Borough council to contemporize Roxboro

BY RAFFY BOUDJIKANIAN

raffy.boudjikanian@transcontinental.ca

By the end of this year, things should be quite a bit whiter in Roxboro.

The Pierrefonds/Roxboro borough council will be harmonizing bylaws regarding the use of tempos in the Montreal borough.

"We have to harmonize our bylaws with the city of Montreal, and it's the same thing for Roxboro," said councillor Christian Dubois, who is in charge of road safety at the borough as well.

Once a separate municipality, Roxboro, with about 7,000 citizens, first joined with the Town of Dollard des Ormeaux in 2001 during the forced Montreal mega-city mergers. Since Dollard does not allow tempos, the famous white winter car shelters did not become an issue for Roxboro residents until 2006, when Pierrefonds and Roxboro residents both failed a referendum attempt to de-merge from Montreal and were then merged together as one borough.

"I've always been against (tempos) and I'll always be against them," said Guy Billard, a Roxboro resident who has lived through his former municipality's mergers and de-mergers.

"It's like having a tent in front of your house," Billard said, decrying the ugliness of car shelters. He also criticized them as unsafe, claiming to have seen several right against the angle of a street and a driveway, blocking the rear view of a driver emerging from his driveway.

Though council is almost certain to allow tempos in Roxboro by the end of this year, Billard said he will not abandon his struggle.

According to Dubois, the only possible recourse for citizens of Roxboro to stop the implementation of tempos is to round up a petition with 51 per cent of that area's voting population that requests a referendum on the matter.

"It can be a difficult task," said Billard, but he said he would like to get the message out.

In 2006, the Pierrefonds/Roxboro borough polled eligible voters in Roxboro to find out whether they would like to have tempos there or not. Fifty-two per cent of responders said they were opposed to it, whereas 48 accepted. Though back then, council said it would refrain from harmonizing the bylaws based on those results, it has now changed its mind.

"The survey has no legal binding," Dubois said. "Frankly, if we had come to an 80/20 result, the law would probably have allowed us to do a zone of exception," he said.

However, the four per cent difference simply does not justify the barring of tempos in a comparatively minimally populated portion of the borough, which has a total of 65,000 residents, he said.

Currently, under the existing Roxboro bylaw, those who put up tempos in Roxboro could be fined by the borough somewhere from $50 to $100, according to Dubois. The harmonization of the bylaws is expected to be completed by November, in time for the next winter.