Furious about the funding problems that are undermining his borough, confronted with rising waters every spring, the mayor of L’Île-Bizard–Sainte-Geneviève, Stéphane Côté, stood up Tuesday in full Montreal city council to proclaim that his borough might be better off outside the City if it does not receive more resources to deal with flooding.
“I wonder if it’s a good thing for my borough to stay inside Montreal. We don’t have adequate funding. I really ask myself the question, ”he said.
“Do you want L’Île-Bizard–Sainte-Geneviève to stay in Montreal, or do you want us to leave altogether? »
Mr. Côté intervened in the context of a discussion on the sum of 16 million that the City will devote to its dike program. This funding will make it possible to maintain and develop the fifteen permanent dikes that protect the island of Montreal from flooding – they are located in Pierrefonds, Ahuntsic and L’Île-Bizard.
“These 16 million is a start, but it doesn’t even cover a dike. The reality is that I don’t have a penny to manage this district, he lamented. And against climate change, I have nothing to fight for, except arm juice. Our fight against floods comes back every year, but we only have archaic means. »
“It was a cry from the heart”
In an interview after his speech, Mr. Côté explained that he had no real intention of demerger of his borough. “I just wanted to shake up the administration, it was a cry from the heart,” he explains.
He claims that this spring, during the flood, the City refused to provide him with additional sandbags, claiming that he had reached his “quota”.
“When a dyke is breaking in front of you and you are told that… Besides, I don’t have the money to equip myself for the floods to come,” he laments.
His borough would need new permanent dikes in certain places where it is necessary to install walls of sandbags each year, according to him. “It takes a week each time to set up with around thirty blue-collar workers,” said the borough mayor.
The problem, he says, is that there are too many jobs in the city center, to the detriment of the boroughs. “We have to change the way of managing this city because climate change is far from over,” he says.