Quebec approved Laval’s new flood zone bylaw M.R.C.L. 4.20 earlier this month.
Laval Mayor Marc Demers called a press conference last Wednesday morning, April 1, to announce the good news.
Correcting the situation for citizens penalized by the old flood levels was one of our first promises the day of our election,” said Demers. “After 15 months, I’m proud to be able to say ‘mission accomplished.’ Seven hundred residents can now rest easy. Now we can begin working to assist citizens whose properties still lie within the flood zone.”
Those residents still can’t expand or improve their properties, but Demers says that there may be a way to change the regulations to allow some building as long as the impact is minimal. City employees will be examining that issue closely over the coming months.
Today, we’re very happy for the people whose homes have fallen within the 20-to-100 year zone because life is going to be much less complicated for them now,” said Jeanne Tremblay, who represented the Laval West Citizens’ Committee at the press conference. “We aren’t forgetting about the people who live in the zero-to-twenty-zone, though, because they’re really penalized. We don’t even know how many people that is, because we can’t sort out the situation house by house until we have the flood plain maps. I don’t know when those will be available.”
Neither does anyone else.
During the press conference, Demers gave reporters a copy of a letter he received one day earlier. Sylvain Boucher, the deputy minister of Quebec’s municipal affairs ministry (Ministère des Affaires municipals et de l’Occupation du territoire) wrote the letter on March 27 to inform Laval that their new bylaw can go into effect as soon as the Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal (CMM) sends the city a conformance certificate.
That may take time.
The new flood zone limits for the Mille-Îles and des Prairies rivers were accepted for the territory of Laval, but have not yet been accepted for municipalities to the north of the Mille Îles River and to the south of the des Prairies River (ie Montreal),” said Denis Fafard, Laval’s assistant city manager in charge of sustainable development and the person in charge of getting the required certificate from the CMM. “A discussion has to take place between the government, the CMM and other affected municipalities before beginning the flood plain cartography that will identify the new zones.”
Fafard did not want to guess how long it might be before new maps might be available. For now, citizens are using the 1995 maps to estimate their situation.
Note: This article appeared on page 5 of the Laval version of The Suburban on April 8, 2015.
