The days of unnecessary driveway shoveling in Cote-St-Luc could be coming to an end.
The city-wide ban on tempos in driveways with single car garages is up for debate at tonight’s city council meeting. Mayor Mitchell Brownstein is pushing to extend tempo use to all homes in the city.
“Will it be adopted this year? I hope in part,” he said in an interview with CJAD 800. “But if not, we'll see what we can do for this year; but, we are moving forward.”
Many seniors in the city have been pushing for years to have the restrictions lifted. Brownstein says following through on their request is one of many ways he hopes to help keep seniors living in their homes.
“They need to have safe driveways.” he said. “It can't be icey. If we look at last winter, it just started snowing and never stopped.”
The bylaw in place now, prevents home owners with single and double car garages from erecting a tempo in their driveways.
“Many of the one car garages were built in the 1940s,” Brownstein said. “They're too small to even fit one car, with the size of cars today.”
He says public opinion is on his side, for the most part.
“The response we got in the vast majority of the city was either ‘yes, we like tempos’ or ‘no, we think their ugly, but we won't oppose them.’”
Cote-St-Luc is a socio-economically diverse city, with neighbourhoods featuring homes in the vicinity of $300,000, while other neighbourhoods sport houses with valuations in the millions.
Brownstein says he expects some resistance will come from those more expensive areas of the city, where houses may have multiple garages, and tempos would be an unnecessary eyesore.
Those neighbourhoods could be subject to separate zoning restrictions, he said.
The city council will debate the new bylaw in tonight’s council meeting, which gets underway at 8pm.