By Thia James

At new look exec meeting, riverbank concerns dominate

Feb 10, 2015 | 5:39 AM

In the first of what the City of Prince Albert promises will be more substantive executive committee meetings, members of administration laid out detailed plans for how to deal with ongoing concerns, most notably along the riverbank.

Under the new meeting format, members of administration will now be making presentations, and on Monday, staff conducted a number of PowerPoint presentations. The final presentation contained images of a crumbling riverbank in the West Flat area, between 15th to 19th Avenues West.

The land along the North Saskatchewan River has been eroding and slumping, and the instability has caused parts of the Rotary Trail to crack.

Alissa Baker, who was speaking on behalf of the Pehonan Parkway Reserve Board, presented a trio of options for dealing with slope stabilization in that area. One option would see the City cut and armour the riverbank and move the Rotary Trail further inland, at a cost of at least $1 million. The other options are a lower-cost managed retreat or doing nothing.

Although he is concerned about the sloping, Mayor Greg Dionne is looking to find out what the cause of the sloping is first.

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“I’m not spending a million and a half of taxpayers’ dollars and it’s still going to slope,” he said.

“The key to me is I have no problem spending money to fix a problem. But I want to assure that it’s fixed.”

With the matter now moving to council with a recommendation that the matter be put on the 2016 budget agenda, Dionne plans to raise questions about provincial and federal grant funding for slope stabilization along the riverbank.

He also plans to ask administration to look at what other jurisdictions are doing to deal with riverbank sloping, particularly the City of Saskatoon. Saskatoon has recently released a report about the Nutana slope failure, which has affected homes in that area.

“I think we’re going to learn from each other,” he said, and added the City should also speak with the department of highways and infrastructure about its attempt to stop riverbank sloping near the Saskatchewan Penitentiary. Dionne said the department’s attempts didn’t stop sloping there.

Concerns over the one-in-500 year flood plain mount

As new planning and development services director John Guenther presented an aggressive timeline to move ahead with the Official Community Plan (OCP), Dionne cautioned that the one-in-500 year flood plain could stall the OCP.

The OCP, or Plan Prince Albert, is a 20 to 30-year outline for future planning and development that is meant to act as a guide. A draft version of the plan was last updated in 2009. Guenther is looking to update the plan’s priorities and to tackle the issue of the flood plain in the plan.

Guenther is looking to have the OCP, new zoning and subdivision bylaws adopted by late July. However, Dionne said discussions about the flood plain – an area of the city that could see a once in 500 year flood, which has a less than one per cent probability of occurring – should include the province. He said the discussions should include public hearings that provincial representatives attend.

“It is the province that has caused us the problem with the flood plain. And I’m not about to take the heat for the province.”

Specifically, residents who live in the one-in-500 year flood plain area have told the mayor that the designation has affected their property values. The homeowners are also unable to apply for permits to build attached garages or other additions.

“And that’s why I think your aggressive plan is going to be stalled when it comes to the flood plain. I believe it’s the province that has to come to the public hearings and say to those 1,200 homes (owners) in the East Flat, ‘this is the issue.’ Not us. We didn’t come up with the one in 500.”

Dionne is also calling on the province to explain why there can’t be new developments in a flood plain, which he called “crazy.” He said building permits should be issued with a proviso that states that if there is a flood, the flood damage to the attachment won’t be covered by the province.

Guenther suggested that the City could move ahead with a strategy to manage the flood plain that wouldn’t involve armouring the riverbank. But the City would have to involve the province in that process, he added.

“I’m hoping that will not sandbag this, no pun intended there, this process either. But … you have a lot of expertise around the table here, so we’ll be hopefully tapping into that.”

tjames@panow.com

On Twitter: @thiajames