MONTREAL - After a lot of squabbling, Plateau merchants won themselves a one-year grace period for increased street parking costs in the borough.
The city of Montreal and the Plateau Mont-Royal borough announced an agreement Friday that maintains many of the borough's initial proposals for changes to parking meter rates.
Street parking on commercial streets will still increase from $2 to $3 and 600 new parking meters will still be installed, except the changes will be instituted gradually over the next year instead of coming into force en masse on Jan. 1.
"The plan today, the agreement today, is more or less what we had proposed in the beginning," said borough mayor Luc Ferrandez.
Ferrandez maintains that the changes are needed to finance new projects in the borough without raising property taxes for residents.
Merchants had feared that increased parking rates would have an adverse affects on their businesses when times were already tough, but they appear satisfied with the compromise reached Friday.
This isn't a perfect deal, but it's a very good one that will satisfy our merchants, we hope, and will help us look forward to better relations with the borough mayor," said St-Laurent Merchants Association Gordon Bernstein.
He's hopeful that the recovering economy will lead to more business coming into the Plateau before the rate increase goes into effect.
"Right now it's very fragile, business is tough, people are doing their best to cope with it," Bernstein said. "The added cost right now would've been quite difficult."
