Aren’t you just so happy you voted for Tremblay?
City sold land valued at $7M for $2.4M
Bureaucrats, Politicians fumbled chances to sell tract for significantly more than Montreal finally got
Linda Gyulai, Gazette Civic Affairs Reporter
MONTREAL – Two administrations at Montreal city hall – under two mayors and over two decades -contested, ignored or suppressed various appraisals that would have seen the city sell a large tract of land it owned in Terrebonne for a higher price than it finally went for in 2005.
The city sold the 12.44 million square feet of farmland in Terrebonne that once housed its municipal tree nursery for $2.432 million to the firm Cote de Terrebonne SEC in October 2005, just before the November election that returned Mayor Gerald Tremblay for a second term.
The site, about one-quarter the size of Nuns’ Island, faces the Mille Iles River and lies near Highway 25 and the future Train de l’est commuter rail line linking Montreal and the North Shore.
A report by Montreal’s civil service to the city executive committee at the time of the deal described the property as “surplus” municipal land that was selling for about the equivalent of its municipal valuation to Cote de Terrebonne, a company financed and managed at the time by the Fonds Immobilier de Solidarite FTQ Inc., the real-estate investment arm of the Quebec Federation of Labour’s Solidarity Fund.
What it didn’t say was that the Fonds Immobilier was buying the property to develop a residential housing project with a private businessman, Antonio Accurso. (more…)
