Mayors forming glomer ad hoc legal committee

By Joel Goldenberg

Mayors and councillors of demerged cities are forming an ad hoc legal committee on the island-wide agglomeration council to look at the recent Montreal budget and other issues, The Suburban has learned.

The central city’s budget has resulted in increases of some 12 percent in what demerged cities have to pay the agglomeration this year, resulting in tax increases as a whole, even where strictly local taxes went up minimally or even declined.

The legal committee was first mentioned by Montreal West councillor Dino Mazzone at that town’s monthly council meeting.

“I received an invitation from Côte St. Luc mayor Anthony Housefather on behalf of the Association of Suburban Municipalities — there will be an informal grouping of lawyers who have been invited by [Housefather] to pool our resources together to see to what extent we can somehow counter or challenge the budget of the City of Montreal and to poke holes and to see to what extent we can try and get a fair share of what we feel to be these egregious amounts of money we pay to the agglomeration.”

Housefather, who is secretary of the Association of Suburban Municipalities, said the body decided to form an “ad hoc committee of lawyers involved in the municipal scene to advise us and Mr. Mazzone is a member of that committee, as would be [Côte St. Luc councillors] Mitchell Brownstein and Dida Berku and others.” Housefather, Mazzone, Berku and Brownstein are all lawyers by profession.

“One of the things we are looking at is what options we would have with respect to the budget, how to properly appeal to the municipal commission and what other options we may have. Certainly, there’s no decision at this time to do anything but the legal committee is much more than this.

“We are looking at a number of issues where the mayors of suburban municipalities have questions about law. We have legal issues all the time — the City of Montreal will tell us something and we may not agree with it. For instance, it took the position that the ad hoc committee on the budget couldn’t hear the public security budget because it was only to go to the public security commission by law. That’s not the case. The police budget has to go the public security commission, but there’s nothing that stops it from also going to an ad hoc committee on the budget. There are legal issues on a daily basis that we get through the agglomeration in terms of the complicated nature of the mixed spending between the agglomeration and the central city.

“Another example would be the case of the water meter contract. We meet as a group of suburban municipalities to take positions related to anything that happened with respect to that, or to be kept abreast of what’s happening with the litigation [regarding the stopped incinerator contract] with Foster Wheeler.”