If Montrealers have the impression that each year their city is transformed into maze of construction sites that make travel complicated, they are not entirely wrong. In her annual report tabled on Monday, the Auditor General (AG) of the City of Montreal, Michèle Galipeau, notes numerous shortcomings in the planning of work in the metropolis.
Two divisions of the City’s Road Network Infrastructure Department (SIRR) are working to better coordinate the work and prevent excessive obstacles to traffic flow. But, as VG has found, there is sand in the gears.
The Street Intervention Management Assistance (AGIR) division must, in particular, plan the work schedule. The operational coordination team (OPC) must for its part coordinate the potential obstacles and propose mitigation measures so as to provide for the sequencing of the worksites.
The Auditor General therefore wanted to know if the methods used by the City were effective. To do this, it paid particular attention to the work carried out between January 1, 2019 and September 30, 2021, focusing on four boroughs, namely Ville-Marie, Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie, le Sud-Ouest and Côte -des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce.
However, Michèle Galipeau noted that the exchange of information between the two city divisions is not always very fluid. Even the audited boroughs do not share their work planning with AGIR, although they register their upcoming worksites in a directory of works to which AGIR has access. Also, AGIR is not informed of the construction sites of private promoters and knows of their existence only after the granting of a permit for the temporary occupation of the public domain.
And as if that weren’t enough, AGIR is not alerted to certain construction sites piloted by the central city, as was the case in 2021 for the Rosemont aquatic complex – yet announced in 2019 – which required the closure completion of a section of rue Bellechasse.
Michèle Galipeau concludes that all these shortcomings do not allow the City to have an overview of its sites that are likely to have an impact on automobile traffic. In particular, it recommends that the SIRR set up a mechanism that would allow it to list all the projects and adopt performance indicators.
Tree maintenance
A chapter of the report is devoted to the application of the Tree Policy adopted by the City in 2005. The VG describes the gap that persists between the canopy maintenance objectives and the work carried out in the field. Tree maintenance practices are disparate across the territory and compromise their life expectancy, she says.
Between 2012 and 2020, Montreal would have planted some 100,000 trees, but due to the ravages of the emerald ash borer and the felling of trees carried out over the years, the metropolis would instead have 30,146 more trees on its territory. .
Eight boroughs took part in the audit conducted by the AG. Most of them have an inventory of their public trees, but the monitoring of the state of the trees is considered incomplete. Only the borough of Saint-Laurent has up-to-date data on this subject, the report points out. With the exception of this borough and that of Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie, the interventions carried out by the local teams in the field are not documented in a satisfactory manner, believes Michèle Galipeau.
The VG also reports that between 2017 and 2021, the City had to pay nearly $2.2 million following complaints made by citizens in connection with the fall of trees.
Tree mortality is also poorly documented. The City does not have a single computer platform for the inventory of public trees or a management guide intended for the boroughs, as provided for in the 2005 Policy. only on prevention and watering of young trees is generally limited to less than four years old.
“In short, contrary to the expectations of the Policy, the data available on public trees in the boroughs is incomplete, not updated, or even non-existent. Thus, the City has no knowledge of the composition and condition of public trees, which is an obstacle to overall management of the City’s urban forest,” says Michèle Galipeau.
This finding prompts the AG to issue a series of recommendations for the implementation of maintenance programs for the boroughs and the allocation of specific budgets for these activities.
Help for businesses
The AG was also interested in the management of the business assistance program in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the wake of a $150 million agreement concluded with the Government of Quebec, the City has delegated to the six PME MTL non-profit organizations spread across the territory the mandate to manage the granting of financial assistance to businesses affected by the slowdown in their activities.
However, the report points out that 19% of the files examined did not meet at least one eligibility criterion. In some cases, the applications were incomplete, while in other files no evidence of the impact of the pandemic on companies’ financial problems was provided. The assessment of the ability of several companies to repay their loans also left something to be desired, says Michèle Galipeau. “For the three SME MTL clusters audited, the comments justifying the financial analysis are variable in geometry and do not always make it possible to properly capture the risk of the business and support the granting of the loan”, underlines the VG who recommends, in particular, that the Service du développement économique set up adequate monitoring mechanisms.