Provincial, federal and municipal politicians are urged to spend more money on programs that provide permanent funding for improvements to water infrastructure, including storm sewers, dikes, berms and drainage channels.
Jim Gerhardt, acting vice-president of the Saskatchewan Watershed Authority, said communities and municipalities throughout Saskatchewan will be dealing with excess water this spring and facing potential flooding.
Municipalities need more money and permanent government programs to help rebuild their water control infrastructure, he added.
“In Saskatchewan, we normally get flooding from time to time and often we’re battling drought in one part of the province and flooding in another,” said Gerhardt.
Read Also
Agriculture ministers agree to AgriStability changes
federal government proposed several months ago to increase the compensation rate from 80 to 90 per cent and double the maximum payment from $3 million to $6 million
“Not last year. Everyone was too wet or really too wet.”
Speaking at the Saskatchewan Conservation and Development Association’s annual convention in Saskatoon, Gerhardt said government spending on water infrastructure has been scaled back over the past two decades.
Permanent programs that help municipalities pay for water infrastructure projects no longer exist, he said.
Funding to help maintain existing infrastructure has also been scaled back or suspended because of budgetary constraints.
As a result, investment in water control is often postponed until the eleventh hour, when communities and residents are faced with the prospects of costly flood damages.
“Just as we need to upgrade our highways, there is often a need to upgrade our (water) infrastructure,” Gerhardt said.
“There’s a strong role for municipalities to play in that and there is also a strong role for other levels of government to play, both federal and provincial.”
Gerhardt said investment in water infrastructure is closely tied to the hydrologic cycle.
Spending tends to increase in wet years or during periods of repeated flooding and then evaporate in dry years.
“If you’re in the middle of a drought, it’s hard to get excited about flooding,” he said.
Much of Saskatchewan’s investment in water infrastructure took place during the 1950s and 1970s when water was abundant and flood control was a priority.
However, drought has been more prominent in the past three decades, and governments have spent more money on drought mitigation.
Gerhardt said the Saskatchewan government has responded well to flood conditions on an as-needed basis.
It is providing emergency relief through the Provincial Disaster Assistance Program and the $22 million Emergency Flood Damage Reduction Program.
It is also covering the cost of extensive flood control work at Fishing Lake in east-central Saskatchewan and at Waldsea Lake Regional Park near Humboldt, Sask.
At Waldsea, the regional park has been decommissioned and nearly 50 cabins have been moved or purchased by the SWA and demolished at taxpayers’ expense.
Gerhardt said those extraordinary costs plus widespread water problems in other areas of the province suggest that a return to permanent flood mitigation programming may be warranted.
He said the federal Flood Damage Reduction Program (FDRP), which ended in the 1990s, shared the cost of municipal infrastructure work and helped finance many projects in Saskatchewan during the 1970s.
FDRP projects were initiated on a cost shared basis, often requiring municipal and/or provincial contributions to trigger federal investment.
“Funding (for water infrastructure) tends to follow the hydrologic cycle, so when you go through a decade of above normal (flood activity), governments tend to respond,” Gerhardt said.
