The sale of the public swimming pool in Préville Park to CPE Agathe la Girafe to open 80 new daycare spaces in Saint-Lambert is creating a stir. The file, frozen since its announcement by the city last June, has created a dialogue of the deaf that continues to drown the relationship between citizens and the municipality. Citizens consider that the decision was taken without the necessary popular consent.
“The mayor will tell us that she did a consultation when she went door-to-door during the elections, but we could never tell her that we did not want to sell the pool, decries Isabelle Gendron , neighborhood activist. We did not know that she intended to part with it! »
Isabelle Gendron acts as a spokesperson for citizens wishing to preserve the integrity of Préville Park. In the opinion of the mother who lives in the area, it would be favorable to give priority to the renovation of the swimming pool. A service considered important for many people in the neighborhood.
“We talk about climate change, heat islands, and we say that the average temperature will increase. Our main argument is that we don’t sell a green space. »
However, the facilities have been condemned since 2021, and the city council does not have the means to renovate it. This is what Mayor Pascale Mongrain argues, estimating that the work would cost between $2.2 and $3 million. “We don’t have those millions. »
Rather than renovating, the city council agreed to sell its land to the CPE Agathe la Girafe, which obtained funding from the Ministry of the Family for the construction of 80 new places.
In addition to the environmental problem, Ms. Gendron also raises a serious urban planning problem to support her objection. A new daycare would mean, according to her, a complicated traffic in streets which are already difficult to access and which also serve the local school.
Isabelle Gendron, however, is in favor of obtaining new CPE places in Saint-Lambert, but only not at any price. “We are just against the fact that we are forced to sell a public good like a park,” she nuances.
She thus claims to “reach out” to the town hall, while maintaining by email that “the Saint-Lambert Citizens’ Group for the Preservation of Parks has hired a lawyer and [a] sent a formal notice on July 12 to the City to express [son] disagreement and request certain documents”.
“It’s not a formal notice that we received, it’s a request for documents”, is surprised the mayoress Pascale Mongrain. Reached by telephone, she is shocked by the “bad faith” of what remains for her a minority of citizens spreading “disinformation”.
She remains stunned by maneuvers that she depicts as “electoralist and political”.
“It’s a bit frivolous, because they have absolutely no basis for legal action,” she wonders. The request for information is just a waste of public money and the time of our civil servants”.
Time and funds that the city of Saint-Lambert no longer has the luxury of wasting, among other things because of the conditions established by the Ministry of the Family, according to Ms. Mongrain. Indeed, she says that if the CPE is not able to open the 80 new places in less than 24 months, it will lose the funding attached to it.
The situation does not help the financial abyss in which the municipality currently finds itself. “If you only knew how we don’t have any more money there. It’s a city on the verge of bankruptcy, ”says the mayor.
This therefore does not include the relentlessness felt by the group opposed to the project. She also assures that most of her fellow citizens support the decision to abandon the municipal swimming pool and would opt instead for the sale of the land.
A majority that she cannot confirm, however. Asked about the possibility of a popular vote, Pascale Mongrain reiterates. “We don’t have any money. Holding a referendum costs tens of thousands of dollars. And anyway, we are running out of time.
The inhabitants of Préville therefore remain on their thirst, they who denounce a lack of transparency and wish to preserve their oasis at all costs.