Save Griffintown!

More Griffintown media mentions:

• Eric Clement in La Presse reports that the Sud-Ouest borough’s star team of citizens, urbanists and architects — their Consulting Committee on Urbanism (CCU) — voted unanimously against the Griffintown project as proposed by Devimco — but their report was silenced.
• Charles Poulin covers the still-unanswered questions in the Journal de Montreal.
• Stephane Baillargeon, writing in Le Devoir, discusses the possibility of future economic collapse affecting Projet Griffintown.  (The question in the article attributed to Hélène Dansereau is actually the question I asked (on Peak Oil). The city’s urbanism guru, Luc Gagnon, blanked on that question and punted it over to Serge Goulet, who repeated his stump speech about LEED certification until I pointed out that that’s not what I asked, and then the moderator called time on things.)

If you haven’t done so already, read and sign the petition for a proper democratic process on Griffintown. If you already have, please pass the link along to colleagues, students, teachers, friends, and family! Remember…your neighborhood could be next!

Griffintown’s 200 years of history are at stake. Whatever gets built there, we will have to live with it for the next 100 years. However, the city, by using the Plan particulier d’urbanisme (PPU) tool, has limited public participation to a mere 8 hours or so of PR spin Q&A sessions; the last avenue available to us at this point is to submit comments and briefs on March 10th-11th.

Will briefs and comments have any impact on whether the project goes ahead, or is significantly modified? Do we get any say on the Plan d’intégration et d’implantation architectural (PIIA) if it goes forward? We have no assurances on any of these.

Make no mistake, those of us who are involved with various community organizations (like the Committee for the Sustainable Redevelopment of Griffintown) are indeed writing up our briefs and comments on the plan. But we despair when we see that, if proper public consultations channels had been used, we might have had the option of more public debate beforehand, a plan defined before developers were invited to submit projects, and a citizen referendum on the whole thing.

The borough mayor, Jacqueline Montpetit, admitted freely that the choice of a PPU was a political move by the central City administration — deployed both to allow for expropriations — and, it would seem, to bypass the Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM) to limit citizen participation and debate on the subject.

If this goes through, it sets a dangerous and undemocratic precedent; What’s to stop the city from using PPUs to expropriate landowners, and turn their land over to private developers, anywhere else? (Well, presumably not in Outremont, but I can imagine this happening in Ville St-Pierre, Little Burgundy, St-Henri, Verdun…)

If you agree that this is a bad thing — and that the city should stop its current process and restart the Griffintown development using proper city and citizen channels — read the petition here at ThePetitionSite.com, and sign it.

You have the option to not display your name online, but your name will appear in the final petition presented to the City.