“Clearly the administration has deviated from the commitment it made to Montrealers,” St-Laurent borough mayor Alan DeSousa said of the long-delayed project.
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Mayor Valérie Plante’s administration must live up to its promise and move on to the next step of planning for the Cavendish extension, the city’s opposition says.
Stalled for decades, it appears the project — to extend the end of Cavendish Blvd. in Côte-St-Luc to Cavendish in St-Laurent, meeting at Royalmount Ave. — is no longer seen as a priority in the city’s plan to develop 20,000 housing units around the old Hippodrome racetrack. Last month, the Plante administration presented its master plan for the sector. It calls for 10,000 units to be built on the Hippodrome site and another 10,000 units east of Décarie Blvd. However, the main access road for the area will be Jean-Talon St., with the Cavendish extension coming at a later time.
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“The fact we have to bring a motion to remind the Plante administration (of its promise) says a lot,” said St-Laurent borough mayor Alan DeSousa, a member of opposition Ensemble Montréal. “Clearly the administration has deviated from the commitment it made to Montrealers.”
In recent years, there has been some progress on the project. A draft was presented to the province’s Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement in 2022. The next step before the BAPE can hold public hearings is for an environmental impact study to be conducted. However, last fall the city delayed a call for tenders to award contracts to study the project, citing budgetary reasons.
The delay is frustrating, DeSousa said, because there is money earmarked in the city’s capital works budget, and there is also money set aside to conduct the studies.
“There has been a definite and deliberate 180-degree turn,” he said. “The mayor is being disingenuous in suggesting that she’s going to extend Cavendish, albeit at a later date. She has moved Cavendish from the front burner, taken the money and reallocated it elsewhere, and she’s not quite willing and ready to tell Montrealers that this project is now on the back burner and is put back years in the future.”
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The opposition has support from the mayors of the demerged municipalities of Côte-St-Luc and Town of Mount Royal, as well as members of the business community. A news conference on the issue is scheduled for Friday morning.
Among those expected to speak are Sam Scalia, representing the Westbury Montréal development, and Claude Marcotte, the executive vice-president of Carbonleo, which is developing the Royalmount mega-mall. Cavendish is seen as key to improving traffic flow in that area, as thousands of new residential units are under construction or being planned.
DeSousa will be one of three elected officials to make a public statement in support of the project Friday morning, as part of the news conference organized with the business community.
Speaking to reporters last month when she unveiled the Hippodrome development’s master plan, Plante said she’s hoping to move forward with development of the Hippodrome site in the next few years, but wants the city to first extend Jean-Talon westward to the area earmarked for the future Cavendish extension.
“I want to reassure everyone that what we call Cavendish-to-Cavendish is still in the plan, so it’s going to happen,” she said. “But what we have to do is (build it in phases). The first phase is to build Jean-Talon to Cavendish north, and we are continuing working with all the partners dedicated to connect Cavendish north to Cavendish south.”
A spokesperson for Plante did not return a request for comment at publication time Thursday.
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