she said.
The buyers can’t sell lots that have no road access or infrastructure and can’t be built on, she said, so they sooner let their properties go than pay taxes.
Krivosheeva can’t even give away her land. She tried to make an ecological donation so she could at least get a federal tax credit, she said. But her land didn’t qualify, she said, because the field is zoned residential.
The new $367,400 municipal assessment for the larger of Lafrenière’s parcels is higher than the $341,500 average evaluation of a house with a garden in the borough of Rivière-des-prairies—pointeaux-trembles.
“So my little acre of greenery is worth more than a single-family home in R.D.P.?” Lafrenière asked. “It’s insanity.”
The city’s Boutin said the evaluation department is carrying out a “correction of anomalies to ensure a greater coherence and equity in the value of vacant land on Montreal territory. The 16 vacant lots should have had a non-zero value on the roll for a long time.”
In other words, the city says the $1 evaluation — tantamount to a value of zero — was an error.
But that means the city repeated the error every time it tabled a new three-year assessment roll for the island in the last 30 years because the city’s evaluators came up with a value of $1 for the lots in the field each time.
The evaluators have now determined the parcels in the Pointe-auxtrembles field should be assessed at $80 per square-metre, Boutin said.
They only forgot to include the increased assessments in the new roll that was tabled in September, she said. That’s why the correction notices were sent in April.
“This new evaluation was made independently of any eventual project by the city for this vacant land,” Boutin wrote in her email.
The city denies the new assessments and accompanying taxes are meant to pressure hold-out owners to give up their land.
“Not at all,” Boutin said. “The objective is to apply better equity in values and taxes.” Equity doesn’t mean equality. For example, the city assesses large sections of a 1.4-million-square-metre field in western Pierrefonds at $15.86 per square metre and $18.65 per square metre. Smaller parts of it are assessed at $59 per square metre.
The city purchased the field for $84 million, including taxes, from developer Grilli Development Inc. in December to conserve with the Grand Parc de l’ouest. The city paid $60 per square metre.
At the opposite extreme, the city has assessed dozens of small vacant lots belonging to 70 owners in an unserviced field near Rodolphe-forget and Maurice-duplessis Blvds. in Rivière-des-prairies at $175 per square metre. Like the owners in the Pointe-aux-trembles field, these owners can’t sell or build because each lot is hemmed in.
The local city councillor says she’s baffled to learn of the city’s manoeuvres.
“It’s completely immoral,” Suzanne Décarie, who represents Pointe-aux-trembles, said of the city’s deeds taking away land without the owners’ knowledge.
“We don’t expect that from an institution. It has to have an ethics code. It doesn’t steal land from people. Vicious is the word.”
Everything about the case is an aberration, she said, including the $1 evaluation.
“By what right did the city sell roads and alleys?” Décarie asked. “By what right did the city allow itself to sell, at auction, property that has no value?
“We’re talking about an institution, the city of Montreal. But if we were talking about a private entrepreneur, we’d be talking about corruption.”
Montreal counts 11,567 vacant lots across the island, 2,036 of them in her borough. Have other vacant lot owners lost their land to the city this way, she wondered?
Krivosheeva and Lafrenière have filed appeals to fight the city’s “correction” of their property assessments.
But it would be easier if the city expropriated the land if its goal is to own it anyway, Lafrenière said.
“I’d be happy for them to expropriate the bloody thing,” she said.
However, it seems the city would rather pay legal fees to defend its new assessment, perhaps in the hope that she’ll abandon her property, she said.
“It’s like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” Lafrenière said of the city. “It’s like a lot of not really smart people got together and tried to devise something crafty, and it’s just laughable.”