City to open referendum registers for loan bylaws

As spelled out in Quebec's Cities and Towns Act, municipalities are obliged to consult residents before enacting loan legislation. The five bylaws in question were tabled in city council in February.

Westmount wants to borrow more than $3.6 million for its road, sewer and water main reconstruction program this summer, $630,000 for Hydro Westmount electrical network restoration, $800,000 to refurbish Westmount Park's playing fields, and $180,000 for various other needs, including vehicles, office furniture, traffic lights and street lighting. "It's a formality, except if someone is unhappy with something," Mayor Karin Marks said of the procedures. "There may be more, but there are two things that we often pass that have to go to a register to give people the opportunity to express their dissatisfaction — and they are generally either zoning bylaws or loan bylaws. "It's really an opportunity," she added. "If there's something that we're doing that doesn't involve a zoning change, but for which we're borrowing a great deal of money, it allows residents to express their opposition to it should they have some."

While loan bylaw registers don't usually attract much attention, according to Marks, there was at least one instance in Westmount, about a dozen years ago, when a sufficient number of residents were able to halt a piece of loan legislation. "When we were going to rebuild the police and fire station — we were going to turn it perpendicular to where it is right now and build it into the side of the hill — the loan bylaw was defeated," she said.

The register will be open from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Monday in city council's chamber. The number of signatures needed to require that each of the bylaws be submitted to a referendum is 500, failing which they will be deemed to have been approved. The results will be announced at 7:05 p.m. Monday.