Suburban mayors pleased with City’s new openness
Plante administration vows to work with officials on agglomeration governance
Encouraged by recent discussions with Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante’s administration, the mayors of the island suburbs held a news conference on Thursday to thank her for her openness and to herald a new partnership with the city they say could result in changes to how island-wide responsibilities are shared and financed.
“We’ve never seen this level of openness from any of the previous administrations,” Montreal West Mayor Beny Masella said in the foyer of Montreal City Hall, surrounded by most of the other mayors of the 15 suburbs that demerged from the city in 2006.
Only eight months ago, the same group stood shoulder to shoulder to denounce the newly elected Plante administration’s first municipal budget, which raised spending and, with it, the suburbs’ contributions to the cost of running shared services of the so-called agglomeration, such as public transit, police and fire, well above the inflation rate. Some suburbs were forced to raise their local property taxes.
Together, the suburbs have 245,000 residents and, on average, contribute half of their local municipal taxes — more than $400 million — to the agglomeration budget.
However, the suburbs’ abrupt change in tone on Thursday was in response to a recent offer from Plante and her right-hand man, city executive committee chairperson Benoit Dorais, to work with them to revise the governance of the agglomeration, Masella said.
The two sides met on suburban territory, in Westmount, on Aug. 29, he said, where Dorais offered to set up four committees that will look at making changes in four areas: how to involve the suburbs in the budget-making process; how the suburbs’ contributions are determined; what responsibilities should be shared costs on the island; and how shared expenses are divided.
As an example of a shared expense, the suburban mayors offered the salary of Montreal’s city manager, 51 per cent of which is paid by the agglomeration. The mayors say they’re convinced the city’s top mandarin spends most of his time working for the city of Montreal.
The committees, which Masella said will bring together administrators from the suburbs and Montreal, would be expected to submit their recommendations by the spring.
“The Plante-Dorais administration has really opened the door for us,” said Masella, who is president of the Association of Suburban Municipalities. “They said: ‘We want you to be real partners with us.’ They want us to sit down with them and help develop some budgetary guidelines that their administrators will use to build the budget. We’ve never been involved at that level before.”
In fact, the 2018 budget was a “disaster” because it was foisted on the suburbs at the last minute, he said. The suburbs learned what was in it at the same time as the media.
Both sides have agreed to redress the budget process first, Masella said. However, any changes would apply starting in 2020, since next year’s budget, which Montreal is due to table in late fall, is already at an advanced stage, he said.
And despite the suburbs’ conciliatory tone, Masella and Beaconsfield Mayor Georges Bourelle warned that the suburbs will refuse to support the 2019 budget if spending increases are above the annual inflation rate as determined by the Conference Board of Canada.
“We’re very much expecting for 2019 that the budget will be below inflation,” Bourelle said. “There’s no doubt that if it’s not the case, and the budget is way above inflation, we’re not going to be happy with the budget and we’re not going to support it.”
And while Bourelle lauded the Plante-Dorais administration for its “very open, very positive gesture,” he also suggested that the suburbs are prepared to pursue other recourse in case the talks with Montreal fail.
“If we’re not successful, we’re going to have to go to a next step, which would be to try to involve the government,” he said.
No one from the Plante-Dorais administration attended the press conference, and Masella said the suburbs organized it simply to say thank you.
“They haven’t really asked for a trade-off,” Masella said. “They realize that they would much prefer to work with us in peace and not to have the acrimony that we saw last January. It’s not productive. So they ’re showing a nice openness to working with us, and we’re hoping that it’s going to translate into … concrete actions.”
They haven’t really asked for a trade-off. They realize that they would much prefer to work with us in peace.