HOME | ARTICLE ARCHIVES | CLASSIFIEDS | NEWSPAPER ARCHIVES | Email Us |
Deteriorating sanitary conditions in Park Extension in recent years have prompted a longtime resident to complain to the Villeray/St-Michel/Park Extension borough council. Addressing the council on Nov. 2, Nekteria Siounis of Wiseman Ave. said, “I’ve lived in Park Extension for the past 38 years and I realize that Park Extension has really changed. It’s not clean like it was before.”
New immigrants
Siounis said she no longer feels as proud to live in her neighborhood as she once did. “The back lanes are very dirty, it’s not clean and I want to see some changes.” While saying that Park Extension has always had many immigrants but the most recent ones don’t seem to understand the basic rules of cleanliness, she suggested the borough delegate one or two employees to maintain a liaison with those people and get the message across to them.
“Why is Park Extension at the level where it is now?” she said, complaining especially about the conditions on parts of Jean Talon St. “There are streets where Europeans live and you can see the difference.” She also said that the properties in Villeray are better maintained and appear cleaner. “I don’t know if it’s the people who are different, but we must change in our own neighborhood.” Borough Mayor Anie Samson pointed out that while the borough has a responsibility for maintaining cleanliness in neighborhoods, so do the residents.
Raising awareness
“In the 16 years I’ve been here — 12 years for Mrs. Deros — there are an enormous number of efforts that have been made to make residents more aware.” She said that when a resident tosses a piece of trash on the ground, it isn’t possible to have borough inspectors on hand all the time to deal with it. According to Samson, each year 50 per cent of the population of Park Extension consists of newcomers, and on top of this, they speak at least 40 different foreign languages.
“The borough doesn’t have the means to pay 40 interpreters,” she said. Noting that the borough ranks 18th in the City of Montreal for its budget allocation and that Park Extension also ranks among the two poorest neighborhoods in Canada, Samson dismissed a comparison Siounis had made with Town of Mount Royal which has five times more to spend per resident. Park Extension city councillor Mary Deros suggested that staff with Éco-quartier would be better qualified than borough employees to communicate with certain residents.
Immigration waves
“Yes, we are conscious of the situation,” said Deros. “Yes, there is a lot that remains to be done. But because there have been new waves of immigration, and no sooner than they’re over there are more waves of immigration that come along, we are always starting over to make them aware or the regulations. But this is just to say that we are very aware of what is going on and it’s a huge task.”
The borough’s director of public works, Michel Laflamme, acknowledged that some commercial streets in Park Extension like Jean Talon and St. Roch are more difficult to deal with. “Could we increase the frequency of emptying trash bins on those streets?” he asked. “Perhaps, but there is also a limit as to how often we can do that.” According to Laflamme, the borough uses up to 60 per cent of its sanitation employees at certain times in commercial areas of Park Extension when trash is accumulating quickly.
Valuations and taxes
During the same meeting, Pierre Lamarre of Waverly Ave. in Park Extension’s easternmost area asked the mayor and councillors whether a hike in municipal taxes can be expected this spring as a result of an overall increase in property valuations contained in the new valuation roll released recently. Samson told him the borough has no tax increases projected, but she wasn’t as certain about the centre city. Deros pointed out that when property valuations rise, the tax rate itself is usually adjusted to compensate, so there isn’t necessarily a corresponding tax increase.
In an interview following the meeting, Lamarre noted that property taxes went up a fair bit this past year. “I got an increase last year of nearly $200, which isn’t small,” he told Nouvelles Parc Extension News. He said he wouldn’t take issue with the increase except that he has doubts about the services the city and the borough are delivering in return for his and other people’s taxes. For example, he said he doesn’t know why three borough employees are kept on duty at the borough’s customer service desk when the amount of traffic doesn’t justify it. “If there is no productivity there, they could be stationed in another department,” he said.