BRENDA O’FARRELL
The 1019 Report
In its ongoing efforts to foster support for the merger of the towns on Île Perrot, representatives of the grassroots group Avenir Île Perrot – Becoming Île Perrot began meeting with elected officials on the island this week to gauge support for municipal fusion.
The members of the group met with the municipal council of Pincourt on Monday, the first of what the group’s representatives are hoping will be a series of sessions with the elected delegations in Notre Dame de l’Île Perrot, L’Île Perrot and Terrasse Vaudreuil. The goal is to outline the group’s objective and seek the support of the councillors and mayors of all four towns to request the provincial government conduct a feasibility study that will outline the pros and cons of merging.
The group has scheduled meetings with the councils of L’Île Perrot and Terrasse Vaudreuil and is awaiting confirmation from Notre Dame de l’Île Perrot.
“The goal of the meeting with the councils and mayors is to have them say it’s a good idea to do a study,” said Avenir Île Perrot – Becoming Île Perrot spokesman Gérard Farmer.
According to Farmer, the provincial Municipal Affairs Ministry would conduct the study at no cost to the towns. It would outline the economic impacts of consolidating the administrations of the four towns and well as the service implications, both in the short and long term, and the significance on cultural, sporting and leisure services that could be offered to residents into the future.
“There would be no loss of jobs,” Farmer said, explaining the framework of any eventual merger would not result in layoffs. Municipal workforces, he added, could be reorganized, with some personnel possibly reassigned.
The most important next step, Farmer said, is to conduct the feasibility study so that both elected officials and residents can make an informed decision.
Once the study would be completed, the findings would be shared publicly, he said.
The group is hoping that all four municipalities will come together to formally ask Quebec to conduct the study. The group cannot request the move without the support of the elected councils. The study does not commit the municipalities to an eventual merger, Farmer stressed. It is merely a diagnostic tool to see if enough benefit exists in the concept of municipal fusion. The study would take up to three months to complete, he added.
“If the towns do not ask for the study, we will not have a study,” Farmer continue, adding that it would be reckless to not take advantage of what the provincial government is offering.
“We can’t say we don’t want to know. That is not good management,” he said.
If the four towns on Île Perrot merged, the new entity would be the second largest municipality in the Vaudreuil-Soulanges region, with a population of about 40,600, only slightly smaller than Vaudreuil-Dorion. The new town would be the 35th largest municipality in Quebec and the fourth largest in the greater Suroît region, which includes Valleyfield, Châteauguay and Vaudreuil-Soulanges.
The new municipality would be better able to afford to build venues like arenas and cultural event spaces, the group contends, and give residents of the island more clout within the MRC of Vaudreuil-Soulanges, the larger Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal and with the provincial government, which provides a number of grants and subsidies for municipal projects, many of which are prioritized based, in part, on the number of residents these projects will benefit.
Avenir Île Perrot – Becoming Île Perrot was formed earlier this year, created by a group of residents who believe that the time has come to launch a public conversation about creating a shared vision of how the island should be development and provide a broad range of cultural and sports services to its growing population.
In 1854, the island of Île Perrot consisted of one municipality, the group points out. In the middle of the last century, from 1948 to 1958, it was divided into five municipalities. In 1984, that dropped to four with the merger of the towns of Pointe du Moulin with the parish of Notre Dame de l’Île Perrot.