Some Saskatchewan rural municipalities that declared disasters due to flooding are finding they don’t qualify for all the financial help they thought they would get.
The Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities last week sent out a survey to find out just what its members are experiencing with the Provincial Disaster Assistance Program.
President David Marit said the board has heard complaints about allowable expenses incurred during road and bridge repair. For example, the full cost of a culvert replacement is not covered because the pipe itself is not eligible.
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“The biggest issue we have is that under the federal rules the compensation for municipalities doing their own work is not there,” he said in an interview. “All they cover for is the fuel you use, any other lubricants, but there’s nothing for your labour and nothing for your equipment.”
Under PDAP rules, the federal government reimburses the province on a sliding scale depending on the size of the disaster. All claimants pay a portion of the cost for uninsured losses. Rural municipalities pay a deductible of up to 0.1 percent of their taxable assessments.
“Once they hit that (deductible) then the provincial and federal money flows in,” Marit said.
For some municipalities, that deductible is as much as $300,000, which cuts significantly into the tax base.
“For an average municipality like mine, and we had a fair amount of disaster, our deductible I believe was in the neighbourhood of around $35,000,” Marit said. “But because we had our own equipment and we could save everybody a lot of money it didn’t benefit us either way. If we could have captured some of our wages and equipments costs it would have been better for us.”
Rural municipalities in the southeast, where assessments are generally higher, were unable to find contractors to do the work because oil companies had already engaged them.
That left the significant cost of doing their own work. Marit said SARM will lobby Ottawa to change its rules to provide at least some compensation for using their own equipment.
In 2011, 330 communities were declared eligible for assistance from 402 separate flood events.
Herb Axten, reeve of Surprise Valley, took a more humourous approach to his request. His municipality is near the U.S. border in the busy Bakken oil field and he said the roads are particularly bad south of Highway 13, an east-west route known as the Red Coat Trail.
“Number 18 highway, you’d almost think it was in downtown Kabul in Afghanistan. There is no damn way you can drive from No. 6 highway to Estevan without a wheel alignment,” he said to applause. “The oil industry has been using No. 18 highway until it’s become almost totally impassable so now they’re using our grid roads and our farm access roads and you know the result of that.
I’m like Jerry Maguire. Show me the money.”
