The city will invest a record sum in 2008

These investments represent 62% of the estimated $652.8 million the city has budgeted in total for 2008. To put this in perspective, it should be considered that the capital expenditures for the year just to conclude will come in at $331 million, just a little less than 50% of the total revenues generated by the city in 2007.

"It's the highest sum in the city's history," noted mayor Gilles Vaillancourt at the tabling of the budget this past Monday.

To this end, $30 million (of the $404 million) has been added to the $84.2 million earmarked for repair work on exiting infrastructures this year, bringing the total projected for 2008 to $116.5 million.

This considerable increase is the same $30 million allocated to Laval for 2008 by the Charest government's Infrastructure Renewal Plan.

In his capacity as the Chairman of the Quebec Coalition for Infrastructure Renewal, Gilles Vaillancourt is acutely aware than others of the urgency to invest in the upgrading of this equipmnent (infrastructures), an awareness he says is more and more shared by the population-at-large, according to a recent survey.

In the next 12 months, $128.6 million will be invested in new infrastructures to sustain residential, commercial and industrial development, an increase of 13% over the $114 million spent in 2007.

The costs of planning of this work which will result in new streets and the extension of exiting ones will bear no consequence on the debt load of tax payers, the mayor pointed out, because the costs (of the planning stages) will be absorbed by developers.

Of this global sum, $14.2 million will be used to determine the viability of industrial lots. The installation of municipal services will notably favour the extension of Louis B. Mayer and Bernard Lefebvre streets in private industrial parks – Impact 440, and Impact 25, the development of Mégapole 13 on the border of Cléroux Boulevard and the extension of the municipal industrial park through the extension of Dagenais and Francis-Hughes Boulevards.

Other highlights of the 2008 budget include improvement of roads and public transit ($36.2 million), parks management and tree-planting ($22 million), renovation of the city's three water treatment plants ($16 million), buying of new recycling bins ($7.5 million), and the building of a new fire station in Sainte-Dorothée ($4.1 million).

Developers and other partners will assume $191.7 million of the expenses, higher levels of government $68.7 million, with the rest ($69.6 million to come from the city's accumulated monetary real estate reserves.

Photo:Budget 2

(Photo:Martin Alarie)