Posted at 8:00 a.m.
The developer of Tower 6 of the Square Children project, whose project has been blocked for 28 months, is filing a lawsuit for 20 million against the City of Montreal and Mayor Valérie Plante personally.
High-Rise Montréal (HRM Projet Children) is asking the Court to condemn the defendants for the damages suffered as a result of non-compliance with the obligations arising from the contract between it and the City of Montréal.
The plaintiff is not content to sue the City, he is also targeting Mayor Valérie Plante on a personal basis.
“By her behavior, the defendant Valérie Plante engaged her personal and extra-contractual liability and participated directly in the damages incurred by HRM in addition to allowing herself, in passing, to defame her and her principals”, is it written in the request statement of claim served on Friday, January 28.
The plaintiff argues that Valérie Plante and the City acted in an “impulsive, arbitrary, abusive and prejudicial manner”.
These allegations have not been proven in court.
At the heart of the lawsuit is the June 7, 2017 contract between the developer and the City. It oversees the construction of a social housing tower on the site of Tower 6 on the site of the former Montreal Children’s Hospital, René-Lévesque Boulevard West. The promoter undertook to build the accommodation and the City to buy the building once the work was completed. In the absence of social housing, the contract provides that the promoter pays a penalty of 6.235 million to the City.
After the signing, the parties negotiated for two years, from 2017 to 2019, in order to realize the tower. These discussions ended in an impasse. The developer then proposed to build a private project without social housing and to pay the penalty provided for in the contract. In response, the City re-zoned Tower 6, lowering the allowable height from 20 to 4 stories in fall 2019.
“Disguised expropriation”
The zoning change leads to a second consultation before the Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM). Remember that the entire quadrangle of the former Montreal Children’s Hospital was already the subject of an OCPM report in October 2016.
The City took 14 months to file the documents prior to the consultation, an unusual delay, recognized the OCPM in our pages on November 16, 2020.
The borough of Ville-Marie then requested the suspension of the public consultation process twice, so that the consultation did not take place.
“The City has, by doing so, knowingly lengthened the freezing effect on the location of Tower 6 and HRM has therefore not been able to obtain any permit for more than 28 months now to begin construction of its Alternative Project. […] The attitude of the City is in fact a disguised expropriation towards HRM. »
The final claim is likely to exceed 20 million because several elements in the damage breakdown are to be perfected.
Given the judicialization of the file, the office of the mayor preferred not to comment.
Learn more
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- Not a first,
- This is not the first time that the City under the Plante administration has been sued by a promoter. A conflict with the Formula E organizer was settled amicably. The City had to pay 3 million.