Cleanliness, security, housing, eastern development, homelessness: Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante presented on Wednesday her priorities for the last 300 days of her mandate. Reporters were barred from asking questions at the end of what his office called a “speech from the throne.”
A big chore to make Montreal cleaner
The mayor says she is aware that citizens expect more to put an end to the waste that litters the city’s parks and streets. Among other things, she promised to launch a “major chore and an awareness campaign in the spring to show the importance of doing your part.”
“We’ve been in a dump for seven years. We did not see any money in the budget for cleanliness brigades. I am perplexed,” reacted the leader of the official opposition at City Hall, Aref Salem.
Limit speed around schools
Valérie Plante says she cares about the safety of too many pedestrians who are caught in the streets of Quebec.
She assures that within 10 months, her administration will implement speed limits of 30 km/h or 40 km/h in front of each Montreal school.
“In the absence of controlling public transport ourselves or having the number of photo radars that we want and deserve, we have a tool within our reach, and that is the speed limit “, she said.
New neighborhoods
The mayor emphasizes that the developer responsible for the travel island project, in the Latin Quarter, would be known in “the coming days”.
She wants to leave as a legacy new neighborhoods that will accommodate thousands of people, between those of Namur-Hippodrome, in the northwest of the city, and Bridge-Bonaventure, south of Pointe-Saint-Charles, on the banks of the river. .
“There is no land that has been sold, no condo that has been built. I don’t know how she’s going to do them,” said Aref Salem.
A tram for the east
Valérie Plante wants to start the structuring Eastern project, a tram project valued at $18 billion.
The Regional Metropolitan Transport Authority presented the new version of the project this spring, but it is still under study in Quebec.
“It has to move forward,” declared the mayor, who hopes that the government will give the green light quickly.
More modular housing
The mayor will continue to mobilize so that Quebec adopts a national homelessness strategy.
She also wants to go further in terms of modular housing, prefabricated temporary units that are quicker to build than long-term homes. She wants to create many more than the 60 announced last year and which have still not emerged from the ground.
“Homelessness, for seven years she has been repeating that it is none of her business, that it is the business of the provincial and federal governments. All of a sudden she wakes up,” said Aref Salem.
