City cancels call for tenders for Îlot Voyageur
The city opened a call for tenders for the southern half of Îlot Voyageur earlier this year, but has cancelled the offer after the two bids it received didn’t meet its requirements. Now it’s got to find a partner who will.
thomas 10:54 on 2024-10-19 Permalink
I don’t understand why the city doesn’t offer part of this property to Hydro Quebec to build the new electrical substation.
DeWolf 11:09 on 2024-10-19 Permalink
From what I understand, this means the city will now be negotiating directly with the two groups that made bids, rather than putting out a new call for tenders in the future. It wants everything wrapped up before the end of the year.
In the article, the head of UTILE, which planned to build 500 non-profit units in partnership with Mondev (who would build another 500 market units) sounds pretty happy to be able to develop a project directly with the city. The other company that bit was Prével, which has a good track record of nice neighbourhood-scale projects (they’re currently building the Esplanade Cartier) but as the article notes, nothing public was revealed about their bid.
Over on Agora, one member who is an architect says this whole case is an example of how the city’s tendering process (as mandated by Quebec) is needlessly complicated and opaque.
carswell 12:51 on 2024-10-19 Permalink
On the surface (because in this case that’s as deep as I can go), that’s a brilliant idea, thomas.
Kate 13:16 on 2024-10-19 Permalink
I remember some passing mention of the HQ idea in the media, but it seemed the city was dead set on using the Îlot space for social/affordable housing.
Also, the library and its land are Quebec’s, which can decide what to do with it, without regard to the city, including putting a big block of Quebec brutalist concrete at Berri and Ontario if they want to.
There’s probably a lot of unseen political stuff going on around the area that the public never knows about.
Incidentally, deals for the Îlot land have been announced before, and Groupe Aquilini was supposed to build something like this (the link was added here by DeWolf in a discussion from August last year).
DeWolf 21:44 on 2024-10-19 Permalink
I’m not sure how moving the HQ substation to this location would solve any problems. You’d be ruining an even more prominent site while sacrificing a large amount of housing.
If the idea is to have an underground substation with the residential development on top, that would be great, except the Voyageur site is right over the metro station so I don’t think that would be feasible. No idea if an underground substation would work for the site currently slated for HQ but it seems much more likely to be possible.
Orr 18:24 on 2024-10-21 Permalink
I was in the Ilot Voyageur for the first time last week to get my 65 Opus card at the STM photo shop for my free STM Montreal island public transport because I have just reached official geezerhood.
It raised the question of why the bus station isn’t connected to the Berri-UQAM metro station? Because that defies any logical explanation. But then, I am not a bureaucracy.