Busy future for Ste. Anne de Bellevue planned

BY ELYSE AMEND

elyse.amend@transcontinental.ca

While the City of Ste. Anne de Bellevue and the Société de Développement Commercial (SDC) – the merchants’ association – are nervous about the impact the next five years of construction and redevelopment in the town will have on local business, they are enthusiastic about the opportunities the final product will bring.

“It’s both a blessing and a curse. If you’ve ever redone your kitchen or your bathroom, you know there’s no such thing as gain without pain,” said Gordon Robinson, head of the SDC. “But what we’re going to end up with is going to be amazing.”

Last Tuesday afternoon, the city held a press conference to present the major projects that will take place in Ste. Anne between 2008 and 2011. One of the highlights was the $5 million Ste. Anne Street reconstruction, plan, which will see the entire stretch between the Galipeault Bridge and Maple Road be redeveloped and repaved.

“It’s going to be done after the big season, making sure we’re not penalizing the merchants. We’re trying to make sure the logistics of everything go well, so that we don’t have a situation like on St. Laurent Boulevard,” city clerk Karl Sacha Langlois said. “For sure, it’s going to be a disturbance. There’s no way of avoiding it. But we want to do it without penalizing anybody.”

The Ste. Anne Street redevelopment will take place between 2008 and 2009 in three phases. “That way, it’s not our whole street at one time,” Robinson said, adding the construction phases will allow the merchants to hold events on one end of the street while work is underway at the other.

Parking meters maintained

The town also announced it will continue to use the parking meters along Ste. Anne Street, a topic that has elicited much publicity this year. Visitors will continue to pay $1 per hour of parking, with a maximum of three hours. With the parking fees and tickets, the city estimates the 13 parking meters will bring in $340,000 each year, which will go towards the road work. While many merchants were critical of the project at first, Robinson said the attitude has changed.

“Anybody’s who’s used to free ice cream will object to five cents a cone, even if it’s a buck everywhere else,” he said. “I’d say it’s gone from 90 per cent negative - mostly because of bad communication and decisions that the city took autocratically – to 50 per cent who are now comfortable with the idea, 25 per cent who are sleeping with their eyes open, keeping an eye on the situation, and 25 per cent who would still complain about free ice cream.”

The meters have also created parking turnover, meaning visitors can often park right in front of where they want to go, if they choose to pay for parking. If not, Robinson reminded that about 60 per cent of parking in Ste. Anne, including the biggest lot on du College Street, is free. He also emphasized that residents who have a parking sticker can park on Ste. Anne Street without paying, by simply printing out a ‘resident’ ticket from the machines.

“Visitorship to the town is up from last year. The amount of resident traffic in the town has about tripled,” Robinson said. “People are actually using their local village now. And these are people who shop 12 months a year.”

Village “not dying”

Langlois also said the numbers show the Ste. Anne village is doing well: “The statistics we have show there were 170,000 transactions in the six month (test) period. Usually there are at least two people in each car,” he said. “And that’s not counting the people that are parking in the back on du College and on the side streets, the students, the boats that come in…The village is not dying.”

According to Robinson, the village also currently has a lower than average vacancy rate, and is expecting some interesting business candidates in the future. “I haven’t seen this type of activity since the old Quai Sera days,” he said, referring to the West Island landmark that burnt down in 1999. He added the city and SDC are working on creating more annual seasonal events, starting with Ste. Anne de Bellevue’s Halloween celebration next Wednesday. The community event will see the daycares and merchants get in on all the spooky fun through costumes, decorations, and all kinds of other surprises.

“This is a happening town,” Robinson said.

Library to be expanded

Ste. Anne de Bellevue is currently also waiting for a response from the provincial government to their funding request for the $1.5 million library expansion project. They are looking for a 50-50 split between Quebec and the city for the expansion, which they hope to have completed by 2010.

According to Josée Caron, Ste. Anne’s library services coordinator, the dollar amount for the renovations came as a surprise, but is justified: the library’s building size is only at 65 per cent of the provincial norm. The collection, which is between 18,000 and 19,000, is also below average.

“We’re going to make it bigger for one reason,” said Langlois. “There is demand.”

Along with expanding the library’s size and adding a mezzanine on the second floor, increasing the number of Internet access terminals, and making more space for youth, the library is also hoping to increase its English-language collection.

“Our English population has gone up, and we want to serve that population,” Caron said. However, she pointed out the project cannot move forward until they get word from Quebec.

“At this moment, it’s still just a project. We submitted our request for grants to the culture minister in March, and we’re still waiting,” Caron said.

Other projects in Ste. Anne de Bellevue include:

- a bicycle path that will connect the north side of the city to the Ste. Anne village. The $2.25 million project will be done in three phases between 2008 and 2010. The agglomeration council will cover all of the costs;

- the extension of Morgan Boulevard to the industrial park. The $1.5 million project is scheduled to be complete by spring 2008;

- a nature park in the north sector, around the l’Anse a l’Orme area, for summer 2009;

- a $2.4 million, 550 metre sound wall along Highway 20 in the south sector by 2010. The cost will be split 50-50 between the city and the agglomeration council;

- new traffic lights on des Anciens Combattants Boulevard, at the corner of the St. Pierre and Demers bridge, to be complete in spring 2008.The Transport Ministry is covering 40 per cent of the $750,000 project, while the agglomeration council is covering the remaining 60 per cent.

- Langlois also said Transport Quebec is currently working on an alternate access plan between Ste. Anne de Bellevue and Ile Perrot in preparation for the $98 million Galipeault Bridge reconstruction. Preparatory work is already underway, and construction is expected to last until 2010.