CSL adopts 2025-2030 strategic plan | City News

Côte St. Luc council adopted at its Oct. 8 meeting its Strategic Plan for 2025 to 2030, which concentrates on safety and security, infrastructure and “building community.”

“It’s important to have a strategic plan,” Mayor Mitchell Brownstein told the meeting following a presentation by Associate City Manager-Urban Strategy Tanya Abramovitch. “Our goals are very clear and they reflect the concerns of the residents and they mesh with the master plan that will be coming up after the election. We want to have sufficient housing, quality of life, commercial and residential — apartments and condos, and money to support the infrastructure improvements and safety and security.”

Abramovitch explained that consultations between 2022 and 2025 for the future of CSL in the master plan was used for the strategic plan as well. Out of these came opinions of the strengths and weaknesses of CSL — the strengths included its programs and services, customer service, parks and public spaces and the senior management team. Weaknesses included no overarching vision for the city, aging infrastructure, CSL being a geographic enclave and nothing for kids to do past 6 p.m.

Goal 1 in the plan is increasing safety and the perception of safety, with such measures as updating CSL’s emergency preparedness plan, holding information sessions on such issues as flood prevention and fraud, creating an “eyes on the street campaign” and modernizing the Public Safety station, amongst others.

Goal 2 is increasing road safety through such measures as studying the city’s highest speed zones, studying problematic sectors, creating 3 km of protected bike paths, adding photo radar at two intersections and conducting an audit of all 140 km of the city’s sidewalks.

Goal 3 is protecting vulnerable populations, with such measures as creating a social, affordable and family housing bylaw, becoming a designated age-friendly community like neighbouring Montreal West and studying “access to city facilities from every angle and identifying barriers.”

Goal 4, maximizing land value, includes such objectives and measures as encouraging mixed-use redevelopment on shopping mall sites, creating a home-based business permit system, conducting a study on maximizing land value and creating an economic development plan.

Goal 5, developing a long-range infrastructure strategy, has an objective of exploring alternate revenue sources and goals of creating a green infrastructure plan, reducing the amount of infrastructure the city is responsible for and conducting a study “on alternate strategies for road resurfacing,” amongst many others.

Goal 6, prioritizing communication and education, includes such measures as the creation of a Public Participation Policy and Procedure, holding “How It Works” sessions on how “various things in the city work for the public” and creating a social media strategy.

Goal 7, increasing community cohesion, includes such objectives as “creating opportunities and spaces for increasing social interactions at the neighbourhood and community levels,” and, amongst others, creating opportunities for community-led projects.

The plan’s conclusion says CSL, as an organization, “will have a roadmap to follow with clearly laid out expectations.”