Suburban mayors trash Montreal tax hikes
Suburban leaders call agglomeration hike ‘a nightmare’ and ‘a slap in the face’
to be the presentation of a document to Mayor Plante with suggestions on how the agglo could be more fairly managed,” Gibson said. “Perhaps there could be committees for transit and water etc., and we could serve on those committees.” Dollard-des-Ormeaux Mayor Alex Bottausci said the lack of warning and the unilateral decision was disappointing, that it demonstrated that the agglomeration is dysfunctional. He said the budget showed a “complete lack of respect towards the demerged cities.” So how will the mayors absorb the payment hike? Options include clawing back planned projects, reducing services, or passing it on to the taxpayers. A document handed out to reporters last Friday listed the potential increase to homeowners’ taxes in the affected West Island municipalities as ranging from $55 to $200. “I imagine we’ll have to take some of the extra cost from the surplus,” Rouleau said. “We don’t have a tree that grows money.” “I doubt very much that we can say that (the hike) will have zero impact on taxes,” Bourelle said. said he would like the mayors to get a detailed look at what expenses are now the responsibility of the Montreal Agglomeration Council. He said every expense which, for whatever reason, is transferred from the centre city to the agglo is passed on, in part, to the suburbs. “We (in the suburbs) never take anything for granted when it comes to the agglomeration,” Rouleau said. “Accounting can be very innovative.” Kirkland’s mayor is hoping Plante will not only agree to budget revisions, but will agree to making changes to the way the agglomeration functions. As it stands, the grand majority of the voting power on the agglomeration council — more than 80 per cent — comes from the City of Montreal, which leaves the suburban mayors with no real say. “This taxation without representation doesn’t make sense,” Gibson said. “The agglomeration does not work. (Suburban mayors) are not part of the process. We want to be involved as equal partners. After all, we pay up to 50 per cent of our budgets to the agglo.” Money paid to the agglomeration pays for shared services, including transit and law enforcement. “I would like Step 2 in this process On Tuesday, Bourelle and other mayors in the ASM sent individual letters to Plante saying the unexpected hike leaves the municipalities scrambling to adjust their 2018 budgets with only two weeks left before the legal deadline and asking again for the mayor to revise the budget. He said the ASM wants to work in partnership with Plante to come up with an equitable budget. “We are firm in our position,” Bourelle said. “We will keep the pressure up. The (agglo) budget is based on choices. Those choices can be changed.” Benoit Dorais, the Montreal executive committee member responsible for finance, said in a statement last week that the increased payments were necessary because the pension fund needed to be topped up after losing ground in 2008 and as a result of extensive work that needed to be done to water infrastructure, increased funding for transportation and a new contract with the police. “Every municipality experiences unexpected expenses,” Bourelle said. “That’s when you sit down and look at ways to offset the expense so that the final budget reflects a citizen’s ability to pay.” Dorval Mayor Edgar Rouleau the majority of the suburbs had been paying more than their share to the agglomeration for a decade. After the formula was corrected, a credit was given to each municipality. The credit would be spread out over three years. The mayors were told at the Montreal Agglomeration Council meeting last Wednesday that this year’s credit had been calculated into each municipality’s agglo payments, yet the municipalities are still faced with payment hikes of anywhere from $117,900 in Senneville to $3.7 million in Pointe-Claire. Pointe-Claire had already mailed its 2018 tax bills to residents. Pointe-Claire Mayor John Belvedere said there would be a caucus meeting this week to decide what will be done. What angered West Island mayors most was that they heard about the agglo hikes at the same time as the media. On Friday, Montreal city manager Alain Marcoux said that in the future the mayors would be informed of any changes in advance. That same day, 15 mayors who make up the Association of Suburban Municipalities (ASM) gathered at Westmount City Hall to call for Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante to sit down with them and make adjustments to the agglo budget. Montreal West Mayor and ASM president Beny Masella called the increases “unacceptable and unfair.” On Monday, Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante, who is also president of the agglomeration, said she has no plans to revise the budget, but would be open to sitting down with the mayors to explain why the hike was necessary. West Island mayors did not mince words when asked to comment on last week’s announcement that suburban payments to the Montreal Agglomeration Council would be hiked, on average, by 5.3 per cent. “It’s a nightmare,” Kirkland Mayor Michel Gibson said. “A complete shock. Disastrous,” Beaconsfield Mayor Georges Bourelle said. “It was a slap in the face,” Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue Mayor Paola Hawa said. Ste-Anne is the only West Island demerged municipality which saw a dip in agglo payments, but the dip fell around $350,000 short of what the town expected. “We were relying on that money,” Hawa said. “We worked so hard to come up with an equitable formula to calculate agglo payments and now this.” Last year an adjustment was made to the formula the agglo used to calculate the theoretical commercial land wealth of a municipality after it was discovered that