Civic Alert: Tremblay's biggest mistake?

After the battle and the name-calling there was harmony, because the main objective of all the candidates was to further their party’s objectives.

So it should have been when 15 cities voted to demerge from the megacity. Instead, Gérald Tremblay and his coterie of lobbyists spent untold energy persuading poor Jean Charest and his responsible minister, Jean-Marc Fournier, to make things as difficult as possible for the reconstituted cites.

It could be his biggest mistake.

With a chance to build a united front in building the Montreal economy, and with Quebec City insisting the off-Island suburbs help subsidize Montreal, he flings mud at his on-Island partners, with abusive tax proposals.

What encouragement can that be for Laval and the others to throw in their fortunes and partner Montreal in creating a great metropolis?

Rather than forming a team to further the shared interests of all on the Island, Tremblay has promoted more discord then ever!



79.5 cents tax is too high



The visible part of property tax is the bill that sets out the calculation of the property value and the rate fixed by the council. With values increased, as they have this year, then the rate should be reduced to compensate.

According to Baie d’Urfé Mayor Maria Tutino, a professional statistician who is the mayors’ association numbers expert, there should have been a reduction of 11.85 per cent.

Tremblay set the Island-wide residential tax at 79.49 cents per $100 valuation. This is only a reduction of 4.7 per cent.

The local tax equivalent for Montrealers was reduced 13.4 per cent, hence the cries of abuse by the suburbs.

The tax credit due for the over-charging in 2006 was also missing. Together some $13 million is being improperly taken from suburban taxpayers, Tutino calculated



Behind the boycott



None of the suburban mayors saw the complete 2007 budget until Wednesday morning, when there was a very short briefing by City Treasurer Robert Lamontagne to their association chair, Karin Marks, and a working group of colleagues. Neither Tremblay nor Frank Zampino was present to explain their reasoning behind the numbers.

Despite the paucity of assistance, the Island mayors soon found that residents had again been abused in the setting of the agglom residential tax rate, which did not drop enough to compensate for the increase in property evaluation.

They were furious. Last year, Montreal had inflated the property tax rate and been forced to refund $42 million. Now there were more tricks,

The regular council was scheduled for 5 p.m. the next evening (Thursday). As usual, the mayors convened three hours earlier. Last week, all were present and their thoughts were dominated by the frustration over the residential tax abuse. Every effort at their cooperation seemed to have been abused.

Since the walk-out in April, the mayors had continually discussed whether to boycott further sessions. Now they agreed there was no alternative. They hand-wrote a statement and the entire group went down to the Great Hall, outside the council chamber, where TV, radio and print journalists eagerly heard Marks read it and Tutino explain her

calculations.



Walk-in



Last Thursday was a rare day of municipal drama. The mayors had been surprised on Wednesday by the Tremblay cynicism over the residential tax rate. The next step was the tabling of the budget at 9.30 a.m. on Thursday morning.

This was expected to be a formal procedure. Tremblay had even agreed that they should have two seats on the committee that was to meet eight times to consider the departmental budgets. Very Danyluk (TMR) and Edgar Rouleau (Dorval) were nominated for the places.

But for various reasons, most mayors did not travel downtown. Karin Marks and Vera Danyluk had an early meeting and were last-minute arrivals at downtown City Hall. They found only a handful of colleagues — Campbell Stuart (Montreal-West), John Meaney (Kirkland) and Bill Tierney (Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue), who has the longest commute.

Marks and Danyluk found the others so upset at the abusive tax that they sent in a message to the council chairman, Claude Trudel, that they would not be joining the session.

The ridiculous council structure is such that there is a quorum whether the suburbs attend or not, so the meeting went on.

At that stage, there was no boycott. Nor did the mayors walk out. This time they simply didn’t walk in!



Did Normandeau get the message?



When the mayors finally had their much delayed face-to-face meeting with Minister Nathalie Normandeau last month, they emphasized that they could not tolerate the present Agglom system.

They made the point that most were at least supporters of the provincial Liberal Party (Karin Marks is an officer of the riding association), but they could not support the present structure or the government’s lack of flexibility.

If it was not clear before, even Normandeau must be ready to face it now. The interest in Mario Dumont and the ADQ did not completely fade with summer and the link built then has recently been refreshed.

Some mayors have set a marker of Dec. 15 for a response about the Agglom structure from Normandeau following their meeting. They feel Tremblay’s failure to fairly reduce the Agglom tax strengthens their conflict-

of-interest accusations.



Civic Studies



Tax setting The Agglom tax is the Island-wide tax set by the Tremblay-Zampino administration. But also each independent city makes its own tax rates to cover local services and debt. Although the council’s monthly meeting is next Monday, Westmount’s budget meeting will be the following week — Dec. 18. Hampstead and Côte St. Luc have scheduled their meetings for the same evening.

Already known Pointe Claire settled its budget two weeks ago, with no increase in local residential tax.

Central costs In boroughs, the tax rate for local services is decided downtown. Some boroughs charge additional taxes, usually because the central city has not allocated enough funds. They include Anjou, Lachine, St. Leonard, Ville-Marie, Pierrefonds and Montreal-North. But the champion is LaSalle where there will be an extra 17.4 per cent, making nonsense of Tremblay’s promise to avoid tax increases.

Team play Although Bill Steinberg (Hampstead) and Maria Tutino (Baie d’Urfé) have boycotted the Agglom council meetings since the April walk-out, they have attended the meetings of the mayors’ association that take place privately before each session.

Travelling Last week, MNA Jacques Chagnon has been in Val d’Aosta, in the Italian Alps, attending a Francophonie conference as a Quebec delegate. On the return journey, he spent two days in Brussels as a guest of Belgian parliamentarians. Five official groups there are involved in debate on cultural diversity. This is another of Chagnon’s interests and for which he represented Francophonie colleagues at UNESCO.

Agglomerate To gather up in a ball, as a thread — Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, circa 1755.

Hospitalized Westmount Councillor John de Castell is in hospital with a recurrent illness. His wife, Terry Lanthier, has asked for no visitors, but Mayor Karin Marks suggested friends send him cheerful cards. “We will make sure they reach him,� she promised.

Park Avenue Party politics triumphs over people. When will Marvin Rotrand draw the line in the sand?

Blackmail That’s what Laval Mayor Gilles Vaillancourt called Mega-mayor Gérald Tremblay’s proposed cost sharing plans at the CMM. Vaillancourt and Tremblay are the Mr. Bigs of the CMM. The third big — Longueuil Mega-mayor Claude Gladu didn’t make it for the budget meeting.

Rookie Ottawa has a new mayor, Larry O’Brien, who is even more inexperienced in municipal affairs than Gérald Tremblay was. As chief of staff, he is appointing Walter Robinson, a pharmaceutical lobbyist, who was for six years the head of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation.

Honoured Michèle Ouimet, who as a La Presse editorialist was an unrelenting

supporter of the forced mergers, has received a Prix Judith-Jasmin, the top award for Quebec journalists, for her reporting from Lebanon this summer.

Mandates “Politicians are the city’s trustees, not its feudal lords. Like trustees of an estate, their first duty is prudence. Like doctors, their first responsibility is to do no harm� — Gazette editorial, Nov. 27, 2006.



• Community activist Don Wedge can be reached at calert@web.net. His columns are archived at www.westmountexaminer.com,">www.westmountexaminer.com,">www.westmountexaminer.com, go to Opinion.