County of Grande Prairie council approved an additional $350,000 for flood prevention efforts last week, bringing the total budget for the ditch rehabilitation program to $505,000.
Public works requested the additional funding to continue work from last year, in response to landowners’ concerns and the 2018 floods.
“We’ve seen the county’s ditches starting to be filled in with silt, so the capacity to flow water has been diminishing through these wet years,” said Dale Van Volkingburgh, county public works director.
“We’re opening up the ditches so the water flow can get to the culverts and the creeks, versus spilling over the roads … and into the fields.”
Van Volkingburgh said the work will occur throughout the county, including in locations in the west county.
This year’s program will cover a total 40 kilometres in lineal length, scattered in locations each approximately a half-kilometre long, he said.
The impetus for the program was the spring melting floods in 2018. Following the floods, public works began consulting landowners in fall 2018 to see where else in the county there have been flooding issues, he said.
Throughout 2019, he said public works began rehabilitating 50 to 60 kilometres of ditches throughout the county, including west of Beaverlodge.
The cost of that work was $155,000, with the latest funding of $350,000 extending that program, Van Volkingburgh said.
The budget for the whole program is $505,000, with no additional provincial or federal funding, he said.
At last week’s meeting, Coun. Bob Marshall said he attended a Water North Coalition conference where members stated reduced provincial and federal disaster relief funding is expected in upcoming years.
“I think it would behove us to make sure we protect our infrastructure and get ahead of it because of the overland flooding we had two years ago,” Marshall said.
Marshall’s motion to grant public works an additional $350,000 out of the 2019 surplus was carried.
In November, the county received $1.3 million from the provincial government for bank stabilization along the Wapiti River and siltation pond slope stabilization.
Van Volkingburgh said that the $1.3 million was for a separate project from the ditch rehabilitation and the work occurred near Aquatera’s settling ponds.
Brad Quarin, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Town & Country News
