Ensemble Montréal borough mayors calling for more financing

Ensemble Montréal borough mayors are calling for more financing from the Plante administration.

They held a press conference Wednesday morning to share their concerns about their ability to provide essential services to citizens while dealing with a significant revenue shortfall.

“In Montreal North, we’d like to get going on updating infrastructure such as park chalets and play modules, transforming our wading pools into water play areas, and improving our facilities, but my hands are tied,” said borough mayor Christine Black.

“We’re constantly having to do more with the same financial resources, which ultimately means abandoning various projects and even cutting back on basic services to the population. This makes no sense, given that providing local services is the core of our mission.”

They say their multiple pleas for more equitable indexation of transfer payments – which account for some 70 per cent of borough revenues – have gone unheeded.

They claim their boroughs of Montreal North, Saint-Leonard, Outremont, Saint-Laurent, Pierrefonds-Roxboro and Île-Bizard-Sainte-Geneviève increasingly struggle to cope with rising salary costs, inflation, outdated infrastructure, and population growth.

“In Pierrefonds-Roxboro, we have to fight spring flooding every year and dip into our local budget to deploy mitigation measures,” said Dimitrios Jim Beis, the borough mayor there. “At the same time, I have to offer more services to our citizens, modernize our infrastructures and facilities, and redevelop our parks and green spaces.

“How does the administration expect us to do all this with a meagre two per cent indexation? Current funding simply doesn’t give us the means to meet our needs or ambitions.”

Ensemble Montréal’s borough mayors are calling for central transfers to be indexed to inflation.

“Essentially, we have three choices to keep from hitting the wall: increase our local taxes, dip into our cash reserves, or cut services to our citizens,” said Laurent Desbois, borough mayor of Outremont and vice-chairman of the Commission sur les finances et l’administration. “None of these three options is viable or reasonable, either for our boroughs or for the people of Montreal.”

They are renewing these demands on the eve of the Municipal Tax Summit.

“The Municipal Tax Summit is the last hope for our boroughs,” said Alan DeSousa, borough mayor of Saint-Laurent and the Opposition’s finance critic. “It’s crucial that central transfers take our needs into account.

“We’ve barely managed to overcome the financial challenges and make up shortfalls so far, but we’ve been stretching the rubber band way too long. Now it’s about to break.”

They also say the Reform of Borough Funding (RFA) measures need to be improved. To ensure greater territorial equity, Ensemble Montréal mayors propose modifying and adding new borough funding parameters.

“The municipal system relies on the boroughs’ local adaptability,” said Michel Bissonnet, borough mayor of Saint-Léonard. “A healthy city needs strong boroughs. We often hear how Montreal is forced to assume more and more responsibilities that depend on other levels of government. Our reality in the boroughs is that we have to take on more and more responsibilities that depend on the resources granted to us by the central city.”