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The Borough of Pierrefonds-Roxboro denounces the absence of any changes brought to the revised Special Planning Zone (SPZ) map released on December 30, despite the Borough’s numerous recommendations.
A number of areas in the borough have successfully been protected during the floods of 2019 thanks to the deployment of mitigation measures notably to avoid flooding through the waterway network. To this day, many residents and owners of commercial properties are still in the SPZ map although they were not affected by the 2019 floods.
“Thanks to our special intervention plan, our borough was able to protect areas that would have been otherwise flooded like in 2017. However, the last version of the SPZ map produced by the Ministère des Affaires municipales et de l’Habitation (MAMH) still does not include any of the recommendations provided by our borough such as removing commercial arteries like boulevard de Pierrefonds and residential streets like rue Des Maçons’’, said Borough of Pierrefonds-Roxboro Mayor, Dimitrios (Jim) Beis.
A restricting decree
It should be recalled that on June 19, 2019, the provincial government adopted a draft decree declaring a Special Planning Zone in order to promote, in its opinion, better management of floodplains. However, in the meantime, it limits the ability for residents and business owners to bring any changes to their property or to conduct any construction on their lands.
Stressful times for residents and owners
Since the decree of July 15, the Government of Québec has specified that if inaccuracies in the delimitation of the territory flooded during the spring floods of 2017 and 2019 remain, municipalities could submit requests to be removed from the map to the Ministère des Affaires municipales et de l’Habitation (MAMH) until August 19, 2019. The Borough has sent more than 400 hundred addresses to the Government to be revised.
“Over the summer, we received a significant volume of calls, emails and visits from residents and business owners who wish to have their homes or commercial properties removed from the SPZ. Yet some are still being held hostage by this map on top of the various challenges they face with other institutions such as banks, insurance companies and real estate companies. We cannot ignore the economic, physical and mental health toll that such measures have had on our residents and entrepreneurs; the government needs to act faster on adopting our recommendations’’ deplores Mayor Beis.
Still in wait for the removal of non-impacted addresses
The borough of Pierrefonds-Roxboro is asking the Quebec government to redo its homework in order to remove the addresses that have not been affected by the rivière des Prairies in 2019. The addresses submitted for a ZIS map withdrawal have been reviewed by our services, which confirmed the veracity of the information provided by citizens and merchants.