The Drumheller Housing Administration (DHA) has had an ambitious several years, undertaking projects that have completely changed the face of the affordable and subsidized housing in Drumheller.
    The DHA was founded on April 1, 1995, by a the order of the ministers of municipal affairs. The mandate of DHA was to provide safe, affordable housing for residents who needed a home.
    The DHA currently oversees several properties in Drumheller.
    The Greentree duplex townhouses were built in 1967 and contain 26 units with 2-4 bedrooms. The Hunts townhouses, which include 24 units, were built in 1971.
    The aforementioned housing units are subsidized, meaning the provincial government sets the price of rent based on a formula using income and circumstances.
    The final property the DHA manages is the new Sandstone Manor, a 20 unit apartment. Sandstone Manor is classified as affordable housing and monthly rent is roughly $200 below market rates.
 In the last three years the DHA has made leaps forward.
  “We started three years ago with a large deferred maintenance list and a shortage of funds,” said Gerald Martynes, board member of the DHA. “We were able to turn things around by hiring contracted maintenance men, using inmate labour, and getting control of the costs.”
  One such maintenance issue was water in the basements of some of the units. Through exterior ground sloping and sump pumps, the problem has been virtually eliminated.
   The DHA was also able to secure $440,000 in federal grants for new furnaces, hot water tanks, toilets, and siding.
    The DHA has also started several green initiatives, such as having gasless push mowers, using rain barrels, and the  DHA has received $20,000 from the Alberta Real Estate Foundation and another $20,000 from Encana to purchase recycling trailers for use at Greentree and Hunts townhouses.
    There is currently a waiting list of 20 people for one bedroom units and vacancies are typically filled within a month.
    Potential residents must go through a screening process.
    One criteria being considered for the screening process is the addition of detailed criminal record checks to discourage criminal activity in the DHA managed properties. A similar program is used in the Edmonton area and other municipalities are considering the same.
    The DHA continues to move forward with modernizing the affordable and subsidized housing in Drumheller.    
    Projects this year will seek to improve video surveillance, replace wooden fences with chain link, and encourage residents to save energy.
    For more information, or to apply, visit www.rentdrumheller.ca.

    The Royal Tyrrell Museum Speaker Series is discussing a topic seldom studied in Drumheller: our own species, Homo sapiens.
    To that end the Tyrrell Museum has invited its first out-of-town speaker of the new year, Dr. Gary Haynes of the University of Nevada-Reno, to speak.
    Dr. Haynes, a professor of anthropology, research focuses on the earliest people of the Americas. The talk will look at the current knowledge and conjecture about the timing and nature of the earliest appearance of Homo sapiens in North America, more than 13,000 years ago.
    Dr. Haynes will also explore the effects that the migration had on the large mammals, such as mammoths and sabre-toothed cats, that lived in North American at the time. A question that has lingered for years is whether the arrival of humans was responsible for the extinction of the large Ice Age mammals.
    The Speaker Series will be held in the Royal Tyrrell Museum auditorium on Thursday, February 9, at 11:00 a.m. For more information about the Speaker Series visit www.tyrrellmuseum.com.