The Quebec government’s decision to provide the future Vaudreuil-Soulanges hospital with a traditional above-ground parking lot instead of a multi-level parking lot as originally planned is causing great dissatisfaction among elected officials and citizens in the region.
The city of Vaudreuil-Dorion, the MRC of Vaudreuil-Soulanges and the Montreal metropolitan region have all adopted resolutions calling on the government to reverse its decision.
A petition has also just been launched by a group of citizens and will be presented to the National Assembly in November by the MP for Vaudreuil, Marie-Claude Nichols.
In this project, we made a compromise for the parking lot, which was a layered parking lot. “Of course we would have preferred an underground car park,” explained Olivier Van Neste, general manager of the city of Vaudreuil-Dorion, on the Le 15-18 program.
However, the bids were significantly higher even for multi-level parking garages [estimations]clarified Mr. Van Neste.
A question of cost
By opting for conventional surface parking, Quebec will save between $50 million and $80 million out of a total budget of $2.6 billion.
Even if it allows savings in the short term, according to Mr Van Neste, the government’s decision is questionable, particularly because it raises issues of exemplaryness, a concern that was at the heart of the city’s concerns when it decided to invest in underground parking for the new community center.
“We wanted to make a statement because we ask our sponsors to do so,” said Olivier Van Neste. If we look at all our neighbors in the area and the residential towers that have been built, in a context where land is scarce, there is very little surface parking to make better use of the space.
The parking lot of the future hospital will therefore have 1,869 parking spaces, which is the size of five football fields. This decision is also difficult to accept from an environmental perspective, said MP Marie-Claude Nichols.
She thinks it’s worth pursuing the matter. If we do it everywhere [des stationnements de surface], there will be a lot of heat islands in Quebec and we want to avoid that. I have the impression that we are talking out of two corners of our mouths on this issue.
Maintain services
Rising costs in the construction industry have forced the government not only to increase its budget for this hospital project, originally estimated at $1.7 billion, but also to make decisions.
In the short term, the changes to the parking plan will help prevent service declines at the future hospital, which will have 404 beds, 41 stretchers and 11 operating rooms. We also plan to hire more than 200 physicians and 4,800 employees.
Even though it is a surface parking lot, we definitely want to reduce the impact on the environment. “For this reason, we are planting vegetation that will cover 40% of the parking lot, which is well above industry standards,” says Jade St-Jean, spokeswoman for the future hospital.
From a government perspective, above-ground parking leaves room for maneuver for possible redesign of the space or for a change in its use.
The Vaudreuil-Soulanges hospital is scheduled to open its doors in 2026. It will relieve pressure on the hospital network in the CISSS de la Montérégie-Ouest area, where the occupancy rate on stretchers fluctuated between 120 and 150% last June.
The addition of the Vaudreuil-Soulanges hospital will bring the number of beds to over 900 in this region, which experienced a 13.9% increase in population between 2010 and 2020.
With information from René Saint-Louis and Gabrielle Proulx