While Drumheller was successful with a small grant for flood mitigation, two other applications fell by the wayside.
The Town of Drumheller has applied for various funding over the last few months to help out with improvements in the area.
Funding to help engineering costs for mapping and planning along the Red Deer River in Lehigh and East Coulee was approved to bring the town closer to being approved for flood mitigation.
Two projects the town is interested in completing are a south Drumheller water supply and booster station replacement at a cost of $2.5 million and a water treatment plant residuals management at a cost of $3 million. The Town applied for the Small Communities Fund and during Monday night’s council meeting Drumheller Mayor Terry Yemen read a letter as a response back from the application.
In the letter it was stated that the project applications had been declined. Yemen told council members that the letter did not explain why and he hoped to find out.
“The applications were put in and all the t’s were crossed and the i’s were dotted and they fit the criteria and both of them were denied without an explanation which I think is a little irresponsible,” Mayor Yemen said.
“I think we should at least get an explanation and we will follow up from an administrative point of view, CAO Ray (Romanetz) has already made some calls and is asking what the problem was with the grant and why it was refused. We will also do it from a political side to see if we can get the answers as to what went wrong,” he said.
Although the Town was not given money for the water upgrades, they were approved for funding to help with future flooding.
The Town put in an application under the Southern Alberta Flood Response Program (SAFRP) to help with the cost of staff to map and plan for further flood mitigation in the Lehigh and East Coulee areas of the Valley. The Town was approved for $84,658 which is subject to certain terms.
“We did finally get an approval for $84 thousand. It is the last bit of engineering we need to have a shovel ready project. It will be for the eastern part of the Town. We are going to have the project ready and we are going to be ready to submit it we just don’t know when,” he said.
“We are hoping that September is still the date, we haven’t been told anything different but again it makes us nervous because they haven’t talked to us about it. We haven’t heard from the government yet as to what the status of flood mitigation is for Drumheller, Alberta. I said it before and I’ll say it again, if you spelt Drumheller with a C we would have had some money by now,” Yemen stated.
“We can’t let them forget about it. We have to keep pushing and pushing and pushing until we get some sort of an explanation, an answer and mitigation. We did have a firm commitment from the government when they talked about the funding and said that it should be 100 per cent from the province because it is their river to mitigate and the town went into a partnership at that time and said that they will. You put in the mitigation, you put in the dyking system we will do the on-going maintenance, that will be our part of it and they said ‘done deal, let’s move it forward’, so that is our expectation… but I don’t know what the reality is going to be,” he said.
During the council meeting Yemen also read a letter that said the Town had been approved for the Municipal Sustainability Initiative funding of $1,383,261.
“It was a nervous time there for a while. We are talking a lot of money just about $1.4 million for the town, which we need to move forward. We had been told in the past that it was sustainable, you could put it into your go-forward plans, your vision for the Town because it is always going to be there for you and when there was a new government come in, it was a little scary,” Yemen said.
The MSI money provided to the Town would often be used for equipment, such as fire trucks and road graders, Yemen said.
